Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inactive Google Account Policy

support.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 83 posts

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#21

Post by ryandrake »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #12

Imagine all the normal people who can not run their own mail server and do not have the paranoia or the time to set up 3 of everything and never miss the periodic chores to keep them all alive just to guard against one of them being cancelled. You certainly don't want anything important like your retirement account to rely on something transient like your isp email, or even a paid email from some smaller company that…

> So you use gmail or hotmail etc, not because they are free, because they arre presumed to outlive everything else, and be safer because of that. And that much is completely true and not a mistake.

I would absolutely not consider a free account on anything to outlive a paid product. Quite the opposite: If I'm not paying for any kind of SLA, written in an agreement, I assume the account in question is temporary, could disappear at any moment, and treat it as such: Never rely on it for anything where you'd be screwed if you suddenly got locked out.

There have been so many, many, many, many of these "I got locked out of my free Xyz account with no appeal possible!!" stories, I'm shocked that people still rely on them. And if you say, well, you shouldn't have put your 401(k) retirement account behind that E-mail address, they call you victim blaming. People, your free account is worth what you pay for it.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#22

Post by ggm »

srik wrote: post #19
ggm wrote: post #7

I don't work for google. I use Google, I have multiple Gmail as well as hosted by Google workspace domains. Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low. There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surpris…

> Google also reserves the right to delete data in a product if you are inactive in that product for at least two years. This part is unreasonable no? I sometimes don't use a product for a while, like google drive for instance, and the prospect of coming back to it and discovering that all my data has been deleted is a bit on the dreadful side. I don't want to have to keep track of which product Ive been using and ho…

Yes. I think it's pretty Awful. "Reserves the right" isn't "will" but it becomes clear it could be "at will"

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#23

Post by Dalewyn »

koolba wrote: post #9

> Before this happens, Google will give you an opportunity to take an action in your account by: > Sending email notifications to your Google Account > Sending notifications to your recovery email, if any exists Further up it says that reading an email counts as being active. So if you have IMAP access does that count when you simply read that email?! I have gmail accounts with IMAP that haven’t logged into the web i…

If you read your Google account's emails, you had to log in (POP3 and IMAP both require authentication). If you logged in, that means the account is active. Sounds simple enough to me.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#24

Post by ggm »

palijer wrote: post #20
ggm wrote: post #7

I don't work for google. I use Google, I have multiple Gmail as well as hosted by Google workspace domains. Overall I think this is reasonable. I can't see why people are upset, when the general burden to make it "live" is low. There are specific corner case problems: people who cannot login for various reasons, can't get Google humans to help, and who get mail forwarded so are limping along. And, there are a surpris…

>Don't depend on "free" for critical functions. All the cards are stacked against the users though. It's not that easy for a non-tech person to use any sort of email/photo library etc that isn't free from Google/Apple etc. Even self hosting email is impossible now. You won't be able to send emails because nothing trusts you. If Google intentionally incentivized everyone to move their entire digital lives into their p…

I think we're in the fine grained differences between "should" and "must"

I definitely think they should have better account recovery process, if need be for $, prove identity and get your data as takeout if they want to decline service but I would be amazed if any part of the current agreement we make with them could be said to obligate it.

As a defacto monopoly I do tend to think they should be made to have some process. Which jurisdiction?

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#25

Post by Dalewyn »

The listed exceptions in short mean that any account which has conducted monetary transactions on Google Play are exempted from inactivity. Sounds simple, fair, and easy to me.

Just buy a book, movie, game, or a subscription of some sort and it won't go inactive ever.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#26

Post by spc476 »

numpad0 wrote: post #15

I think of likely reasons this happens is username exhaustion. >100 million people are born every year, it won’t take centuries for us to fill up every namespaces with dead accounts. Before that inevitably happens, there will probably be a point we all have to switch over to identification not by user selected username but random alphanumeric ID string, with display names only for search, free from uniqueness require…

I have a Gmail account [1] and I regularly get email for other people who share my name (at least three others). I find it amazing they think that's their email address (or other people think that they'll reach the right person by just @gmail.com).

[1] Not my primary account but I got it to give Gmail a try when it was first opened to the public. I personally found it 'meh' but kept the account for testing purposes with my own email server.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#27

Post by drewda »

believ3 wrote: post #11

> Exceptions to this policy: > Your Google Account contains a gift card with a monetary balance. So, all I need to do to keep a Google Account active indefinitely is just link an unspent $10 gift card to the account? Sweet!

This could be an effect of California law that doesn't allow businesses to expire gift certificates. They have to honor it as long as they're still in business.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#28

Post by haglin »

Two years it too short.

The reason I now use gmail and not hotmail is because Microsoft did a similar thing 20 years ago. When I lost my hotmail account, I thought I might as well use gmail from now on. Reason I didn't log into my hotmail account was because I used the mail address I got from the university.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#29

Post by Terr_ »

numpad0 wrote: post #15

I think of likely reasons this happens is username exhaustion. >100 million people are born every year, it won’t take centuries for us to fill up every namespaces with dead accounts. Before that inevitably happens, there will probably be a point we all have to switch over to identification not by user selected username but random alphanumeric ID string, with display names only for search, free from uniqueness require…

> I think of likely reasons this happens is username exhaustion.

I disagree, there is a solution out there, it's just more work because the client-software has to be smarter. We can take inspiration from how our meat-space society functions, where everybody maintains their own contextual aliases as metadata, something that can be personalized or shared.

For example, imagine we have a big global commenting site, and my own metadata says "Terr_ believes ID 49985189215 is Bob Smith."

When I ask the software to contact "Bob Smith", it knows who I mean from that mapping. When I publish something for other people to see and add a special reference to Bob Smith, it contains "{49985189215 which author knows as "Bob Smith}". People who already know 49985189215 as "Bobby Smith" would see that pop up on their screen instead, and the rare few which have a conflicting "Bob Smith" would see it rendered differently, making it obvious I don't mean their Bob Smith.

It gets more complex though when you consider the same user with multiple contexts: "I'll call Bob" at home might easily be a totally different person than "I'll call Bob" in the workplace.

Re: Inactive Google Account Policy

#30

Post by pnw »

cobertos wrote: post #2

Wish you could check your inactivity status more closely than their suggested "if you're not sure, just sign in to the Google account". I have a couple Google accounts that are just pulling email to a separate mailbox and who knows if that's active or not. Maybe I'll have to buy something on one of those accounts just to get it exempt? Also reading this closely there's separate timers per product? This is worse than…

Exactly. You can buy a $1.99 movie on your Google account and that stops expiry indefinitely.
Post reply on HN