You're going to have more success working with the providers of the other accounts and services rather than Google. That means a lot more legwork on your part but banks and other online services all have processes to deal with lost passwords. In some cases you may have to physically go somewhere with ID and other documents.
Isn't there an SMS option? buy a new phone and have them send you an OTP via SMS.
> once you're phone is gone, you are completely over with society?
yes, I'm waiting for the Black-Mirror episode where someone drops their phone and basically dies, can't contact anyone, can't unlock or start their car, can't get an uber, can't pay for anything, can't navigate without gps, can't log into anything etc.
Man, passwords sure are nice aren't they! All you have to do is remember one because your password manager remembers all the rest of your randomly generated passwords for you and as long as you keep a backup of the password database you never have to worry about this bullshit.
The same way you recover any other deleted data for which you didn't make a backup: you don't. You eat the loss & make new accounts. Then you remember to make and test backups for the future.
Even if they had customer support, if that customer support had a backdoor to unlock your account it would be regularly used by malicious parties to steal people's accounts & data.
If you don't have the authenticator backup codes and you didn't turn on cloud sync in the app, you might be out of luck.
You can get a replacement SIM though and use it with a new phone, so the phone number recovery option should work.
This. Can't you get your number moved to a new phone? I have never don't anything magic when upgrading my phone other than move contacts.
You're going to have more success working with the providers of the other accounts and services rather than Google. That means a lot more legwork on your part but banks and other online services all have processes to deal with lost passwords. In some cases you may have to physically go somewhere with ID and other documents.
Consider it a learning experience.
Isn't there an SMS option? buy a new phone and have them send you an OTP via SMS.
> once you're phone is gone, you are completely over with society?
yes, I'm waiting for the Black-Mirror episode where someone drops their phone and basically dies, can't contact anyone, can't unlock or start their car, can't get an uber, can't pay for anything, can't navigate without gps, can't log into anything etc.
Pretty similar to how my life feels right now.
Everything you listed, plus a recovery email option, plus backup codes, plus SMS.
That's already a lot and anything easier would allow people to just take over accounts that they don't have a right to.
Man, passwords sure are nice aren't they! All you have to do is remember one because your password manager remembers all the rest of your randomly generated passwords for you and as long as you keep a backup of the password database you never have to worry about this bullshit.
There's no way, no human contact. That's why I de-googled myself.
No human contact is a plus for security, as the human is the weakest link that can give up your authentication to someone that isn’t you.
Have you heard about Meta AI doing support?
"I am permanently locked out of my account with no recourse" is also a security issue.
The only secret option I know of is to have a popular social media account and complain online.
Other than that, I copy/pasted your post into Claude and it had some good ideas.
need to save your recovery keys (text file) before you lost the phone
Does your browser have the email password saved?
The same way you recover any other deleted data for which you didn't make a backup: you don't. You eat the loss & make new accounts. Then you remember to make and test backups for the future.
Even if they had customer support, if that customer support had a backdoor to unlock your account it would be regularly used by malicious parties to steal people's accounts & data.
They could do ID verification
Going forward, consider using an authenticator that securely syncs across multiple devices to remove the single point of failure risk.
I use Proton Authenticator now [0]
Authy used to do this, then they enshittified their app and bricked the desktop version.
[0]: https://proton.me/authenticator
Google authenticator supports syncing across multiple devices.
You were supposed to save your backup codes.