"Urgent: Sign in to your Google Account if you want to keep it"
But then it doesn't matter if you log in with the correct username and password and receive the PIN via your email. This is isn't enough. Unless a phone number is somehow added to the account one gets,
"You can’t recover your account at this time because Google doesn’t have enough info to be sure this account is yours."
This is despite having all information ever associated with the account. Unless that account has a phone number it will be deleted. This is a very shady dark pattern by Alphabet corporation.
Advertising company (Doubleclick [1]) wants phone numbers to better target ads. No surprise there.
[1] The company currently calling itself Google is not the same Google as yesteryear. In 2008 Google purchased Doubleclick, and what happened is that the advertising rot from Doubleclick ate Google from the inside out. What we have now calling itself Google is actually all the evil that was Doubleclick, only calling itself Google. That's why the Google motto no longer includes "Don't be evil".
We've fallen so far from the days when the retailer let you just have the game you bought and then they were out of the picture forever.
So will they also delete inactive accounts that have no phone number, but one or more phone-less 2FA methods associated?
I recently had to log into it for the first time in a few years to make a config change to the domain, and it wouldn't let me in because the 2FA code wasn't working, and a recovery code wasn't sufficient to enable privileged access. I had to reach out to Google Workspace support to regain admin access to my domain.
Thankfully, they were able to do so (although it took a few days and I had prove ownership of it).
So there's an example of a situation where an account that's not logged into for a long time doesn't mean that it's forgotten or unused.
“If you haven't used your ham sandwich in a year, why do you want to use it now?”
“If you haven't used your receipt in a year, why do you want to use it now?”
Ah, yes. I see what you mean. Truly absurd.
"If you haven't used your passport in over a year, why do you want to use it now"?
"If you haven't used your grandmother's family photo album in over a year, why do you want to use it now"?
"If you haven't used your safety deposit box in over a year, why do you want to use it now"?
> If you haven't used your $whatever in a year, why do you want to use it now? Replace $whatever with whatever you want and you'll see how absurd this question is.
This is a silly statement specifically because the choice of “$whatever” determines whether it’s “absurd”. It’s definitely not absurd to assume that a year old sandwich is trash, while it is absurd to assert that an unaccessed safe deposit box is trash.
But of course you also pay the bank for your safe deposit box. If you stop paying then they absolutely will discard the contents (or send them off to the state, depending on laws). No one stores abandoned junk for free. If you want you pay Google for your account I bet they’ll keep it even if you never log in.
The trouble is you think that you are in possession of a ham sandwich that Google is taking away when in reality you’ve left your ham sandwich in Google’s fridge and they are sick of storing the obviously-abandoned sandwich for you.
See also: https://xkcd.com/1150/