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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

#441

Post by kibwen »

amelius wrote: post #417
pavel_lishin wrote: post #406

> I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional…

I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe from the evil of big corporations.

If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your machine.

If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on, it's not your data.

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

#442

Post by kragen »

Probably worth reading Doctorow's "Scroogled": https://craphound.com/scroogled.html

Centralization of power in unaccountable organizations has always been a recipe for disaster.

I could suggest some slogans:

"Apple. Not even once."

"Friends don't let friends use Apple."

But I think this is a problem that merits more than slogans.

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

#444

Post by Workaccount2 »

num42 wrote: post #412

Off-topic and a stupid question: why does anything related to Apple attract so much attention on HN? As a newcomer, I assumed HN focused mostly on reverse engineering,retro computing, and deep technical topics.

Tech stopped being full of tech nerds when 10 weeks in a JavaScript boot camp and a few thousand lines of code in your personal GitHub would land you a $140k remote job.

Maybe now we will start seeing a reversion to the people in it for the passion.

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

#445

Post by bragr »

KPGv2 wrote: post #153
trinsic2 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. It's really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this to store data.

> This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. macOS doesn't require this. My Apple account has a handful of apps purchased over the years, and that's it. I could've bought them directly from the vendors, but the store makes it easier to update.

>macOS doesn't require this

Technically true but I tried using a mac without creating an Apple ID and gave up. You can't access the store without it so you are locked out of Mac apps that aren't installed by default, and all apps that only distribute through the store now.

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

#446

Post by quinncom »

jasode wrote: post #239
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…

>It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. It's also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe... If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans. - Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potenti…

I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?

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

#447

Post by a012 »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #443

Just curious if the account owner is still able to access their passkeys stored on their Apple device at the moment. Not too keen on passkeys without an easy way to backup. Same goes with sign in with Google and Apple.

Buy two Yubikeys and save your passkeys there if you would

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

#448

Post by markbnj »

num42 wrote: post #412

Off-topic and a stupid question: why does anything related to Apple attract so much attention on HN? As a newcomer, I assumed HN focused mostly on reverse engineering,retro computing, and deep technical topics.

I would not say your list is anything like complete, although those topics are often discussed here. Apple is a huge player in the general computing ecosystem, and probably a majority of front- and back-end developers these days work on macbooks, so it isn't surprising that the things they do resonate in this community.

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

#449

Post by sodafountan »

ovi256 wrote: post #418
pavel_lishin wrote: post #406

> I am not a casual user. I have literally written the book on Apple development (taking over the Learning Cocoa with Objective-C series, which Apple themselves used to write, for O’Reilly Media, and then 20+ books following that). I help run the longest-running Apple developer event not run by Apple themselves, /dev/world. I have effectively been an evangelist for this company’s technology for my entire professional…

> I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success. Ouch. If he can't get it fixed, it's scary

[flagged]

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

#450

Post by insane_dreamer »

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…

> 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.)

To me this is the biggest problem. Just like a bank can decide to close your account at any time, it's reasonable that Apple (or any business) could do the same. But they can't keep your stuff.

You can say "don't be naive and assume your cloud data is safe", but in today's world that's like saying "don't keep your money in a bank". The reason I pay for iCloud storage is because it's supposed to be safe (safer than my local HDD going bust or getting lost).

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