Google Purging Many Accounts: My Experience
Time is running out...
THE writings are on the wall.
Google (and now the press) cautions that it's about to delete a lot of accounts, citing 'security', as usual (so you cannot argue back). Perhaps a veiled motivation is to delete a lot of "old" mail and YouTube videos, reducing the cost of operation at Google, which has had plenty of layoffs. Storage and/or content delivery isn't cheap at the scale YouTube does it. There's no working business model.
I used to upload some videos to YouTube over a decade ago, almost always mere copies (backups) of what I had already uploaded to my own site. I prefer to keep the YouTube account alive, as it has videos, even if I've not logged in for years. So I wanted to just log in to prevent deletion. But guess what... YouTube first tells me you cannot log in and thus keep your videos unless you 1) buy a mobile phone and 2) give us your number. They already sent E-mail with a code and gave me about 7 different CAPTCHA riddles. This is ridiculous.
Google hired way too many people from Microsoft and it shows.
So what is going on? In the name of "deleting spam" (or "security") YouTube will purge perhaps billion of videos and thus "cut costs". Dead people will lose what they uploaded. A lot of history will be lost forever. What happened to Google's false promise?
Just another reminder: "free" hosting is a myth. There's no such thing. Look ahead and look beneath the surface. █