Melinda Mattox, instructor in software and data engineering at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, recently spoke with WCCO Radio about Google’s decision to delete inactive accounts and how this may impact users.
From the story:
“It’s a pretty straightforward reason actually – an account that is not used very often, if it’s left unattended, it is far more likely to be compromised and for there to be a security breach, for instance, an account is compromised using phishing attacks, which is a pretty common occurrence ...
Google has a lot of accounts so there is some lag in how quickly they can remove all of them – there’s millions of them, probably billions, but those that are unattended would be anything that hasn’t been touched in two years so that’s a much smaller number,” said Mattox.
