If you haven’t signed into your Samsung account for a couple of years, then you should probably do so if you want to keep it. Samsung has started to notify customers that it considers any accounts that haven’t been used or signed into for two years as “inactive” and they will be “subject to deletion” after a new policy comes into effect on July 31st.
“If an account is deleted, access to the account will be restricted and all data linked to the account will be deleted,” reads an email issued to customers on Wednesday. “Accounts and data that are deleted cannot be restored.”
That could be a pain if you were previously a Samsung user and want to switch back in the future without losing your account data. The Galaxy Store and proprietary Samsung apps for things like Health and Galaxy Wearables also require a Samsung account to sign in, meaning you risk losing access to the data connected to those services. Some data may be retained after account deletion, but Samsung says this is only in accordance with legal requirements.
The new inactive account policy makes exceptions for registered family accounts, accounts with “a record of accumulating/using reward points,” and accounts used to purchase products on Samsung’s website, all of which will be considered active. For anyone who falls outside of those exceptions, account deletion is thankfully easy to evade — according to Samsung, all you have to do is have “at least one” usage or activity detected for the account every two years. This includes account creation itself, logging into the Samsung account, or using a connected service while signed in.
If you have no intention of ever switching back to Samsung, however, you could allow the company to nuke your account and data instead of doing it yourself manually. Just make sure you won’t be locked out of connected apps in the process.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
