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so apparently if a hacker compromises your google account, they can just make it into a "child" account managed by a "parent" account they control, and this completely takes away your ability to recover the account via a backup phone number or email address or similar
(since those require "parental approval" once an account has been made into a "child" account)
this has just happened to a good friend of ours
and it's a known problem and, of course, Google do not have support personnel you can contact
so you are just totally fucking screwed
unfortunately this good friend of ours is not a tech worker and in any case not famous enough to get to the top of Hacker News, so I guess she will not be able to use the de facto Google account recovery escalation process, so she just loses access to her digital life now
@hikari is your friend in Europe? The father of a friend of mine died and she needed google to do something, apparently they have been requred by google legal to read no-reply@ google something for certain things. Also, sounds like a valid usecase for rights under the gdpr right to correct wrong data. If google doesn’t play ball, ask your data protection officer.