Google to Start Deleting Inactive Accounts in December

After announcing an update to its inactive account policy earlier this year, Google is set to start deleting inactive Google accounts in December. The company said that the new policy will impact consumer accounts that haven’t been used or signed into for at least 2 years.

If you have such an account, Google should have already sent you multiple notifications about its upcoming deletion. However, if you didn’t configure email forwarding or provide a recovery email address, you may well have missed these alerts.

Anyway, if you fail to sign in to this account while there’s still time, Google will delete it and all of its content: That means emails and calendars in Gmail, documents in Google Drive, pictures uploaded to Google Photos, and more.

Back in May, Google justified its new policy regarding inactive accounts by the fact that they can be easily compromised without users being aware of it, especially when two-factor authentication isn’t enabled. “Once an account is compromised, it can be used for anything from identity theft to a vector for unwanted or even malicious content, like spam,” the company explained at the time.

Google said that accounts that haven’t been used for at least 2 years will be deleted in waves, starting with those that were “created and never used again.” However, the company won’t be deleting inactive accounts with YouTube videos and ongoing subscriptions to Google One, a news publication, or an app.