"Your Google account is being deleted" message

In My Humble Opinion
1

This is some new idiocy from Google. Apparently my “Google Account” is being deleted because it hasn’t been used in two years. What confused me at first was that the referenced account was my ISP email address, which has nothing whatsoever to do with Google or my Gmail accounts with Google. And which I use many times a day!

I eventually realized that I had used my ISP email as an ID to set up something called a “Google Account”. I found the original password I had used and it worked, but now Google is giving me the runaround. To “prove it’s you” they’re going to send a verification to code to that email address. They did, and it worked. And the next step? They want me to give them my cell phone number so they can text yet another verification code to, again, “prove it’s me”. How the hell does giving them my cell number prove anything?

It smells like a scam but these are legitimate Google URLs.

My other question is, what the hell good is a “Google Account”? I have several Gmail accounts. What else do I need?

This whole thing pisses me off, and I’ve already had a bad day.

2

Great! Now it gets even better. I just got a “Critical Security Alert” that some criminal had tried to sign in to my “Google Account”, but in its wisdom, Google blocked them. Yes, you fucking morons, that “criminal” was me! I just got so sick of your multiple verification code requests that I gave up.

3

Your “Google account” is your underlying identity and login behind all your separate gmail accounts. The brough Gmail under the Big Daddy Google umbrella about 5-10 years ago. Sounds like they’re finally getting around to consolidating that stuff for you.

A google account is how your android device(s) authenticate to the mother ship. it includes cloud storage, the play store, access to google wallet, and a ton of other stuff like that. None of which you may need or want.

But that’s what it is. And yes, it’s normal they want your gmail email addresses, a non-gmail backup email address, and a cell phone number. All of which get tied together as your master login to all things google. And, in their evil thinking, a master login for lots and lots of other websites.

4

Thank you for the excellent explanation. This whole situation does have this canine Luddite wondering what the hell Google Accounts™ are good for, for the likes of us. The only thing I can think of is if you used “sign in with Google” to get access to some resource, that access would disappear if the account disappeared. The only thing I ever remember using it for is access to ChatGPT. If the Google account disappeared, I guess I could still register again for GPT, but all of our original brilliant conversations would be lost to posterity! :wink:

5

As LSL says, your Google account is how you access all Google services. All the cloud-related things you access from your phone, like Contacts, Calendar, Photos, YouTube, Google Docs, Play Store, etc. It’s possible (but seems unlikely) that you don’t use any Google services except Gmail. In any case, once you get access to your Google account, it’s a good idea to create backup codes to ensure that you don’t lose access (myaccount.google.com → Security → 2-Step Verification → Get backup codes).

6

I just a couple of days ago got a message from Google that they were going to delete an account that hasn’t been used in two years that was affiliated with my gmail account. But it isn’t my account. It’s the military (af.mil) account of a woman that I dated for a few months in 2007 who was an Air Force reservist. Explain that one.

“Your Google Account redacted@gimail.af.mil is being deleted because it hasn’t been used within a 2-year period.”

7

Did she perhaps put your email in as the emergency recovery email for her account? I can see her trying to log in a nag screen appears, says she must specify an emergency recovery email right now, in exasperation she enters the only email she knows off the top of her head, yours, and moves on. A week later she’s utterly forgotten she did that. And now she’s not using her af.mil gmail, so gmail’s attempts to contact her fail.

Not that many people actively maintain multiple unrelated email provides for years and years and also remember all the ones they’ve sorta stopped using.

8

That was my best guess as well.

9

The reason they want a cellphone number is so they can text you another request to verify that it’s you.

Many critical services are now moving to 3-factor verification or even more. I guess we can excuse this because…demons are lurking everywhere, and you can’t be too careful, eh?

But sometimes it can drive a person batty. I was helping an older veteran (yeah, 92 is older than me) set up an account to get reimbursement for medical travel as he is entitled to. They want not only the usual real name, signon name, password, but address and exact spelling of ALL names (first, middle, last, prefix & suffix, if any). But wait, there’s more! Much more. They have to verify his address (according to PO records), name (to match his vet records), SSN (to match SS records) and of course vet status and eligibility for reimbursement.

