A sign is displayed on a Google building on their campus in Mountain View, California on September 24, 2019.
Jeff Chiu/AP
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Jeff Chiu/AP
A sign is displayed on a Google building on their campus in Mountain View, California on September 24, 2019.
Jeff Chiu/AP
Google will delete accounts older than two years to avoid security risks, the company announced on Tuesday.
The tech giant said overlooked accounts are more likely to use old or repeated passwords and less likely to have two-step authentication enabled and perform security checks on the account.
“This means that these accounts are often vulnerable, and once an account is compromised it can be used for anything from identity theft to vectoring unwanted or even malicious content, such as spam,” said Ruth Kricheli, vice president of product management at Google.
Deleted accounts would erase data on Gmail, Google Drive and Docs, Google Photos, Google Calendar and YouTube.
The rule applies to personal Google accounts, not work or school accounts.
Google said it will send multiple notices to inactive accounts and recovery emails associated with those accounts. Deletions will begin in December at the earliest, and accounts that were created and never reused will be deleted first, Kricheli said.
To keep an account active, a user simply needs to log in. This includes connections to third-party websites and applications.