Discussion Google will be deleting all inactive accounts after two years of inactivity, including YouTube, with deletions starting in December (not video)

[Semi Lazy Gamer]

Updating our inactive account policies

Starting later this year, we are updating our inactivity policy for Google Accounts to 2 years across our products.

www.blog.google

I really hope they clarify on what's happening with YouTube videos because I'm pretty sure a lot of accounts with popular videos are going to be culled.

Edit:

 

[Pineapple Pizza]

It makes sense financially to not have lots of dormant account eating up server space but I agree, need to know what will happen to legacy YouTube content as there's loads of uploads from inactive users that viewers still enjoy today.

 

[Kingpin Rogers]

Would genuinely be horrible if inactive accounts also get their videos deleted. Tons of history would be deleted

 

[Tangerine_Cookie]

Time to download all those videos from long inactive accounts I want to keep, I guess.

 

[hapi]

 

[Semi Lazy Gamer]

 

[ZephyrPhoenix]

ok thank god, cause there was a mini series that I used to watch and would suck balls if it was lost.

 

[Johna X]

It still sounds like a "for now" moment, I'd prepare some degree of archival none the less, I don't know the direction of this mixed with the twitter every month thing like server costs have caused the market to no longer favor online media preservation, as we already know much physical and digital media in general isn't favored for. But well things like the eShop closure are terrible, we have online communities aware of the inevitability of these closes, setting up to preserve their history. We currently lack that for internet video type stuff, and well the eshop has thousands upon thousands of games I still think with the barrier being so low complete archival is genuinely impossible, so its best to start early

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

for the record, they've already done something similar a while back. every unlisted Youtube video made before January 1st, 2017 was turned private, rendering them unviewable to anyone except the uploader.

there was a way to opt-out of this if you had an active account, but naturally not everyone was able to do it.

 

[Tangerine_Cookie]

I don't trust them.