They need to see his driver’s license or state equivalent ID, but they will not accept a scan and upload of it. Nor will they accept a military ID or passport. They WILL accept a photo of the DL taken with his phone and emailed FROM THE SAME PHONE. Since he doesn’t have that kind of phone, they insist that he print out a PDF form they email and physically take it to a Post Office to show them his DL. Any not just ANY Post Office; you have to make an online appointment, and you have only 10 days to do all this or begin all over.

Then, when he files for reimbursement, they require him to look up (in their records) his appointment date(s), verify that he actually went to the appointment, and less than 30 days had elapsed since.

This retired Colonel is a good friend of mine, and I’m vastly more computer-savvy, yet it was a considerable hassle for me, even though I went thru the same process for myself about 9 months ago. He said, “How in the Hell can the average, elderly veteran do this by himself?” – a valid question.

10

Except that … think about the logic of this. “We’ve verified your password. Now we want to verify your original email login account. Please respond with the security code we sent you.”

So I respond. The security code is accepted.

Next step: We now need to send you another security code through a text message on your cell phone. But …

*We don’t know what your cell phone number is,so please send it to us. That way, in some mysterious way that no one can explain. we will further verify your identity". :roll_eyes:

So if these aren’t scammers, are they Google employees who have gone insane?

11

Ignore whatever the text on the screen might say. This time they want to text you a code to confirm that the phone number is yours, not that you are who you say you are. In the future, based on your demonstrated control of that phone number, they may text a code to it to as part of a two factor authentication.

12

Oh, I wouldn’t count on that. Lost to you, maybe, but they’ll just get repurposed for training the next generation of AI…

13

The overlap between “Easy enough for a 92yo who may only have a HS education” and “Hard enough to stymie overseas organized crime eager to plunder the US Treasury’s nearly bottomless pockets” is a very narrow target. Maybe even a target of negative size.

14

So I take it that the consensus of the experts on this board is that I should follow all of Google’s verification procedures in order to get into my account again, including the stupid one where in addition to the verification code sent to my email, I have to give them my cell phone number to get a text message with yet another verification code? I can’t believe how stupid this is!

I normally wouldn’t even care about the stupid Google Account (my Gmail accounts are independent of it) by I think it has to be valid to authenticate me on sites where I’ve used Google as the third-party authenticator (“Log in with Google”).

15

Then you haven’t been paying attention the last ~4 years as practically the entire web-o-sphere has taken to using people’s mobile phones as their 2FA token?

Of course Google wants you to register your phone as your 2FA token.

16

This is correct! :grin:

And thank you for the advice!

17

(Never mind, I had misread the OP.)

18

The part that I don’t understand is asking for a non-Google secondary email address. Why, again, would I have one of those any more?

19

Google isn’t “asking” for one, I gave it one as a recovery email address. As to why anyone would have a non-Google email address, maybe because Google is not the only email provider in the world?

Anyway, I don’t know why you would want a non-Google email, but I have one and continue to use it because I’ve had it ever since almost the dawn of the public internet, and there’s about a bazillion things connected with it.

20

When you lock yourself out of google, or you get hacked, they need another channel to contact you on.

Now why someone would put all their email and global identity eggs in one basket, that’s the part I don’t quite get.

I have a Live.com (Microsoft) email address as my primary, and a more or less throwaway Google address as my secondary. One gets used many times a day; the other is logged into every couple of months just to keep it alive. Each serves as a backstop / emergency contact identity for the other.

Which ecosystems out of the big 4: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and Apple that people choose to use is up to them. Ditto for which is primary among their chosen two.

But IMO having two, each from different ecosystems, seems like bare prudence. Kinda like the second fob for your car when you’re a single person, you don’t need it very often, but when you do need it, a) you really need it, and b) it’s too late to get another one if you don’t already have it.