Google plans to delete accounts that haven't been used in over 2 years, including YouTube content

[AnotherLinus]

Summary

Yesterday, Google announced that they are updating their "inactive account policies." In 2020, Google said they would remove content from Google Drive and Photos in inactive accounts. They are now expanding that policy to include outright account deletion - and content on YouTube.

 

Quotes

Quote

[We] are updating our inactivity policy for Google Accounts to 2 years across our products. 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 – including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube and Google Photos.

 

The policy only applies to personal Google Accounts, and will not affect accounts for organizations like schools or businesses. This update aligns our policy with industry standards around retention and account deletion and also limits the amount of time Google retains your unused personal information.

 

We are going to roll this out slowly and carefully, with plenty of notice:

• While the policy takes effect today, it will not immediately impact users with an inactive account — the earliest we will begin deleting accounts is December 2023.
• We will take a phased approach, starting with accounts that were created and never used again.
• Before deleting an account, we will send multiple notifications over the months leading up to deletion, to both the account email address and the recovery email (if one has been provided).

 

My thoughts

I am extremely worried about the YouTube content that could disappear because of this change. Many people could have gone on to greener pastures, or outright lost the login details for their accounts, and now we're facing the possibility of massive data loss in the YouTube backlog.

Some sources (9to5Google) claim that "Google is not planning to delete accounts with YouTube videos" but that is not backed up by any of Google's documentation. A clarification here would be helpful.

 

Sources

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/16/google-deleting-inactive-accounts/

https://9to5google.com/2023/05/16/google-account-delete/

https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/updating-our-inactive-account-policies/ (primary source)

[lieder1987]

I mean it makes sense from a business perspective especially for the youtube portion. Those videos are likely seeing minimal if any views so freeing up server space seems like the right call.

[Needfuldoer]

15 minutes ago, AnotherLinus said:

I am extremely worried about the YouTube content that could disappear because of this change. Many people could have gone on to greener pastures, or outright lost the login details for their accounts, and now we're facing the possibility of massive data loss in the YouTube backlog.

Don't forget the archives of content creators who have shuffled off this mortal coil.

[LAwLz]

This is worrying, but I doubt Google would do anything super drastic.

My guess is that 9to5Google are correct that they won't delete Youtube accounts that have videos uploaded, and I really hope that's true.

 

It's one thing to delete private data that isn't being accessed anymore, but it's another thing to delete public data that others access (but not necessarily the creator). The former is okay in my opinion, but the latter can do a lot of harm.

 

Since it seems like Google will take a staged and fairly reasonable approach to this (for example deleting accounts that were created but never even used) my guess is that they will not just mass purge Youtube videos.

I mean, if we are being reasonable, it doesn't make sense for Youtube to delete for example all videos from TotalBiscuit (youtuber who died in 2018) just because he hasn't logged in to his account. Those videos are still getting thousands of views ever day and as a result, are generating revenue for Youtube. 

 

My guess is that the biggest impact this will have is that we'll see people's subscriber numbers drop like a rock. MKBHD might have 16.8 million subscribers, but my guess is that a large chunk of those are inactive accounts that will get deleted.

[Ashleyyyy]

i wonder how many people are gonna download yt-dlp after seeing this and archiving a lot of stuff. i mean, a lot of people grew up watching youtubers that are now no longer uploading...

[suicidalfranco]

so does this mean the removal of TotalBiscuits channel?

[Kisai]

46 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

so does this mean the removal of TotalBiscuits channel?

Most likely.

 

Let's be realistic. Google should not be doing this. Twitter should not be doing this. Yahoo did this already, and you know what happened? It's impossible to recover passwords to anything that was setup with a yahoo account made in 1999, or under any country domain like .ca . Sites send passwords to those domains and just go into limbo. So now if that account expires, and someone else grabs it, they are now effectively the identity attached to that gmail account, even if they never had anything to do with it.

 

Remember back before local number portability? How many wrong calls and text messages you'd get for years before people stopped calling you? This is what's going to happen with gmail. People will try to grab email addresses of dead people and then impersonate them.

 

Not even "Free up space" is a good excuse, because of how google basically said "make a new gmail account for every youtube account" because of that google one nonsense back when Google failed to commit to doing social media.

