That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware.
"Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".
That's a great counterpoint that's been brought up many times before in this type of discussion. My response to that is this.
1) A genuine effort here to avoid this moral hazard might be to have a policy to refund all/most of the fee paid if the user was found to have done nothing wrong, as well as some transparency in the overall process (publish some sort of stats of their customer service efforts) to keep some kind of public view on the situation.
2) Even if Google does essentially "extort" some people, I think the downside of maybe having to pay a fee needlessly is worth the upside of having some actual recourse possible in the event of a real emergency. Again, businesses die and people lose their jobs when Google messes up. Having a flawed recourse would be a better state of affairs than no recourse at all.
That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware.
"Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".