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“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) and Google Photos.”
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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I read a variation of this news in the past where there was some major controversy about Google accounts that have active YouTube channels with videos uploaded to it. The solution is that Google would not delete inactive accounts if they have uploaded YouTube videos on it. I just don't know of this policy still stands or if they changed their minds.
There are videos I still visit and were uploaded more than 10 years ago. It would be a shame losing them all, pieces of internet history instantly gone.
If someone has a link to where this policy is/was, then we can validate whether this is still in place or was a "pinky promise" not to before swiftly undoing said promise.
It misses the most important information: why.
The CNIL (French privacy regulator) slapped Discord in October last year because they never deleted accounts (hi GDPR).
Since then, all tech companies are hurriedly designing a plan to mass delete inactive accounts.
Good, these companies hoard data for far too long
They will delete the account, not the data.
"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) and Google Photos," tech giant Google confirmed in a post on its blog.
Thanks GDPR
may
Lawyer speak
Can't they delete the contents of an account after backing it up to some server somewhere that only they have access to?
From TFA, they delete the data.
Of course they will remove the data. If they kept the data while removing the users ability to delete it they would get a record breaking fine for Christmas.
Besides they don't actually care about individual data after they finish processing it, they just care about the resulting aggregate data. Wasting money keeping the emails that they don't need would be cartoon villain level of stupid.
If they anonymize the data so that it's no longer possible to identify you GDPR allows them to keep the data.
Wasting money keeping the emails that they don't need would be cartoon villain level of stupid.
Yeah.... Because there is no money in machine learning and it will never benefit from text written by humans...