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Every day, Google works hard to keep you and your private information safe and secure by preventing unauthorised access to your Google Account with our built-in security protections. And keeping you safe means having strong privacy practices across our products that minimise how long we store your personal files and any data associated with them. We want to protect your private information and prevent any unauthorised access to your account even if you're no longer using our services.

Therefore, we are updating the inactivity period for a Google Account to two years across all our products and services. This change starts rolling out today and will apply to any Google Account that's been inactive, meaning that it has not been signed in to or used within a two-year period. An inactive account and any content in it will be eligible for deletion from 1 December 2023.

What this means for you:

• These changes do not impact you unless you have been inactive in your Google Account for two years or have not used your account to sign in to any Google service for over two years.
• While the changes go into effect today, the earliest that we would enforce any account deletion would be December 2023.
• If your account is considered inactive, we will send several reminder emails to both you and your recovery emails (if any have been provided) before we take any action or delete any account content. These reminder emails will go out at least eight months before any action is taken on your account.
• After a Google Account is deleted, the Gmail address for the deleted account cannot be used again when creating a new Google Account.

How to keep your account active?

The simplest way to keep a Google Account active is to sign in to the account at least once every two years. If you have signed in to your Google Account recently in the last two years, your account is considered active and will not be deleted.

Other ways to keep your account active include:

• Reading or sending an email
• Using Google Drive
• Watching a YouTube video
• Sharing a photo
• Downloading an app
• Using Google Search
• Use Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service

There are some exceptions to this policy. Examples include: A Google Account with YouTube channels, videos or comments; an account that has a gift card with a monetary balance; or an account that has a published application, for example, one that hosts an app on the Google Play Store. Other exceptions to this policy are available here.

Google also offers tools to help manage your Google Account and provide options to back up your data, including the ability to download your data using Google Takeout, and allowing you to plan for what happens to your data if you're inactive for a specific period of time with the Inactive Account Manager.

Our priority is to make it as easy as possible for you to keep your account active, if you want to, and we'll ensure that you have adequate notice before any account is impacted by this change. So before an account is deleted, Google will send email notifications to the Google Account and its recovery email (if one has been provided). You should verify that your recovery email is up to date.

Learn more

• Inactive Google Account policy
• How Google retains data that we collect
• Updating our inactive account policies (only available in English)

Thank you,
The Google Account Team

On 5 January 2022, we're making some changes to our Terms of Service. These changes won't affect the way that you use Google services, but they'll make it easier for you to understand what to expect from Google – and what we expect from you – as you use our services.

You can review the new terms here. We've also provided a summary of the key changes. At a glance, here's what this update means for you:

• More clarity on what you can expect from Google and what we expect from you: We're providing more examples to describe the mutually respectful conduct that we expect from all of our users. We're also providing more transparency about how we develop, improve and update our digital content, services and goods – including more detail about the reasons why we make changes and legally required updates, the advanced notice that we provide to you, and your right to withdraw from your contract with us.
• Legal guarantee: We're summarising the legal guarantees that you receive under EEA consumer laws when you use our digital content, services and goods.
• Withdrawal right: We're providing information about your legal right to withdraw from the terms within 14 days of agreeing to them if you're a consumer based in the European Economic Area (EEA). We're also including a copy of the EU model instructions on withdrawal in case you want to exercise that right.
• Additional definitions: We're adding more explanatory text to help you understand certain legal concepts that we refer to in our terms, including 'commercial guarantee', 'legal guarantee' and 'lack of conformity'.
• Improved readability: While our terms remain a legal document, we've done our best to make them easier to understand, including reorganising some topics so that they're easier to find.

If you use Family Link to manage a Google Account for someone else, please take some time to talk to them about these changes.

Thank you for using Google!