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Comment by kllrnohj | Hacker News Reader

If the users are inactive they aren't seeing ads. Google isn't a charity, why would they pay for storage that isn't being used?

Also, somewhat morbidly, dead people don't really need their photos and emails hosted perpetually.

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They don't, but as a society we would all benefit from some way to archive at least some of that. Future historians will curse us for not leaving behind letters, photos, etc. (which is especially ironic given how much more of them we're each generating).

Heh, now try to win the privacy debate that’s on the other side of your argument.

One argument I've heard is that you can encrypt your data now to gain privacy while you're alive. Then by the time the data would be useful for historians they'll probably have enough compute to break 21st century encryption.

If you're worried about your data evaporating, consider using Google Inactive Account Manager to set up a way to automatically gift your data to a family member. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en

There's already enough publicly-shared content online to keep historians facepalming about this era for centuries to come, without digging into everyone's non-public files.

People can choose whether they want their data retained after death. A default opt out sounds good.

They're not even checking if the entire user account is inactive.

And it can be very important to people for the public galleries of dead people to stay up.

I was also thinking about how this is part of their new policy to not provide unlimited image uploads to Photos, even for active users.

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