Man locked out of Google Drive and loses 9 year old photos after SIM Swap attack

What is wild to me is that Google has developed such a reputation for being completely unreachable for real support, that in an article like this, it only speaks of the cell phone carrier's fault. It doesn't even bothering mentioning Google!

It is simply taken for granted that if you lose access to your Google account, you are completely out of luck because there is simply no way to reach anyone there who will be able to help you.

There was an HN thread within the last few days that talked about this very thing. [1]

Google, believe it or not, is a real company with real people who work there. Those people build the products and market to the end user that they can entrust their lifetime of photos to Google's custody, but when something goes wrong, there is often nothing that can be done. Why? Because those same humans have made it so that they cannot be reached, do not have to care about your problems, and do not have to ever deal with any level of accountability for the real human distress they have caused by building systems in a way that permits a user to be locked out without recourse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694

> Because those same humans have made it so that they cannot be reached, do not have to care about your problems, and do not have to ever deal with any level of accountability for the real human distress they have caused by building systems in a way that permits a user to be locked out without recourse.

As a former Googler: no, it's because Google policy forbids employees from helping others, if it's not going through proper customer support channels. For privacy and privacy liability reasons. Yeah, it sucks when a friend asks you to look into something and the only thing you can do without risk getting fired is saying "talk to customer support."