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this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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At least write "is scheduled to be deleted" to make the lie not as obvious.
I assume that the account is not usable after this. So it is a logical delete and the physical delete is scheduled. I don't know what would be a better way to phrase it, that would not confuse the users.
I am not trying to defend google, I just had similar UX issues at work.
Correct. Google is banking on users getting withdrawl and crawling back. They all do the same thing, like Meta products. They give you 30 days before deletion because they know most people are addicted and will recover their accounts.
Guilty as charged
Could be, but it's more likely that the delete gets put into a message queue and gets processed when the deletion service can handle it. These large deletions are computationally expensive.
Its similar to why the exports take so long to process
It's like how most people call moving a file into the trash can "deleting." It is deleted (in a sense), but you can still recover it if you want before the trash can gets emptied.
Or like how even you can actually delet a file from the disk but still be able to recover it before the disk space is overwritten by other files. I'm not saying that this is what Google does when you recover a freshly deleted account (most likely not), but what I'm trying to say with these two examples is that being able to be recovered is not a contradiction with having been deleted
Also I don't get why you take problem with this. It's not like it's another loop to jump through to get to delete the account?
Could still be actually deleted, but there's backups. Technically true.
If you can recover my Data then my Data is NOT deleted.
Just a copy of it, yes.
A copy of the data IS the data...
A friend told me he filled his google drive with a lot of small and random data in a cryptomator container. But he was not able to fill the google calendar and contacts with random data.
His Idea was, that after deleting there is a possibility that google only backup the last snapshot of his data and throw away the older backups. But only empty the account would not work.
Seems a legit idea, but what an effort ๐ฎ. There seem no tool that would do that for you.
I mean technically deletion just means to allow the computer to overwrite the data but until this happens it can be recovered.