In fact to change the recovery account you will need your Owner key, an even higher level than Active! PeakD do not, AFAIK, save your keys anywhere - it is just their frontend being used to interact with the Hive blockchain. I have no issue using it for this purpose.

Another tool for changing recovery account is: https://reazuliqbal.com/HiveAccountRecovery/

To be completely independent of anyone else's code, you would need to run your own script using Python/Beem. It's something I ended up doing in order to recover my account, but it requires experience (I had help).

You could use hivesigner and do it yourself as per this post:

Read your account of losing 25BTC in 2010/11 and a few other posts on your blog...sounds like you have recovered well :D

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