Google announced earlier this week that it plans to begin deleting personal accounts on its service that have not been used or accessed for two years. “Beginning later this year, if a Google Account has not been used or signed in for at least 2 years,” the original version of the blog post said, “including content within Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar), YouTube, and Google Photos, the account will be disabled. and we can delete its contents”.
The mention of deleting Google accounts that own YouTube videos has alarmed many on the internet. Concerns were raised that the accounts of people who later passed away but uploaded popular YouTube videos could be deleted.
Since then, Google has quietly modified this blog post. The word “YouTube” was removed from the paragraph in the statement and added “Furthermore, we currently have no plans to delete accounts containing YouTube videos”.
YouTube videos will come to the rescue
Therefore, if you haven’t logged into your Google account for a while and uploaded some YouTube videos through that account, your accounts should not be deleted.
As mentioned earlier, Google stated that it has made the decision to delete unused or inactive accounts, mainly to increase security. There are concerns that older, unused accounts may have compromised passwords and may not have extra safeguards such as two-factor authentication for protection.
The company plans to start deleting Google accounts in December 2023, and this will start with accounts that were created but never actually used. If you have such an account, Google says it will send you multiple notifications over the months before it is deleted. These notifications will be sent to both the account email and the recovery email address.
All you have to do to keep an account active in Google’s eyes is to sign in to that account and use it for simple activities like reading or sending email, using the account with Google Search, or watching a YouTube video.
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