Starting in December, Google will begin removing inactive accounts, a warning sign to people who use multiple logins. Google has been reminding people via email what will happen to stagnant accounts recently.

A growing number of critics are speaking out against Google’s strategy.

She received the warning in an email with the vanilla subject line, “Updating our Google Account inactivity policy,” according to Sabrina Meherally, CEO of Pause and Effect.

“I think email subject lines should be explicit, especially if a customer’s inaction has a consequence,” she wrote. I could have easily deleted it given how many emails and spam enter my inbox.”

Meherally suggested a “banner on Google.com,” Google’s ubiquitous search engine, as a more effective option.

Multi-account users are able to use different email addresses for different purposes and store photos and documents online separately. However, Google charges for storage space on free accounts. It has also been a year of profitability for the company.

Despite this, consumers haven’t become accustomed to this new form of Google aggression.

In a post with an attached screenshot of the email message, the user StoneRose95 on X, formerly known as Twitter, wrote, “What are you doing Google.”.

Schools and businesses that use Google accounts are not affected by the new policy. Subscriptions to services such as extra storage are also safe. It is expected that 80% of account holders will use their 15GB allotment for three years or longer, according to Google’s blog post from 2020.

Sign in once every two years

The extra account doesn’t require much effort to maintain. It only takes a user two years to sign in. According to Google’s May post, the purge will prevent hackers from gaining access to neglected personal accounts. The company told users that they would receive “multiple notifications in the months leading up to the deletion.”

In her post, Ruth Kricheli, a Google vice president, wrote that unattended or forgotten accounts often use compromised passwords, don’t have two-factor authentication, and receive fewer security checks. The likelihood of 2-step-verification being set up on abandoned accounts is at least 10x lower than that on active accounts, according to our internal analysis.

According to a Google spokesperson, this is the company’s first such policy.

Similar operations are carried out by Microsoft. Users must log in at least once every two years to keep their accounts active, and the company reserves the right to close accounts that don’t comply.

It is left unsaid in Krichell’s post that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is on a cost-saving mission.

Four consecutive quarters have seen Google’s revenue grow less than 10% for the first time in the company’s almost two decades as a public company. As a result of the uncertain economy, advertisers are being cautious, and TikTok is putting a lot of pressure on Google’s YouTube service.

The company has cut thousands of jobs this year, slowed hiring, and focused on efficiency. Among the changes are revised PC refresh cycles, shuttle schedules, cafeteria operations, and even fitness classes, according to CNBC. Finance Chief Ruth Porat described this as “efforts to reengineer our cost base.”