It is my unconfirmed opinion that even though they say they have deleted your data and account, it still exists on some backup in some server farm somewhere.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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I've had a few over the years and yes, I just migrated everything to Proton unless it's for business which I still use Gmail for but everything else is now over to Proton, Tuta or I will be using FreeMail. Can I trust them? Not fully but there's only so much we can do from our end and to be honest, any information they dont delete is probably already out there in the universe anyway
I deleted my Google account in January of 2023 and had not been using it primarily since 2018. I honestly don't trust them to have deleted the data, but since I'm not adding to the data, it's getting older and older and therefore less and less valuable to them because they don't know what I am like now. They only know what I was like as of the beginning of 2023, which for advertising is kind of useless.
I deleted one I didn't even remember having. Something I created back when I first got a smart phone and as much as I recall think I used it for the primary phone login account and had my separate emails just in the client.
Only got reminded of it when they sent an email to my main address saying it had been inactive for years and was going to be deleted anyhow, so went through this process where they unlocked it after a month of waiting to see what was in there before shutting it down. Was pretty much blank from the start so it doesn't really matter if they actually deleted it or not.
How my main email got set as a recovery is another question, probably just many years back brain not being so good at keeping online identities siloed.
Nah, just deleted relevant data and left it there to rot in their servers.
Yeah I did. A couple years ago.
The biggest problem was changing my email. Many companies are simply not equipped for such a request.
Some of them actually told me I had to cancel my account and open a new one. Others would send half my emails to the new address and the other half to the old one. So fucking ridiculous.
I moved my email to my own domain, so hopefully I never have to deal with that again.
God help me if I ever have to change my phone number again for all the fucking companies demanding SMS verification.
I’ve deleted multiple Google accounts in the past. The experience was pretty straight forward. Nothing out of the ordinary that I remember.
I went through and deleted everything first… photos, docs, history, etc. If I recall, I tried to delete any info not required for the account. I think at the time I may have address info that I removed.
Walked through the process and account was deleted.
Do I trust them to delete everything? No, which is why I did what I could before removing the account. Also, that account really won’t be deleted, it will be marked as such and you can’t reuse your Gmail address but the actual account will still be around.
Most companies are like that… I said most, please don’t flame me about all the companies that actually remove accounts 😆
If you have an account and want to delete it, clean it up first, wait a bit, then follow the process. Not much else you can really do.
your account will only be marked as such
Yeah big databases systems on google scale work like this I guess 😔. Best thing to do is delete that shit and hope for the best I guess.
Sadly, hoping for the best is the only viable option these days.
Self host ALL the things. I know where all my pics and docs reside right here in my house.
That is a fair statement. In today’s world, it’s the only truly safe option.
However, it’s not always realistic for some people to do… for various reasons.
Yeah, though with things like the fediverse, generations that where born into the tech world (internet only really started to be a thing around high school for me, but my kids have never used dial up) and small cheap systems like raspberry pi I expect it'll get much easier and hopefully more common.
Keeping your google account can be helpful if you want to follow this strategy:
- Register on Signal using your phone number
- Port your phone number to google voice ($20 transfer fee but free after that; additionally while its privacy sucks, google is great for security)
- Change the settings so that every caller is sent to voice mail
- Use mysudo and cloaked for VoIP numbers
- Set up Signal on a new device (ideally a grapheneos pixel)
- Use a calyx institute hotspot for data or buy a sim card with cash
Do you trust them to really delete everything?
Or even anything?
I am pretty sure that every data they ever gathered about you is still there, just marked as hidden. Data is their currency; you don't throw that away.
Fuck no
Mine has been around for ages and I'm itching to delete it. But sometimes it comes in handy with an edge case where I do need a non-work Google account. I'm of the opinion that they'll keep some sort of shadow profile kicking around after I delete the account, but it'll at least feel liberating when I do.