Make sure your Google accounts are active, otherwise they may be deleted

If you haven’t used one of your Google accounts in a long time, you might want to do so this week. Inactive accounts will disappear from December 1.

Google announced in May that it would begin deleting accounts that had been inactive for two years and said the policy would take effect in December.

That means anything stored in Gmail or other Google products like YouTube, Photos, Docs, Drive, Meet, and Calendar can be deleted.

Accounts are considered active when a user signs in and takes one of a number of actions, including reading or sending an email, watching a YouTube video, or using Google search. The user must be logged into the account for the action to count.

The company said when it announced the policy that it was for security reasons: accounts that have not been used for a long time are more likely to be compromised. It also said that inactive accounts were ten times less likely to have two-factor authentication, which verifies a user’s identity.

The policy applies only to personal accounts, not to accounts managed by a company or school.

Google said certain accounts would be exempt from deletion even if they were inactive for two years, including accounts that contained a gift card with a cash balance or had an active paid subscription.

While the company said it could start purging accounts on December 1, it may not delete them all immediately. Google said in May that it planned to start with accounts that had never been used.

If a Google Account is deleted, all its contents and data may disappear. Before beginning the removal, Google said it would warn users in multiple emails to the inactive Google account and to another email address, if one is saved in a user’s account.

An inactive account can be made active by logging into a Google service, such as Gmail or YouTube.

Users must also sign in to Google Photos specifically, because that’s the company’s own policy states“If you are inactive in Google Photos for two years or more, all your content may be deleted.”