Google to delete accounts that haven't been logged into in two years

[Ming]

Here's the story: Google will start deleting inactive accounts after two years

Here's Googles notice: Updating our inactive account policies

Of course Google's rationalization for this is bogus. The real reason, surely, is what the AT article posits: getting riding of the need to store all this old stuff. And the reality is, there's a lot. And Ming has to think that the real issue is Youtube, as there are undoubtedly tons of accounts which put up a bunch of videos years back and then went away, so a lot of awesome old stuff is going to disappear. And the message, as usual, is to Never Rely On the Cloud. If you want something, download it and make copies. Anything else you will eventually lose.

[Hemiauchenia]

Here's the story: Google will start deleting inactive accounts after two years

Here's Googles notice: Updating our inactive account policies

Of course Google's rationalization for this is bogus. The real reason, surely, is what the AT article posits: getting riding of the need to store all this old stuff. And the reality is, there's a lot. And Ming has to think that the real issue is Youtube, as there are undoubtedly tons of accounts which put up a bunch of videos years back and then went away, so a lot of awesome old stuff is going to disappear. And the message, as usual, is to Never Rely On the Cloud. If you want something, download it and make copies. Anything else you will eventually lose.

Your suggestion that this is primarily about YouTube storage makes sense, and thinking about it is quite logical. I can understand deleting all of the old videos with a handful of views that make youtube no money and cost a boatload to store, but it seems strange to delete all of the old viral videos from inactive accounts that still probably make YouTube money. I agree with your assessment about never relying on the cloud for long-term storage.

[eppur si muove]

It's going to annoy people who have lost friends and relatives and like to occasionally access their videos etc.

[ScotFinnRadish]

I can't imagine that Google even notices the cost of hosting old YouTube videos. Storage is dirt cheap, especially on the scale Google's cloud uses it.

[Ming]

I can't imagine that Google even notices the cost of hosting old YouTube videos. Storage is dirt cheap, especially on the scale Google's cloud uses it.

Nothing is that cheap if you need enough of it. Also, the infrastructure to address all that storage and feed it out isn't free either.

[Midsize Jake]

Yahoo did this too, about 3 years ago (I think), so I guess the fact that hardly anyone noticed when they did it shows just how far the mighty have fallen.

My impression at that time, which could easily be wrong, was that they wanted us to believe their tech-support crew were having to handle too many requests from new users wanting existing usernames — presumably based on their having no comments or discussion posts anywhere, and/or not replying to e-mails, or... something.

Anyway, they're saying Twitter is going to do this too, and other Big Platforms won't be far behind, so the Washington Post says to start archiving everything now. And by the way, still no word on whether or not Wikipediocracy will do another lurker-purge in the near future. But obviously, it's always more fun for us when these things come as a complete surprise, at least to the lurkers.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Looks like YouTube videos will not be included in this purge. Maybe.

Ars Technica: Google’s new “inactive account” policy won’t delete years of YouTube videos

[Zoloft]

Yahoo did this too, about 3 years ago (I think), so I guess the fact that hardly anyone noticed when they did it shows just how far the mighty have fallen.

My impression at that time, which could easily be wrong, was that they wanted us to believe their tech-support crew were having to handle too many requests from new users wanting existing usernames — presumably based on their having no comments or discussion posts anywhere, and/or not replying to e-mails, or... something.

Anyway, they're saying Twitter is going to do this too, and other Big Platforms won't be far behind, so the Washington Post says to start archiving everything now. And by the way, still no word on whether or not Wikipediocracy will do another lurker-purge in the near future. But obviously, it's always more fun for us when these things come as a complete surprise, at least to the lurkers.

In general, I don't purge lurkers. I purge people who never log in after registering. I did a few times purge people who logged in without posting but had not even logged in for a year or so. Inactive accounts are a minor security risk.

Y'all have secure passwords and change them once in a while, right?

Edit: I dropped a new list of never-used accounts in the mod forum.

[Konveyor Belt]

The old adage still rings true: There is no cloud, only someone else's computer. Some people tried to argue against this by saying "well, the computers used for the cloud are completely different from ours", but all along it was the "someone else's" part that was really the point.

[Lurking]

Someone else's computer, just one you can access from basically anywhere in the world. Means it makes for a pretty good backup in many cases, but a terrible place to host the only copy of something.

Then again, nowhere is a good place to host the only copy of anything digital you would mind losing. If losing it would matter at all, back it up. And if losing it would matter more than just being a minor inconvenience, back it up in multiple places.

[Beeblebrox]

I had an interesting argument about this a few years back. A friend asked me if I backed up my computer with cloud storage, and was appalled when I said I backed it up with a separate hard drive. He seemed to think that was a crazy risk that could end with me losing my backups.

[Vigilant]

I had an interesting argument about this a few years back. A friend asked me if I backed up my computer with cloud storage, and was appalled when I said I backed it up with a separate hard drive. He seemed to think that was a crazy risk that could end with me losing my backups.

As opposed to giving them to some corporate cloud provider?

[tarantino]

Imgur is going to delete rarely viewed content or stuff uploaded by people without an account. It's used in around 3000 posts here.

And remember when we all used webcitation.org to archive before archive.today or archive.org would work on demand? All that content is lost.

[Hemiauchenia]

Imgur is going to delete rarely viewed content or stuff uploaded by people without an account. It's used in around 3000 posts here.

And remember when we all used webcitation.org to archive before archive.today or archive.org would work on demand? All that content is lost.

Apparently Something Awful has worked to archive most if not nearly all of the imgur content. https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/8/23713 ... to-hosting I agree that archiving sites other than archive.org are unlikely to persist in the medium-long term, given the infrastructure required to maintain such a database.

[Konveyor Belt]

Someone else's computer, just one you can access from basically anywhere in the world. Means it makes for a pretty good backup in many cases, but a terrible place to host the only copy of something.

Then again, nowhere is a good place to host the only copy of anything digital you would mind losing. If losing it would matter at all, back it up. And if losing it would matter more than just being a minor inconvenience, back it up in multiple places.

It's not even about losing it. I'm not a privacy nut but it's pretty interesting all these cloud companies are deleting old content only after they've already been scraped for data collection and AI purposes.

[Lurking]

Someone else's computer, just one you can access from basically anywhere in the world. Means it makes for a pretty good backup in many cases, but a terrible place to host the only copy of something.

Then again, nowhere is a good place to host the only copy of anything digital you would mind losing. If losing it would matter at all, back it up. And if losing it would matter more than just being a minor inconvenience, back it up in multiple places.

It's not even about losing it. I'm not a privacy nut but it's pretty interesting all these cloud companies are deleting old content only after they've already been scraped for data collection and AI purposes.

Both are pretty relevant concerns, I think, which one more so depending on context. But yeah, the timing is interesting all right.

[wiki-reviewer]

crunch time for https://wiki.archiveteam.org/