Wired: “Deleting digital accounts that you rarely or never use not only reduces the amount of clutter in your online life—it keeps you safer too. Every extra account you’ve got is an extra target for a hacker, an extra database that might leak, and an extra way that someone might get access to some of your bigger, more important accounts. If you want to minimize your exposure, keep open only the accounts you need. When it comes to deleting a Google account, the process isn’t difficult or long-winded, and Google will even let you download your data first. Bear in mind that deleting a Google account wipes out everything associated with your Google username, from the emails in Gmail, to the places you’ve saved in Google Maps, to the files you’ve saved to Google Drive. It’s also worth noting that Google shuts down accounts automatically if they haven’t been used for two years, primarily for the security reasons that we’ve already mentioned. If you go to delete a Google account and find that it’s already gone, this might be why—though Google does send plenty of warnings in advance. You can read more about Google’s inactive account deletion policy if you think this has happened to your account…”