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Comment by jpdus | Hacker News Reader

Why don't they just offer some kind of emergency support with a hefty pricetag for these cases? Eg pay 200$ to have an actual human verify your identity? I don't think that would cost them anything and most people in this situation would likely pay any price to regain access..

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I'd think they would be accused of engineering the situations where that help is needed, and profiting from it.

Why don't you just buy two yubikey and print one-time recovery codes?

If you care about it, then lock it down.

In many ways there is no good way to verify you, if you don't invest in 2FA.

Would you rather be locked out, or have a hacker locked in?

Well, I use 2FA extensively, including for my Google account. However, there are even more vectors possible with 2FA where you lock yourself out of your account (e.g.loose backup codes, phone and access to phone number) which a human could easily solve (verify scan of ID, address proof, phone call, confirm that no activity for X days on the account in question).

How would that work? I can of course go to their office and prove my identity but since nobody did that when opening the account, they can't necessarily prove that it is my account..

Business accounts already have payed support built-in, and are able to contact a human (I know because I did).

Why you'd use gmail professionnaly without a business account is beyond me.

Because they would likely lose money over it.

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