alt Hacker News> You have to consider that the user base of Google accounts is in the billions.
Basing your security decisions on "it'll never happen to me" because there are billions of other users who will get burnt first is not a wise strategy either.
Why take the chance when there are so many other alternatives that let you own your vault or at least companies that still have some semblance of a support team.
Losing a decade of my Google Maps Timeline data even with backups enabled made me realise I may not be lucky enough to win the lottery but I am lucky enough for Google to pick little old me, hidden in the billions, to lose my data.
> Basing your security decisions on "it'll never happen to me" because there are billions of other users who will get burnt first
That's not my argument. My argument is that your evidence that Google is uniquely bad at locking people out of their accounts is not good evidence. A few stories in the news represents a beyond negligible fraction of billions of user accounts.