111–120 of 225 posts
I understand the risks of inactive accounts, but as I have pointed out here before these binary policies do not address the all-too-common situation where someone is forgetful and/or incapacitated prior to their death. These people have more important things to think about than their email and their photos,and the transition from alive to dead (to be blunt) can easily take more than two years. By the time that the es…
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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.
I have a google account I haven't been able to log into for some time, because even though I know the password, it flagged "suspicious activity" at some point and has required me to verify with a phone number I no longer have, from when I lived in the U.S. (I now live in Canada, but it did let me log in from Canada when I first moved here) I was hoping that some day, someone would register that phone number and I'd b…
>and I'd be able to convince them to give me an authentication code Unless you got to know them well (as in personally face to face), a stranger asking for a 2fa code would appear to be an elaborate phishing campaign.
What they are really doing is signing up for stuff using your phone number.
If someone ever asked me to send them a 2fa I would send them the wrong one until they get mad and stop asking me to do it.
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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.
Google wins by limiting account hijacking, cutting hosting costs, and the only people who care are some complainers on Hacker News who will stop caring the moment they get distracted by the next Framework laptop cup holder attachment.
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> Remember when Google said they would hold on to everything that their users did on their site forever? Err, no, as a matter of fact I don't. Would you have a cite for this?
it's probably a wishful interpretation from the initial coverage, https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to... "hey want to offer their searching capabilities so that users can search through their entire set of e-mail, I guess forever. " https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message... "Storage: Google believes people should be able to hold onto their mail forever. That’s why Gmail…
There was nothing about saving all your emails forever no matter what even if you stopped using the product. It was never presented as a lifetime backup archive to be accessed decades later. Just tons more quota than competitors was all.
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Surely there was some buildup to it :)
It's very easy to be arrested, denied bond, be convicted, and serve your time, without ever leaving the jail/prison system. Especially if you're poor.
I wish I could get into my old Google account. I unexpectedly went to jail for 10 years and when I got out I couldn't log into my account because my 2FA (phone) was gone. I had 10 years of email in there. Would love to find another way to authenticate myself. Looks now like it is all going to be hosed anyway.
Ideas: (1) sign up for Google Workspace subscription and then log a support ticket saying you want to migrate your old account to Workspace (2) hire a lawyer and get them to write a letter to Google asking nicely. If that doesn’t work, you could have the lawyer escalate to threatening a lawsuit, filing a lawsuit, subpoenaing the account contents, asking for a court order that Google give you access to the account, et…
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 not just poor health, there's an entire subclass of Americans who don't have internet access for 2 years+ - most anyone in the prison system. Now as a secret unmentionable for any 2+ year sentence: lose access to all your google shit .
And even if they didn’t, they have 2 *years* to have a friend/family to log in for them.
For a free service.
This is fake concern created by people that just want to be mad at google.
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…
Photobucket (remember them!) kept hundreds and hundreds of photos in my account with them despite complete inactivity for over a decade. I simply forgot the account existed, and remembered one day to find a ton of amazing decade old photos. There’s something to be said for doing things that earn your company respect from consumers. Had photobucket deleted my decade old photos because I didn’t log in frequently enough…
Google is not being unreasonable in understanding that they can't afford to store all data from everyone indefinitely. They are not being unreasonable that it is a potential security risk.
Where they are being unreasonable is that they have basically gotten everyone addicted to their "free" product, and then, a decade after promoting the idea that no one should run their own services, they should just use free offers in the cloud: they are now admitting the downsides to this arrangement.
That Google account that your dead friend had that you keep on your buddy list because it gives you memories? Gone. That Facebook account with your dead family members photos and timeline? Gone. The Twitter account with all the tweets from you child who died too soon? Gone.
The lesson should be that if you're hoping for someone else to be the steward of all your digital histories, you're in for a bad time.
If you're on someone else's servers, you're bound by their rules, because much like going to their building, you are on their private property.
The thing is, they spent over a decade making sure that people trusted that their data would always be there, and that storing it in someone else's private property indefinitely, somehow, wasn't a problem.
It was always a problem. If you want to keep your data indefinitely, you have to know how to store it yourself on your own storage mediums that you keep in your own home and on your own computers/servers.
So, Google is currently doing nothing wrong, based on the realities of security and cost of data storage. The wrong they did was convincing users for over a decade that this wouldn't happen, knowing full well that eventually it would.
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…
Exactly. If I stop using their free services, do I stop seeing their ads though? Because that’s kind of required to make this argument work.
Or it’s just Google gets to delete my data because they have all the power in this relationship? I get to keep being fed ads, make Google money, lose my data, and cost Google less at the same time. There’s only one side of the relationship that benefits off any of this.