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Never trust Google on anything mission-critical, always have an emergency plan in mind and backup everything from their services. Getting locked out is as easy as changing the country and finding out the "change country" menus on your google pixel phone inside the play store are simply non-functional decoys, pressing confirm buttons will just be silently doing nothing without any error and if you file a support ticket there will be no reply.

Yes, 100%, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Here's how I got over the migration hump: I span up my personal email (cloudflare and fastmail, nothing fancy) and then every time google did something evil I channeled my frustration into migrating an account or two over to the new email. After about two years, I was done.

It feels really good to have a meaningful (if tiny and personally-scoped) response when when a megacorp does evil with impunity.

Here's what happened to the Sidewalk Labs building: https://www.blogto.com/city/2021/10/torontos-bright-hope-inn...

the page is now some weird 404

Needs (2018)

Insanity: Locked Out (2020)