You’ve misunderstood the problem. Backup codes wouldn’t help here, and the person I was referring to had their 2FA to hand. Forgetting a password is unrecover

You’ve misunderstood the problem. Backup codes wouldn’t help here, and the person I was referring to had their 2FA to hand. Forgetting a password is unrecoverable on gmail - they even had recovery options on the account (secondary email and phone), but the recovery form never asked for that information so it could never be used (it insisted on the previous password). As no member of staff has access to prompt the system to offer a different one of the specified recovery options, the account is permanently frozen to this user (but not potentially to an attacker in the future, assuming that other information could be obtained somehow). Helping the elderly is hard, but Google’s system is horrifically dangerous to people in ways even Google aren’t aware of. This was an elderly gentleman, not well versed in computers, but all the savviness in the world couldn’t have helped him. He was forced to just walk away and hope for the best. Holiday snaps, photos of grandkids, personal files - all permanently retained by Google but locked out of his reach forever.