Just yesterday, Google has announced that they'll be deleting accounts that haven't been used for 2 years. They're planning to delete all the accounts and all the content associated with the account including Youtube videos, emails, photos, google drive content and much more. They're planning to begin this process in December 2023 and will be first deleting the accounts that were not used after being created.
To avoid your Google account from being deleted, you have to sign in to your Google account every 2 years to keep your account safe. They said that they're only going to delete personal accounts and not organisations or school accounts. They claim that they're doing this to avoid old accounts being hacked and being used for scams.
But this also means that the Youtube videos and accounts of people who passed away or no longer making content on Youtube will be deleted. Youtube has a lot of informative content and a lot of memories of people, most of them coming from old and inactive accounts. Losing this content will do more harm to the platform when compared to scams because Youtube is a knowledge bank and the content on Youtube is precious to us.
We all have some spare Google accounts with us that we occasionally use or don't use them frequently. They'll flag these accounts as inactive and delete them later if you don't use them for 2 years. While deleting useless and spam Google accounts is a good thing, think about the bigger picture. What will happen to the accounts of dead people who have posted a lot of informative and useful content on Youtube? They'll be all gone. Years of content, just gone in one click.
While Google has claimed that it will send notices about deletion to the inactive user's email and their recovery email, what will happen to the accounts of dead people or famous youtubers who are inactive or just people who uploaded some popular videos and are not uploading anymore? All that content will be gone and it will affect Youtube very badly.
Youtube has to reverse this decision and let the inactive Youtube accounts and content stay on the site or else it will not only make it harder for people to find reliable guides or their memories, it will also decrease the usefulness of Youtube since there'll be a loss of good and informative content. I think Youtube is shooting themselves in the foot with this decision. What do you think?