Google can terminate your account with no recourse (it has no customer support to speak of) due to completely unrelated reasons, such as a chargeback on your credit card for a Google product or service.
I just did some looking, and I can’t find any examples of this, just people saying this is what happened when actually something different happened (ex). Are you sure that locking people out of their email for a chargeback is a thing?
You are right, you don’t get totally locked out in this case, my bad. Still, there are stories online of people losing access to their gmail accounts. Might not be a source of risk worth considering though.
A large fraction of the stories I’ve been able to find are people who set up 2FA without a spare and then lost it (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+account+locked+out, linked in the post). I think this is a serious risk, but it’s also pretty easy to avoid (by always having at least two, ideally three, registered security keys)
I just did some looking, and I can’t find any examples of this, just people saying this is what happened when actually something different happened (ex). Are you sure that locking people out of their email for a chargeback is a thing?
Actually, I did more looking and maybe this is a thing? https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accidentally_buying_two_google_pixels_and/
You are right, you don’t get totally locked out in this case, my bad. Still, there are stories online of people losing access to their gmail accounts. Might not be a source of risk worth considering though.
A large fraction of the stories I’ve been able to find are people who set up 2FA without a spare and then lost it (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google+account+locked+out, linked in the post). I think this is a serious risk, but it’s also pretty easy to avoid (by always having at least two, ideally three, registered security keys)