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Should I delete my old Google account? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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Hi everyone, I have an old Google account that I don’t use anymore, and I’m thinking about deleting it. But I’m worried I may have used that email address for government services or other important accounts in the past, and I don’t want to overlook something that could cause problems later.

What should I check before deleting it? Do you have similar experience?

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[–] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

Check your password manager. What other accounts is the e-mail address account linked to? Change it, then delete the account.

If you don't have a password manager: Now is the time to get one. I recommend KeepassXC (PC, cross-platform) / KeepassDX (Android). Combine with Syncthing for cloudless cross-device sync of the password database file.

Also, don't worry too much. You wouldn't be the first to lose access to an e-mail address. Governments or "other important accounts" usually have procedures to deal with that issue. But: a Google account shouldn't be linked to anything important anyway, let alone government accounts.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I heard keepass was going hard on the AI. Is that true? I can't find much about it tbh.

    If so, that'd make me nervous for a pw manager. If not, then it seems like a legit option.

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  • [–] 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 child)

    I heard keepass was going hard on the AI. Is that true? I can’t find much about it tbh.

    I can't tell you much about that, other than

    • I've never heard about that
    • they haven't got an agents.md or similar giveaway files in their Github repo that suggest they do
    • they do have a short paragraph about GenAI in their Github that reads:

      Generative AI is fast becoming a first-party feature in most development environments, including GitHub itself. If the majority of a code submission is made using Generative AI (e.g., agent-based or vibe coding) then we will document that in the pull request. All code submissions go through a rigorous review process regardless of the development workflow or submitter.

    Personally, I don't mind devs using GenAI if it's used in a responsible fashion, i.e.

    • it is used to support software engineering, not replace it: any actual creative / design work is done by humans, GenAI is only there to help with simple, but tedious tasks (writing smaller, easy-to-review code snippets, unit testing, etc.).
    • there's a human at the helm, meaning: every line of code is human-reviewed.

    Also, I tend to trust projects more whose code base started long before GenAI was a thing. Typically, these have a large base of maintainers and contributors, and the people contributing code know what they're doing. This is certainly true of Keepass.

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