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Updating our inactive account policies

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Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#101

Post by Gigachad »

gessha wrote: post #98
skissane wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can give their password to a trusted friend/family member, and have them log in once every few months to keep the account active. Yes, it’s a pain, what if they forget, etc, but it means a 2+ year sentence does not necessarily entail losing one’s account. Could someone start a subscription paid service for the incarcerated - “we keep your accounts alive while you are inside”? More broadly, could provide other “m…

How about we stop monetizing people’s misery and start treating them like humans? People get drunk on money and start trying to monetize every single interaction in life. People make mistakes, go down the wrong path and go to jail if their wrongs are bad enough. That doesn’t mean they should have even more of a mine stripped road back to society.

This is already common for most business models. When you chuck your stuff in a storage locker and then vanish for 2 years without paying, you know what they do? They cut the lock off and sell your stuff to some stranger.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#102

Post by Gigachad »

ryandrake wrote: post #93
JohnFen wrote: post #85

> 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.

Honestly, I wish more online services would do this. My password manager has accumulated hundreds of accounts, many for services I haven't used for years. Probably half of them are "one off" accounts that I had to create because the stupid web site makes you create an account to do some basic thing (that shouldn't require an account). So here all these accounts are, sitting out there probably with my real name and ma…

I think it will as the data backlogs become larger and the expense greater. Imagine how much Google is spending to store user data on accounts that will never log in again. All the people who have died and had gigabytes of content stored. Eventually it becomes unsustainable to keep everything.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#103

Post by nitwit005 »

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…

That's possible, but the storage costs of unused accounts is probably significant. Given billions of users, they probably have several hundred million of them.

Previous company I worked for had to create a process to clean up unused developer accounts. The fact that they were free to sign up meant we eventually got quite an impressive amount of them.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#105

Post by jasonfarnon »

MrDresden wrote: post #99
doodlebugging wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

What kind of weird entitlement is this?

Whatever the sense of entitlement behind it, it would be nice to have the public reminded of this walkback, so that Google's future statements and promises can be interpreted with appropriate degree of skepticism.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#106

Post by sokoloff »

kerkeslager wrote: post #96
skissane wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm struggling to see what problem you think this solves, or why this is a response to what I posted. Ask yourself: are you trying to imagine a way of helping inmates retain access to their Google services, or are you trying to shoehorn a business into the much more obvious solutions to that problem?

If you don’t make something people want, you fail. If you don’t make the unit then the overall economics work, you also fail. If you fail, no one else is helped.

This is a dumb business to create, not because it’s technically hard, or because it wouldn’t help some people, but because Google is one policy email away from making your business obsolete. If you get traction, they’re fairly likely to do that for the PR.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#107

Post by creato »

ryandrake wrote: post #93
JohnFen wrote: post #85

> 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.

Honestly, I wish more online services would do this. My password manager has accumulated hundreds of accounts, many for services I haven't used for years. Probably half of them are "one off" accounts that I had to create because the stupid web site makes you create an account to do some basic thing (that shouldn't require an account). So here all these accounts are, sitting out there probably with my real name and ma…

> Even HN doesn't let you delete your account. I understand they will if you E-mail them, but even then, I don't think they will delete your content.

It’s a tricky problem. Is it still “your” content after other people build possibly large conversations on it?

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#108

Post by charcircuit »

Gigachad wrote: post #102
ryandrake wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I wish more online services would do this. My password manager has accumulated hundreds of accounts, many for services I haven't used for years. Probably half of them are "one off" accounts that I had to create because the stupid web site makes you create an account to do some basic thing (that shouldn't require an account). So here all these accounts are, sitting out there probably with my real name and ma…

I think it will as the data backlogs become larger and the expense greater. Imagine how much Google is spending to store user data on accounts that will never log in again. All the people who have died and had gigabytes of content stored. Eventually it becomes unsustainable to keep everything.

>Eventually it becomes unsustainable to keep everything.

The number of people on the earth grows exponentially. Babies can subsidize dead people.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#109

Post by benatkin »

panic wrote: post #95
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…

The issue is with the expectation they’ve set. “Store your important data with us, and we'll keep it safe” was the message many people got, even if they never actually promised to do that.

Yes, and their "plenty of time" is six months from the announcement.

Re: Updating our inactive account policies

#110

Post by sowbug »

UltimateEdge wrote: post #54

Does anyone know what the previous policy was?

It was originally 9 months. Here is an email my dad received on June 23, 2005. I replaced personal info with XXX.

===

Hi there,

We've noticed that you haven't used your Gmail account, XXX@gmail.com, for quite some time. In order to make Gmail better for our users, we've added a lot of things in the last few months and we hope you'll want to start using your account again. Here are just some of the latest additions:

- Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports.

- More free storage (today and tomorrow): Stop worrying about storage. Your account now has over 2000 megabytes of free storage and our plan is to continue growing your storage by giving you more space as we are able.

- 12 more languages: The Gmail interface is now available in UK English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and simplified and traditional Chinese. If you don't see the language you want on this list, look for it in the future because we're going to keep adding more.

- Rich text formatting: Express yourself with fonts, bullets, highlighting and over 60 colors of the rainbow.

- And lots more, including support for more browsers, an improved Contacts list, and an easier way to send photos.

We're still working hard every day to build you the best email service around. But to keep Gmail great for our users, we may have to close inactive accounts after 9 months. So, we hope you'll give us another chance. To log in to your Gmail account, just visit: http://gmail.google.com.

Thanks, The Gmail Team

== We sent you this message because we wanted to warn you of your account's inactivity and remind you of our dormant account policies. For more details, please visit our Help Center:

http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6563

*Protect your Gmail password and your personal information*

Google takes your privacy and security very seriously. For your protection, Google will never ask you for your personal information, such as bank accounts numbers, credit card numbers, pin numbers, passwords, or Social Security numbers in an email. For more information on how to protect your Gmail password and your personal information, visit our Help page here: http://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=8253

We sent you this message because as part of signing up for a Gmail account, you agreed to be periodically asked for your comments and suggestions to improve Gmail. If you do not wish to provide such feedback in the future, you may opt-out of receiving Gmail market research messages by visiting: XXX

(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into the address bar of your browser)

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