Yandex announced the removal of inactive accounts

Accounts on Yandex in which no activity has occurred for more than two and a half years will be deleted, the company said. Google already announced a similar decision in the summer; both companies base their actions on cybersecurity concerns. Provisions giving Internet services the right to delete abandoned accounts are also in the documents of other Russian companies: for example, at Mail.ru Mail, the risk of deletion appears after six months of inactivity. Experts add that such rules can help companies reduce the cost of maintaining infrastructure.

Yandex will begin deleting accounts that have had no activity for more than two and a half years, it follows from messages companies. They promise that the company will first warn the owners of such accounts several times at least a month before the planned deletion. To avoid losing your account, the user will need to log in to Yandex using it or perform some action.

Yandex clarified to Kommersant that deleting inactive accounts will not affect public content.

We are talking, for example, about reviews or archives of questions and answers on Yandex.Q (frozen in June 2023, old content is read-only). The company has not previously resorted to deleting inactive accounts. She explained her decision by cybersecurity issues: “Inactive accounts are often protected by old passwords, are the most vulnerable and, if compromised, can become a source of access to personal information.”

Similar explanation in May brought and Google, which has tightened its policy for deleting inactive accounts since 2020. If previously Google only reserved the right to delete content stored in an abandoned account, then this year it clarified that it intends to completely delete accounts after two years of inactivity. After users began to express concerns about the safety of old videos on YouTube, the company clarified that accounts with published videos would not be deleted.

Kommersant surveyed other Russian Internet companies about deleting inactive contacts.

IN VK declined to comment. At the same time, within the framework user agreement belonging to her Mail.ru It is stated that the company reserves the right to delete accounts, including in the event of non-use of the account for an “extended period of time.” IN agreement Mail.ru Mail clarifies that inactive mailboxes can be deleted after six months. Kommersant did not find such provisions in the documents of the VK ecosystem. IN Rambler&Co They said that “Rambler’s policy implies the preservation of accounts, and now there are no retention periods.”

Deleting inactive accounts, for example those used exclusively for testing services, simplifies account administration, says Pavel Kulakov, CEO of cloud provider Oxygen. But, according to him, such “cleansing” have virtually no effect on the speed of services or the load on the hardware.

Chief expert of Kaspersky Lab Sergey Golovanov admits that cleaning can reduce, in particular, the occupied disk space and resources required to maintain the infrastructure.

At the same time, Mr. Golovanov confirmed that deleting inactive accounts makes sense primarily for cybersecurity: “If a person uses his account, he may notice suspicious activity, but if it is abandoned, then the owner may not know about the hack.”

Yuri Litvinenko