As Google announced earlier this year,inactive Google accounts will be deletedstarting on August 22, 2025. Google said that it will send plenty of reminders before that happens and will start with those accounts that were never used, but to be safe, you should take action before the date comes. To prevent your account from being deleted, you can simply sign in or use the account for some simple actions.
Google first announced this new policyin a blog post back in May 2023. In it, the company detailed that going forward, it will delete accounts that haven’t been used for more than two years. This only applies to personal accounts; business and education accounts will not be deleted automatically. Given that Google said it would start with unused accounts, it’s likely that it will take some time to roll out this policy to all inactive accounts.
If you want to make sure that you won’t lose your account, you only need to sign in. This should be enough to mark it as active again for Google. The company also offers a few other steps you’re able to take to keep an account active, though these natually require you to sign in first: “reading or sending an email; using Google Drive; watching a YouTube video; downloading an app on the Google Play Store; using Google Search; or using Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service.”
If you’ve uploaded a YouTube video or if you have an active subscription through the Google account in question, the account also won’t be deleted. In that sense, uploading a random video to YouTube is the safest way to ensure that your account will stick around for now.
Google says that it will give you plenty of notice before it takes action. The company will send multiple emails to your account and any attached recovery email addresses to warn about the impending deletion. Still, it makes sense to proactively mark your account as active every once in a while if you want to keep it around.
When an account is deleted, Google will remove all data stored in it across all of its services, including Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Google Photos, and anywhere else on Google’s servers.
Google cites security and privacy reasons for its decision. According to some internal analysis, abandoned accounts are ten times more likely to be compromised. People may have used old and insecure passwords that they’ve reused on other platforms later. Older accounts additionally don’t necessarily have two-factor authentication set up, which makes it easier to attack them. On the privacy front, Google also wants to ensure that it doesn’t indefinitely retain unused personal information.
Google has already had a similar policy in place for Google Photos. The company retains the right to delete Photos content if you haven’t been active on Google Photos for two years or if you’ve run out of storage. To prevent this from happening, you need to sign in and view stored images at least once within a two-year period.
