Account recovery is a Catch-22 that support cannot escape
Title: Account recovery is a Catch-22 that support cannot escape I lost access to my phone. To recover my Google account, Google requires verification through... my phone. To restore my phone, I need to log in to my Google account. Neither can happen without the other, and Google's recovery system has no path out of this loop. I have spent hours on the phone with support representatives who either cannot understand the circular dependency or have no tools to break it. Each call ends with instructions to use the very recovery flow that fails because it demands the device I no longer have access to. A company of Google's scale should have a human-verified identity recovery process for exactly this situation — government ID verification, security questions from account history, anything that doesn't assume the missing device is available. Instead, users are locked out of years of email, photos, and documents with no recourse. Until Google fixes this, I would caution anyone against making a Google account the single point of failure for their digital life.