Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help

Good to know. They certainly don't care for emails about my dead AirPods Max (flex cable designed to fail after enough rotations back and forth)

> which shows some questionable judgment

Convenience is a hell of a drug.

My 2 cents:

There was a time when I accidentally deleted some photos of which I had only one copy. I blamed myself for being stupid not having a copy but also money was tight for additional drives.

Then there is this: depending on a service provider and then blaming them for something like this. The problem is that now you are losing trust in service providers (of which there should be little to begin with) and on top of that you are also blaming yourself for depending on them. However you have to create a trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.

MacOS and Windows / Google with always logged in systems that lock you out completely at their will is an example of how your devices are not owned by you to begin with and then trusting them with your data as well means your digital life is basically owned by them completely.

Now imagine that there are no humans to solve this but endless LLM bots that respond with generic responses because the LLM has never seen a problem like this. I want to point out that owning your data and hardware is really important if you depend on it and your business especially does.

The broken logic is that it will expose why the account was flagged, and thus, allow 'bad actors' to better navigate and bypass such flags.

Of course, this is absolutely silly and beyond absurd, for bad actors share information of forums, can deduce fairly easily, and even have help from people on staff.

Such actors typically know about detection and flagging methods within days of implementation. There's literally zero benefit to secrecy. None. Security through obscurity can be a beneficial additional layer, but it simply never helps here.

We really should pass a law requiring full disclosure of the precise method of banning. I can even see a 'trial' period, where accounts activated (and used!) for 3 months receive this benefit, but new accounts, or new + dormant accounts do not.

This should likely be coupled with mandated full refunds of phones or computers, as an example.

Note that this isn't a 'free' account we're talking about here. An Apple account, or a Google account is required to use an iphone or pixel in its default config, and all the features it entails. These accounts aren't free, they're part of purchase cost, and core-required.

(Even if it's a, for example, Samsung phone? It comes pre-installed, with uninstallable Google Play cruft, as part of an agreement with Samsung. Same conditions need apply here)

I self host an Immich [1] instance to backup photos on my iPhone. It’s OSS and has a level of polish I’ve rarely seen in free software. Really, it’s shockingly good. The iOS app whisks my photo off to my home server several times per day.

What I’m not sure about is how to backup things like iMessages, Notes, and my Contacts. Every time I’ve looked, it appears the only options are random GitHub scripts that have reverse engineered the iMessage database.

1. https://immich.app/