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

hey.paris

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

#211

Post by thelittleone »

cthalupa wrote: post #148
inkyoto wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civil tribunals in Australia (an equivalent of small claim courts in other countries) do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead. In fact, the NSW Civil Administrative Tribunal explicitly requires the Tribunal’s explicit permission for a person to be represented by somebody else, including a lawyer. But tribunal's decision is binding on the commercial entity, should it…

> do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead. Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to represent the corporation besides a lawyer? In the US, some states explicitly do not allow a lawyer and require a different officer of the company represent them, but plenty do allow lawyers. If Paris is taking Apple to the tribunal, there's no single human equivalent to Paris…

You also get things like Stripe with mandatory arbitration. The arbitrator is chosen by Stripe. Naturally arbitrator wants to keep Stripe as a client.

Stripe terms allow them to hold the funds until 'investigation' is concluded but while held, they have the right to invest the funds and keep the profit.

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

#212

Post by stavros »

pflenker wrote: post #209
stavros wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make more sense to stop offering gift cards, which make zero financial sense for the consumer, but why stop offering a lucrative product that people buy because they're bad at logic, when you can just shut down accounts and greatly inconvenience people at no cost to you?

Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.

Seems like restricting their purchase to companies would be an easy way to prevent fraud.

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

#213

Post by pflenker »

x3sphere wrote: post #32

It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…

I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.

At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult.

To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry solutions are … AI powered.

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

#214

Post by acron0 »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #67
compounding_it wrote: post #55

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 to…

I think this argument conflates “what’s possible” with “what’s reasonable”. In a complex modern society, we can’t all be expected to have backup plans to the Nth degree. Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter/battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable. It’s why we have regulations and ombudsmans for healthcar…

I actually really like the idea of a Digital Services Provider Ombudsman, who you can go to if you feel like you've been wronged by a big tech corp. They have a "way in" that consumers potentially don't, and they have the capacity to levy fines in certain circumstances. I love this! What's preventing this from happening, other than no governmental pressure to make it happen? I might write to my MP...

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

#215

Post by left-struck »

knallfrosch wrote: post #130
st3fan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great victim blaming there buddy.

read the TOS before agreeing

Let’s be real, the number of people who read it approaches zero.

Not only does no one read it but it seems like they are intentionally designed to be difficult to read.

They are written by lawyers for lawyers, not for common people to read.

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

#216

Post by hagbard_c »

While I can't help with extricating your data from the fruit factory's claws I do have a suggestion what to do next: get a 10-foot or 3 m pole and use it to distance yourself from them in the future. Self-host your data if possible, find a friend you trust who already self-hosts and see if you can hitch a ride, use some commercial service if necessary but don't allow yourself to get trapped within an 'ecosystem' again. If a company makes it extra hard to use things outside of their own control you should understand that they're not doing this for their users but to remain in control and maximise their chances of extracting as much from their captives as possible.

Don´t check in to Hotel Cupertino or soon you'll be singing along:

   Mirrors on the ceiling
   The pink champagne on ice, and she said
   "We are all just prisoners here
   Of our own device"
   And in the master's chambers
   They gathered for the feast
   They stab it with their steely knives
   But they just can't kill the beast

   Last thing I remember, I was
   Running for the door
   I had to find the passage back
   To the place I was before
   "Relax," said the night man
   "We are programmed to receive
   You can check out any time you like
   But you can never leave"

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

#217

Post by noman-land »

parisidau wrote: post #119
reactordev wrote: post #82

[flagged]

I have spoken verbally to multiple members of Apple's support teams. Apologies if that was unclear. I didn't record this calls, as they did not permit me to.

You don't need their permission to record the call if they are recording the call already.

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

#218

Post by ColinWright »

I used to have an eBay account, and at some point, despite not having used it for a year or so, I got an email saying I was permanently banned from eBay.

No appeal, no reasons given, no possible way to create another account.

Just. Banned.

The companies need to be big enough to provide the amazing services they do, but once they are large enough they will never care about individuals.

My internal model of large companies is that they are intelligent, psychopathic aliens. The people in them are like cells in our body, important for the function, but with no agency, and they are not who you are dealing with.

You're dealing with the company, and it's an inhuman, psychopathic alien.

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

#219

Post by subscribed »

userbinator wrote: post #166
christoph wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we must have passed peak Apple this week or something… I’ve had Clone Hero running badly on an ancient MacBook for my drums, so I decided to swap it out for an M1 Mini that was collecting dust on a shelf. I did a full erase, but I couldn’t get past its activation lock. At all. This is a piece of hardware I purchased on my credit card, for my company, (luckily) linked to a phone number I control and an email a…

Not sure if the Chinese have figured out a way for the newer ARM-based ones yet (I realise it's already been several years since the M1 was released...) but I believe most of the older x86 ones have been cracked. I've unlocked some old Thinkpads that were similarly left locked with a BIOS password by departed employees, officially not possible, but actually possible if you reflash the BIOS and EC ROMs.

Thanks, that gives me hope - my SO bricked their Thinkpad by forcibly powering it off in the midst of the firmware upgrade of all things. Don't ask.

I was looking for the flashing hardware around here, but i should probably peek on AliExpress :)

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

#220

Post by xigoi »

parisidau wrote: post #3
iamnothere wrote: post #2

This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when th…

I do have backups of most data, including photos, but there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents, and things like that. I can rebuild from it, but it's still a shitshow and my very expensive devices are bricked.

> there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents

If they’re shared, surely someone else can still access them?

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