many horror stories of incompetence and apathy.Īccount recovery problems / account lock-outs for no sane reasons just most often get ignored unless one is paying for enterprise cloud / apps / hosting services in which case one may get some minimal help as a recurrently paying subscription customer. where one HAS paid them for a service / product and supposedly has support / warranty obligation rights. I've been on the wrong side of google account access recovery, tried all the documented steps, nothing, zero help, zero support, zero success, and it was not even a question of losing some access credential one day they just decided to tweak their algorithm in some stupid / buggy way and got locked out despite having all the access / recovery credentials I had defined and nobody trying to or succeeding to hack my account, etc.įor fun go look at the 'customer support' stories often posted about things people run into with buying / using stuff from Google Store, pixel phones, Google Fi, etc. Services that give something away for free generally have little or nothing in the way of service quality / support guarantees, and when there's a problem, nothing is often EXACTLY what you can look forward to.

Services that provide guaranteed support / service for paying clients publish SLAs and service commitments in written contract form.

I think the simpler explanation (lacking CONCRETE GUARANTEES in writing about their service commitment) is that when not clearly guaranteed, there may BE NO effective / reliable customer support / service / recovery option that will predictably / reliably work for you or anyone.

You say they're 'intentionally vague' and that seems like you've giving them the benefit of the doubt about having secret master plans designed to protect the customer in some 'security by obscurity' way.

Yubikey with google