 

If google really wants to solve abandoned account issues, what they should be doing is analyzing accounts for "empty", eg no email, no youtube content, no use of it as a oAuth, etc, and if any email forwarders are setup. Becuse some people have forwarders setup so this 'disposable' account is really just a forwarding email to the real account because it was needed to exist because youtube.

 

This entire @ account thing with youtube is probably partially what is driving it. Where there's probably thousands of youtube accounts with @ three, four, five letter names just because they were made before google acquired youtube.

 

My dad setup a new gmail account for every game he bought on steam. There is no possibility of ever figuring out what they all were.

[Levent]

Oh for fucks sake. This for sure will reduce ancient videos on youtube, especially from those who died or stopped uploading. This only means adding another thing to things that I hoard, content of the dead youtube channels.

 

EDIT: Now that I think about it, I wonder what they will do if a third party uploads contents of another channel that got deleted and started monetizing them.

[Alex Atkin UK]

40 minutes ago, Levent said:

Oh for fucks sake. This for sure will reduce ancient videos on youtube, especially from those who died or stopped uploading. This only means adding another thing to things that I hoard, content of the dead youtube channels.

 

EDIT: Now that I think about it, I wonder what they will do if a third party uploads contents of another channel that got deleted and started monetizing them.

They'd probably save a lot more space culling the duplicate uploads from people doing exactly that, monetising other peoples content.  But that would take effort.

 

A lot of these old channels, especially with SD videos, will take up way less space than a single HD duplicate upload.  Especially when you consider how many different formats YouTube converts new uploads into.

[Quackers101]

while its understandable against spam or temporary accounts.

but for a lot of history channels or had their place and might still be so today?

Sadly a lot of old content is overshadowed by new content, even if there is some old gold nuggets out there.

How does one deal with any type of content growth? as at some point there will be issues, be it in assets stores like epic, unity etc, or to roblox, videos or comments on youtube, twitter, etc. Some that encourage new comments over old ones, posting the same stuff 1000x times over like certain bots or networks.

[Doobeedoo]

Basically if it ain't fresh, hip for Google in a sense how most front face of Internet media is today it's useless for them.

[Alex Atkin UK]

17 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

while its understandable against spam or temporary accounts.

but for a lot of history channels or had their place and might still be so today?

Sadly a lot of old content is overshadowed by new content, even if there is some old gold nuggets out there.

How does one deal with any type of content growth? as at some point there will be issues, be it in assets stores like epic, unity etc, or to roblox, videos or comments on youtube, twitter, etc. Some that encourage new comments over old ones, posting the same stuff 1000x times over like certain bots or networks.

Think of it like a library or book store saying were only going to contain books of authors who are still alive and published a book in the last 2 years.  How completely insane would that be!

[GhostRoadieBL]

At least all you have to do is sign in, there's a ton of photo printing services which force you to store images on their cloud and delete without warning every few months if you don't purchase prints of those photos (even removing parts of albums if you print a few but not all)

 

It makes sense, other than the YouTube videos. If the video hasn't been viewed by anyone and the user hasn't logged in in 2 years I totally agree, declutter the storage.

[wanderingfool2]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

This is worrying, but I doubt Google would do anything super drastic.

My guess is that 9to5Google are correct that they won't delete Youtube accounts that have videos uploaded, and I really hope that's true.

 

It's one thing to delete private data that isn't being accessed anymore, but it's another thing to delete public data that others access (but not necessarily the creator). The former is okay in my opinion, but the latter can do a lot of harm.

 

Since it seems like Google will take a staged and fairly reasonable approach to this (for example deleting accounts that were created but never even used) my guess is that they will not just mass purge Youtube videos.

I mean, if we are being reasonable, it doesn't make sense for Youtube to delete for example all videos from TotalBiscuit (youtuber who died in 2018) just because he hasn't logged in to his account. Those videos are still getting thousands of views ever day and as a result, are generating revenue for Youtube. 

 

My guess is that the biggest impact this will have is that we'll see people's subscriber numbers drop like a rock. MKBHD might have 16.8 million subscribers, but my guess is that a large chunk of those are inactive accounts that will get deleted.

Yea, this is what I was partially thinking.

