an inactive Google account is one that has not been used for a continuous period of two years. Google defines “activity” as actions such as signing in to read or send emails, using Google Drive, watching YouTube videos, sharing photos, or downloading apps.
It is, though 2 years is a little short. I just got back into my very first Yahoo e-mail not long ago and that wouldn’t have been possible with a policy like this.
But, they have so many that have been stagnant for so long so I’m not really faulting them for this particular move.
Are you sure? I’ve had accounts before where only signing in to the official web UI or client counted (because that’s where they showed ads and grabbed telemetry).
So while WE would consider using third party clients to be signing in, THEY may define it differently.
It’s not the first time. Besides, they won’t even let you log into old accounts that don’t have recovery emails and real names set. I lost a couple of really good usernames from the beta era after they rolled out all of their account protection practices. A password isn’t good enough for Google.
They wouldn’t let me log into a couple of accounts despite having the password, saying that I hadn’t used it for awhile and they couldn’t verify I was the account owner. Since there was no recovery email set, which was intentional because it was supposed to be an anonymous account, and none of the other information I set was real, they said they can’t verify me and won’t let me log in. They’re pretty insistent that passwords alone aren’t acceptable, even when you use all of your real information. Go try to log into Google on a new device from a new location and see what a huge PITA it is.
Ah; that explains it; I have multiple accounts cross-linked as recovery accounts. Sounds like I’ll be fine as long as I don’t run afoul of their “inactive” rules.
It was disappointing. I had uber1337 and lost it due to them refusing to let me log back in. That name doesn’t mean much now, but it was pretty l33t back then.
Edit: I guess it’s actually a pretty stupid name now that there’s a taxi company named Uber. Cool, I just made peace with losing that account. Haha!
They can leverage these terms if they want to. For example you’re also only allowed to have one account per person.
Wasn’t it the Terraria dev who got his account locked and they used that as an excuse as to why he was locked out of his account? They said he had too many accounts or something?
I do only have one account with them now. They’re a terrible platform these days if you want an anonymous spam account. They were good back in the day because they offered 10x the storage as everyone else, and we hadn’t fully comprehended the scope of their snooping. My only email address with them now is used as a corporate spam address, since it’s completely overrun with spam anyways, after 20+ years of use.
Notably, any account that has posted one or more videos on YouTube will be exempt from the account purge, regardless of the period of inactivity. This exception ensures that users who have contributed content to the platform will not lose their accounts.
So. Years back. When they did that ad where parents sent a kid emails to their own Gmail and then gave them the account details when they were grown up… Everyone who ever did that are gonna lose all their work if they don’t think to log in periodically. Nice.
uBlock Origin has kept their filters up-to-date for me. Still no ads, and no blocks from YouTube, since day 1. I did disable my other privacy extensions like Privacy Badger and Ghostery on YouTube to stay on their “good” side however.
Does that fix it? I disabled the whole addon because it interfered with the anti adblock measures. Unfortunately many features of it are pretty broken at this point and the author even removed it from the Firefox addon page.
Yeah for a while I used Adblock plus and ublock. With this adblock plus was just tripping youtube so it was an immediate uninstall. Stupid article is stupid
It’s not crazy. There are multiple blacklists that largely but not completely overlap. Sometimes program A works best on site B and program Y works on site Z. Or at least historically this has been the case.
This result honestly sounds like their best-case outcome. I don’t like much of what Google does, but I’m certain a lot of discussion went into what would be viewed as a “win” on this call, and my guess is “some number of people stop using ad-blocking software” actually beats out “some people are converted to subscribers” (an effect not measured here and somewhat necessary to get any context for one data point) by virtue of Google being an advertising company.
Regardless, they’re targeting only low-hanging fruit: people who use ad blockers to block ads. Sounds tautological, but this excludes anyone concerned about privacy. Nobody using an ad blocker in concert with other add-ons is going to be converted here. And I sort of wonder whether media coverage from when the crackdown started inflated ad-block installs among people who’d never used one, thus making this win less substantial on a longer timeline.
It’s on F-Droid. I personally haven’t used it in a long time because you couldn’t sign in to your account. Not sure if that’s changed. I’m currently using revanced which is great.
As the other poster said, it’s on F-Droid. It’s mostly a Youtube frontend, although it accesses SoundCloud and PeerTube too. And more importantly, it doesn’t download advertisements from YT, so you don’t even need an ad blocker when using it.
Oh OK my bad, that was news to me. I stopped using it a couple of years ago when Firefox got the functionality built in, and it wasn’t advertised as an ad blocker back then.
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