Where do you keep your passport, if you have one? Your birth certificate? Any other important papers you have?
No, it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be well organized. Life can be chaotic. People lose stuff. We know this. Some people are so unfortunate as to lose all their stuff. Repeatedly. The level of organization people have varies extremely.
But I do expect there are hundreds of millions of typical people with houses and sufficient organization to hang onto to their important papers, and it's a good idea to add your backup codes to your other important papers. It's good advice, though not always applicable.
Absolutely. Primarily because a passport comes out of process mediated by multiple humans for whom that is their only responsibility. It's a matter of few hundred dollars and a couple weeks to replace it.
I don’t know about replacement but there are lots of delays currently for US passports:
> The processing time for routine applications is taking from 10 to 13 weeks up from six to nine weeks for those who applied before Feb. 6, the State Department said.
> Expedited processing, which costs $60 more, is taking seven to nine weeks, an increase from three to five weeks.
That's pretty absurd and definitely not how long it takes in all countries - but still probably quicker than recovering a Google account which you might not be able to do at all.
All those important papers have recovery processes. It might involve a judge or signing documents in front of stern officials or having friends and family vouch for you, but governments and financial institutions and telcos can do it because they have to. Because life happens, and we can't always control it. But for online services, with no responsibility of care, it is easier to just lose customers than provide robust processes and accept the responsibility of letting you prove who you are. You can be homeless and ID less and still bootstrap all the important stuff, except your email and all the things that require email for recovery.
This is pure speculation and not practical advice, but if you were trying to get in to your accounts from a 'starting from nothing' situation, I wonder if you could get a passport etc. and then make a GDPR request for your data from google?
Obviously you wouldn't be able to get in to your account to use google's built in tools because you wouldn't have access, but if you sent a letter to their legal team with proof of your identity then they would be obliged to process the request by law (as I understand it).
This might (should) get you your data but that data won't include your passwords which (presuming basic competence) Google doesn't store. This means that you are still locked out of many things. The data might also not be in a format useful to laymen and will probably be incomplete in some way, e.g. excluding data you had access to with that account but isn't your in Google's opinon data like shared documents.
Google would need to know that remus@gmail.com belonged to the person making the GDPR request, or it would be an attack vector. From the providers point of view, you are asking for a copy of your data and data about you, and they are not going to give out data that might be yours. Maybe if you had linked a phone number, but even that is arguable.
> Where do you keep your passport, if you have one?
Nearby, 'cause I travel semi-frequently. Otherwise, in one of few designated drawers. I only kind of care, because replacing it isn't hard, just annoying - and I don't need my passport to get a replacement one.
> Your birth certificate?
Wherever. I don't care. If I need it, I can file a form, pay a small amount, and get arbitrary number of copies from the local government branch.
> Any other important papers you have?
The only important paper I store safely is the booklet the military gave me when I turned 18, related to then obligatory military service (which I didn't go to because of minor health issues). I only worry about tracking it because I don't know the process to replace it, and the military is Serious Business - but then, I'm sure the process exists. Also, I don't worry much, because chances I'll actually need it for something are nil (if shit hits the fan so much that I'll get called into service, nobody will care about that booklet - they'll hear me speak fluent Polish, they'll give me a gun and send to the meat grinder).
Also, relevant: most of the important documents - like my national ID (replaced twice over the past few years), passport, contracts, etc. - have an expiry date on the order of 10 years or less. My Google 2FA codes already existed for more, and I expect them to be valid for the next 10 years too.
No, it's not reasonable to expect everyone to be well organized. Life can be chaotic. People lose stuff. We know this. Some people are so unfortunate as to lose all their stuff. Repeatedly. The level of organization people have varies extremely.
But I do expect there are hundreds of millions of typical people with houses and sufficient organization to hang onto to their important papers, and it's a good idea to add your backup codes to your other important papers. It's good advice, though not always applicable.