Stayin' alive

 KEEP YOUR BLOG ONLINE

Google's plan to start deleting inactive accounts (and their blogs) begins this December.

What does it mean to you, and how can you protect your blog?

The actual requirements are simple. Just publishing blog posts keeps the account active.

But there's a nasty surprise for some blogs.

The policy

1. Google's new policy is that it may delete inactive accounts after two years. Quote:

Google reserves the right to delete an inactive Google Account and its activity and data if you are inactive across Google for at least two years.

2. It may also delete some services (such as YouTube) from active accounts if the service has not been used for two years.

This is determined based on each product's inactivity policies.

At the present time, Blogger does not have its own activity requirement.

So, inactive blogs will be maintained as long as the account is active.

The rollout

Google has never deleted an account for inactivity before. It announced the new policy in May.

The announcement promises to proceed slowly, at least at first (emphasis added):

We are going to roll this out slowly and carefully, with plenty of notice:

• While the policy takes effect today, it will not immediately impact users with an inactive account—the earliest we will begin deleting accounts is December 2023.

• We will take a phased approach, starting with accounts that were created and never used again.

• Before deleting an account, we will send multiple notifications over the months leading up to deletion, to both the account email address and the recovery email (if one has been provided).

If your account contact information is not up to date, you won't get these warnings. 

The surprise

It's not obvious, but if there were ever other accounts on the blog, and those accounts are deleted for inactivity, any images they uploaded into the blog will be deleted too.

You can lose images that way.

The scenario might happen if you started your blog with a dedicated blogging account, but then transferred the blog to another account that you use for email and other services.

It could follow if you have or had a team blog with images uploaded by a co-author in his or her posts.

It applies even if the originating account is no longer linked to the blog.

Images cannot be transferred from one account to another in Blogger. Blogs can be transferred, but the images remain hosted in the originating account.

When a blogging account is deleted

It's worth reviewing what happens when an account that has a blog is deleted.

• If the account is the sole account on the blog, as administrator, the blog will be deleted along with everything else in the account.
• If there is another account on the blog that is not deleted, the blog will persist. If the deleted account was the sole administrator, ownership will pass to one or more non-admin authors, who will become administrators.
• In that case, the blog posts from the deleted account will persist.
• However, images uploaded from that account will be deleted.

My advice

Contacts: Google says they will try to contact you before deleting any of your accounts, at least initially.

So, make sure your account contact information is up to date. Typically, email and cell phone.

Google's efforts to reach you will only be as good as the information you provide.

You can revise contact information in the settings for your Google account, under personal info > contact info.

Old blogs: If your blog is inactive, but you want it to remain online, sign in to your account once a year and use it to perform a Google search, watch a YouTube video, or send an email (to anyone).

(The requirement is actually once every two years, but why risk forgetting?)

Update: Google also says it won't delete any accounts "for the time being" if they have uploaded a video to YouTube.

That sounds kind of sketchy, but it's something else you might do.

You might want to do this if your blog is of abiding interest to family members or others. Also, see "Legacy" below.

Hidden accounts: To avoid a nasty surprise, inventory all the accounts that ever wrote blog posts.

Gain access to all of them and make sure the contact information is up to date.

Activate them once a year, too. 

Or, if there are only a handful of images that would be deleted, edit the affected posts by replacing the images with the same ones uploaded from an active account.

If you do that, you can just forget about the originating account.

Update: I've published a guide to tracking down these hidden accounts.

Legacy: If you wish your blog to survive you, you'll have to arrange to have someone activate the account regularly. That person will need your account credentials.

I suggest asking them to do this once a year, on your birthday, to make it easy to remember.

Also, ask them to keep the account contact information up to date for them.

There can be a lot of issues when Google gets a sign-in request from a new location and device. So, to make sure this goes smoothly, I recommend

• providing a set of one-time backup codes along with your account credentials
• asking your digital heir to try signing in now, while you are still around to assist.

Be absolutely clear about this

This policy is a major departure for Google and introduces an element of time where it did not exist before. 

If you drop the ball you could lose part or all of your blog.

So, I suggest it is worth reading carefully

• Google's announcement
• Google's official policy

Today's image, via Open Clipart, is in the public domain.