If you’ve been following along, you might have noticed that many 2FA methods rely on a smartphone.

Whether a code is texted to us, or we use an app like Google Authenticator, we need our smartphones.

But what happens if we lost our phones? Could we be locked out of our accounts?

While this could happen to someone using 2FA, not using 2FA is far riskier. Without 2FA, a hacker only has to steal your password. 

Each service has different ways of recovering your account. To keep things simple, we’re going to use Gmail as an example.