Google: account data will be automatically cleared if not logged in for more than 2 years
Earlier, Google announced that the company’s popular application, Google Photos, would no longer provide unlimited storage space. Starting next year, backing up photo content will occupy a free quota. But Google seems to be making policy adjustments to more products and services, especially those related to storage.
According to Google’s instructions, if the user has not logged in to the corresponding service for more than two years, all data stored in the corresponding service will be automatically cleaned up after expiration.
Google announces:
Updated product policies for Google Photos, Gmail, and Google Drive (including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms, Jamboard and Sites files) will start to go into effect on June 1, 2021. These policies affect Google Accounts that are over quota as well as products where you may be inactive. The earliest these policies would be enforced is June 1, 2023.
Google [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The original account quota is a free gift from Google, so no matter whether the user uses it or not, the quota will always exist and of course, the data contained in it will not be cleaned up.
However, the new policy is that if you do not log in to the corresponding service for more than two years, the data will be cleared. Google estimates that it hopes to clear the archived data of invalid users through this method.
That is, the user must log in to the service at least once within two years, otherwise, the data saved by the service that has not logged in will be deleted after two years.
It needs to be emphasized that each service needs to be logged in separately, not just log in to the Google account once, but log in to the corresponding service.
The limited period of this policy is two years. Therefore, the data cleaning plan will be implemented two years after the implementation of the policy. Therefore, users who use Google accounts need to pay attention to this policy.
Google said that it will send emails to users during the period to ensure that the account data normally used by users will not be cleaned up, after all, it is some archived data to clean up.
