alt Hacker NewsI have the same issue. At the time I created the account that I'm locked out of, Google said nothing about these "recovery" email addresses as 2FA. Years passed without any notice that maybe they were going to lock me out of an account I have the password for. No notice that I had better have access to that "recovery" email address that I hadn't bothered to keep up to date because I never thought I'd need to "recover" the account from Google. (In my case, it's an old .edu email address that I was promised "for life".)
If Google wanted to lock me out of my account for my own good until I enabled 2FA, fine. But as GP stated, they abused the recovery email addresses to force 2FA on people and ended up locking some people out of their accounts.
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> old .edu email address that I was promised "for life"
Best treat all org controlled email address as temporary.
> No notice that I had better have access to that "recovery" email address that I hadn't bothered to keep up to date
The rest of your complaints make sense but this one is bizarre. It's a recovery email, isn't having access to it the entire point? Like what else did you think it was supposed to be there for beside being accessible?
Google clearly misused it for something else, and you have a strong argument they shouldn't have. This one sentence just needlessly weakens the argument.