American technology and internet services company Google has revised its policy on handling inactive accounts, announcing that it will delete any account that has not been used for more than two years, thus the most important question is what is old? Have accounts on the video streaming site owned by YouTube?

A large number of videos posted on YouTube years ago are on inactive accounts and accounts whose owners have passed away, while there are still loved ones who want to continue watching such videos through the site.

Hence, Google decided to delete inactive accounts instead of deleting videos from these accounts.

Google posted a message on the internet stating bluntly, “At this time we don’t want to delete inactive accounts with YouTube videos”.

Google said it decided to remove inactive accounts to reduce fraud, noting that these old accounts are easier to hack.

“Our internal analysis shows that abandoned accounts are 10 times less likely to use the two-step user identity verification method than new accounts are using this method,” which aims to reduce the chances of these accounts being stolen or hacked. “This means that older accounts are often at risk,” he added. Once hacked, an account can be used to do anything from impersonation to spamming.

At the same time, deleting inactive accounts will reduce the cost of Google’s server system. However, Google will not delete the content of accounts in the Google Workspace service, such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Mail, and Google Calendar, before next December. The program will be rolled out gradually, starting with deleted and unused accounts. So people who have old accounts will have a long time to reactivate their accounts to keep them. At the same time, Google wants to send multiple warnings to inactive account holders to warn them before deleting them.