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Comment by bloomingeek | Hacker News Reader

F-ing Google locked me out of my account and my email because I broke my cell, and then traded it in for a new one but Google kept sending the verification to my broken cell. There's no one to call for assistance!

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That sucks and this is something Google needs to fix, but for everyone else: make sure to get backup codes for your Google Account and place them in a password manager.

Make sure to get backup codes for your MFA-protected accounts, and then keep them out of your password manager at all costs. Print them out on paper and store them in a fire-safe location, preferably one copy off-site.

Or host your own domain with google and buy google workspace for enterprises so you can use your android with your own domain.

Good reminder, thanks for sharing.

I hate to be that guy but this seems like a user problem

The inability to recover an account is bullshit regardless. It’d be like if you lost your bank card, and the bank didn’t have a service desk.

Just because google is free, doesn’t mean they don’t have a responsibility to users. Savings accounts where I live are pretty much free too.

Email accounts from big providers need some safe-guard legislation (a bit like FDIC for banks), given how much every other service wants your email address. Even my power utility wants my email address.

It’s not possible to completely disable 2FA with paid Google domain accounts either. I’ve explicitly turned off 2FA for my paid Google account and it continues to ask me to type a text code or YouTube code. Crazy how you can’t even pay to get rid of these “lose your phone lose account forever” features.

My mother had an account inaccessible as the mfa backup workflow did not work, my email was the second factor but it refused any codes I provided. I assume this is a functional bug but google has no inbound communications so I could never resolve it. My mum ended up requesting her old number from a phone provider who obliged.

The world will be a better place when legislation requires these evilcorps to at least have some baseline responsibilities to the people who they are supposedly helping while making trillions in revenue.

It is made abundantly clear when you set up 2FA that you need to backup your 2FA or it may not be possible to recover. What did you expect? Personal responsibility is important.

Yes and what I’m saying is that is not an okay solution. If you lost absolutely all your proof of ID and bank cards, there is still ways to sufficiently prove your identity and recover access to your assets and bank accounts. An email address is an asset.

That is just your opinion. Those "ways to sufficiently prove your identity" are also ways that identity theft happen every single day. Some people prefer to take personal responsibility over opening themselves up to compromise.

In any case, if you thought that is not acceptable to you, you should not have set up 2FA because the conditions were clearly communicated.

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