 

The one where I would agree with them deleting a YouTube account with videos is when there are stretches where a video isn't even viewed (when you exclude bots).

 

As an example, I have a second account that I used for YouTube back in the day and the videos on it aren't really viewed (only by bots) as it was pretty useless videos that I needed at the time for school projects.  I suspect as well that there are a fair amount of channels that have lots of private videos that they just used for archive purposes.

 

Then again, I 100% agree with your sentiment as there are some people's YouTube accounts where the maker admitted they had forgotten their password so they just make a new account; and those videos shouldn't be deleted...so hopefully they take a tactful approach.

 

With that said, 2 years I don't think is enough; I think a 5 year period would be okay...I actually have one gmail account I don't really log into often (I use it as a master type of account...where if my bank login needs and email or some other important service that I wouldn't want compromised needs an email I will use it, I have 2FA on it and a super strong password...but I'm not concerned about the actual emails in it as I just have it forwarding to me...the thing is since I don't really use it in a 2 year period I could see myself not using it for that length of time)

 

Now one thing I hope they never to is open up and I think Google wouldn't is letting others register with that email address (as that's something I firmly believe should be reserved for a long period of time)

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

If the video hasn't been viewed by anyone and the user hasn't logged in in 2 years I totally agree, declutter the storage

thats a lot of ifs, and also thats not what they're saying......

 

 

[wanderingfool2]

29 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

thats a lot of ifs, and also thats not what they're saying......

 

 

That's a singular if...so if you count 1 as a lot then sure...but there is only one conditional statement (and only a single added component to what was mentioned).

 

Also to point out, the word Google used is may be deleted.  That allows them the leeway to actually have something like what he said.  There might be heuristics that just haven't been announced or mentioned.  In fact at the moment there isn't actually much details other than the 2 year thing so they didn't really say too much.

[SansVarnic]

I have no issue with this.

This likely only impact accounts with little to no content.

[BondiBlue]

I don't like this at all. I have a number of old Google accounts that I created for a variety of reasons, some of which I only need to use once in a blue moon. They won't be deleted since I'm aware of this before Google will start deleting things, but having old accounts deleted isn't nice. The only good thing I can say about this is that at least they're giving a decent warning. 

 

I could also see this being an issue with Google accounts belonging to people who have died. My mother's Google account, for example, still has a lot of content, but nobody has signed into that account in many months (she passed away a couple years ago). It's all backed up in my case, but I'd hate to be someone who loses a bunch of stuff (family photos, for instance) because they were just keeping the account as-is and didn't realize old accounts would be deleted. 

[Quackers101]

Might not count for everyone, since youtube is so big.
If its true or not.

 

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

Might not count for everyone, since youtube is so big.
If its true or not.

 

Maybe someone got the message that if they do this, they might cause people to rip the site extremely hard.

[StDragon]

I don't thing people realize the shit-ton of throw away accounts created and IoT account registrations (such as SMTP sending MFPs and other automated reporting jobs) that have long since expired and camping on space.

 

A "Great Purge" has been long overdue.

[Mark Kaine]

Tldr: when u say "all accounts " that didn't log in [only for 2 yrs] then you delete a lot of highly valuable information resources devaluing ur own platform, alas you'd need to b incredibly dumb. But thats google for ya.

 

 

And if they don't communicate their intentions properly its still pretty stupid,  embarrassing and condescending. 

[HarryNyquist]

On 5/17/2023 at 7:56 PM, Quackers101 said:

Might not count for everyone, since youtube is so big.
If its true or not.

 

 

On 5/17/2023 at 10:11 PM, Kisai said:

Maybe someone got the message that if they do this, they might cause people to rip the site extremely hard.

Doesn't matter. Hoard the data. They would not have said this if they did not fully intend to do it.

 

Google is no stranger to deleting ENTIRE SERVICES that people are actively using. You cannot trust their statements, official or unofficial.

[LDGrinn]

On 5/17/2023 at 1:52 PM, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

i wonder how many people are gonna download yt-dlp after seeing this and archiving a lot of stuff. i mean, a lot of people grew up watching youtubers that are now no longer uploading...

I did that last year. Shows and content I like and enjoy that might watch in the future.