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Updating our inactive account policies

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Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#81

Post by doodlebugging »

crazygringo wrote: post #72

I'm seeing a lot of criticism here in the comments, but what's the alternative for free accounts? If you're not using it, how long is Google (a for-profit company) supposed to hold onto your data for free? 100 years? 50 years? 15 years? 2 years seems pretty reasonable to me for something provided by a for-profit corporation. And as other reporting has noted, they're not deleting YouTube videos (makes sense, since whi…

>I see no reason why we should expect a company to keep providing storage for dormant accounts beyond 2 years though.

Remember when Google said they would hold on to everything that their users did on their site forever? People were concerned about the privacy implications, etc. and how a part of their lives that maybe they didn't want anyone to know about would be out there, probably for sale, forever.

Well as far as I'm concerned Google made their bed and now they get to lie in it. Don't piss down my neck and tell me it's raining. They promised (or threatened, or noted) that they would hold onto it forever and that storage costs were manageable, etc. They need to be held to it.

In my case that means they get to archive all my junk mail (a few hundred emails with account info for places I might never visit again) since that is the sole purpose of my gmail account and I haven't intentionally used google search in years since DuckDuckGo showed up as an option.

This is actually funny to me. Life caught up with them and forever ended up being a much more normal, physically quantifiable time period that fit nicely in less than a human lifetime. But still, they should be forced to live up to their promises, or threats, etc.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#82

Post by grose »

I seem to have lost my old YouTube account. I used a username (not email) to login, and then I used that same email for a different account, and now YouTube doesn't let you log in with usernames anymore, so it's in limbo. Now it looks like they'll delete all my videos and there's nothing I can do about it.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#83

Post by [deleted] »

doodlebugging wrote: post #81
crazygringo wrote: post #72

I'm seeing a lot of criticism here in the comments, but what's the alternative for free accounts? If you're not using it, how long is Google (a for-profit company) supposed to hold onto your data for free? 100 years? 50 years? 15 years? 2 years seems pretty reasonable to me for something provided by a for-profit corporation. And as other reporting has noted, they're not deleting YouTube videos (makes sense, since whi…

>I see no reason why we should expect a company to keep providing storage for dormant accounts beyond 2 years though. Remember when Google said they would hold on to everything that their users did on their site forever? People were concerned about the privacy implications, etc. and how a part of their lives that maybe they didn't want anyone to know about would be out there, probably for sale, forever. Well as far a…

[deleted]

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#84

Post by pentagrama »

This can be bad for many cases, but also good for people who lost access to their accounts and finally that embarrassing YouTube videos and Blogger posts posted with they real names from 2005 when they were 15 year olds will be erased from the internet.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#85

Post by JohnFen »

> Starting later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, we may delete the account and its contents

This is great news! I have a couple of Google accounts that I couldn't delete because I lost the login credentials. I appreciate that Google will go ahead and do that for me.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#86

Post by JohnFen »

rurp wrote: post #18

This is disappointing, albiet not that surprising. It's a good reminder to not rely on Google for long term storage of anything you care about. It's not uncommon for inidivduals in poor health to go through multi-year stretches of very limited activity, especially for elderly individuals. In the future, people in that situation, or their relatives, might be surprised to find a Google account they thought was secure n…

> It's a good reminder to not rely on Google for long term storage of anything you care about.

Don't rely on any cloud/SaaS provider to do that. Seriously.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#87

Post by danpalmer »

jsnell wrote: post #17
withinboredom wrote: post #6

This ... is not what is going on. When I worked at $bigcorp serving billions in traffic, what happened is that botnets would create accounts and leave them dormant for weeks/months/years (thousands of them), then start doing their bot thing. Account age says a lot when it comes to trust (usually) and spam detection. That's more than likely what they're seeing, not 'compromised' accounts. All this does is tell the spa…

Are you suggesting that they're too incompetent to tell the difference between bulk account creation and hijacking, or that they're just lying about the reasons for why this change is happening? The former idea is pretty arrogant, the latter is unmotivated. Especially given you're talking of "thousands" of accounts, I suspect whatever problems mattered to you the most were not the same as those of Google's account sy…

This could also just be a simplification for the purposes of this announcement.

They mention this being mostly about security and preventing the use of hacked accounts, and they mention these dormant accounts that were only created and then went immediately dormant. It makes sense to me that they are in fact talking about this issue, just not explaining all the detail.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#88

Post by nullityrofl »

withinboredom wrote: post #55
nullityrofl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This ... is not what is going on. I am reasonably confident that Google are more aware of what's going on with dormant accounts on their platform than you are. I previously worked at Google in Security and while it wasn't in user protection, I know they have quite a few signals for determining compromise. It's pretty trivial to see that an account that was in legitimate use for 5 years and then dormant for 5 vs one…

Yes, we saw the same thing. But when spot-checking the activity we realized it was super-low-effort legitimate activity. IOW, it could have been sweat shops or scripted bots going through some motions.

I promise you Google is running user activity learning models that go well beyond spot checking the occasional account.

Google deals with abuse creation accounts in the tens of millions.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#89

Post by skissane »

kerkeslager wrote: post #80
skissane wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like the only possible motivation a person might have to start such a business would be to exploit the incarcerated. What if the founder is a former inmate, and says “I wish there was something like that available when I was on the inside?” Even if the business is officially classified as “for-profit”, there’s a big difference between a business seeking a living wage for its founders and employees v…

> You make it sound like the only possible motivation a person might have to start such a business would be to exploit the incarcerated. Initial motivations are irrelevant. At some point, the motivations of a business reduce to "make money", and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that doesn't matter, including your ethics and initial motivations. There are lots of innocuous reasons why that happens. For examp…

What about the corporate structure of the Guardian newspaper in the UK - a for-profit business 100% owned by a not-for-profit? The not-for-profit isn’t allowed to pay dividends, so 100% of the profits are either reinvested in the business, invested in the not-for-profit’s endowment, or donated to charity

I mentioned more details about it in another comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35967694

This has some overlap with the structures used by OpenAI and Mozilla, but unlike OpenAI, the Guardian doesn’t have any “capped profits”, 100% of profits go to the not-for-profit owner. There are employee salaries to pay, and likely also some debt interest, but those are an expense not a profit distribution

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#90

Post by renewiltord »

SoftTalker wrote: post #30
xenago wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been reported that they will not be reusable for exactly that reason. https://9to5google.com/2023/05/16/google-account-delete/

There's an argument that this should be done with domain names as well. Right now, anyone can buy an expired domain, set up a wildcard email address, and read any email that's still being sent to addresses in that domain. Conversely, if you take the advice of some to set up a personal domain for your email, you are basically committing to a lifetime obligation. If you later change your mind and let that domain expire…

Interesting. Is there a 302 equivalent for mail so I can start people getting off a particular address?
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