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

hey.paris

541–550 of 1001 posts

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

#541
post #513

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 had similar trouble redeeming a gift card on Amazon. Twice. (thankfully they got resolved upon appeal). Enough that I am very wary of buying or redeeming gift cards now, especially more than one in a row. Apparently there's some sort of scam with gift cards, which must affect any platform which allows them, and legit uses often get flagged by automated systems. If they are so much trouble for Amazon/Apple I wonder…

Going through this at the moment. Was it a physical card? What evidence of purchase did they ask you to provide?

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

#542

I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out . And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaborati…

> Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure.

Well, i don't. I have my local file storage. Contacts and Calendar get synched, thats it. These get lcal backups, but aren't important so or so.

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

#543

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.

What's an iWord and why can't it be backed up?

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

#544
post #523

I back up regularly using Google Takeout and similar tools, but I don’t think it’s fair to shame this author . Even if you have backups , your recent and essential content and credentials will be locked out . 1% of your content is the most important We all depend heavily on cloud storage and sso . Everything works fine until you are locked out . And using them isn’t fully voluntary. They are necessary for collaborati…

Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP. It is totally normal in today’s world to depend on cloud services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China: no WeChat you are practically dead. Here try to join meetings without account, try to send a message on WhatsApp without account, etc… a lot can go wrong very fast. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to…

> t. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to other services ?

Your own wrongdoing. Always use a site-specific auth method, i.e. by email. And a separate email for each site.

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

#546
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me personally Immich is a non-starter because its not end-to-end encrypted.

Why would you need it to be end to end encrypted anyway? You’re running it. Set it to only upload photos when you’re on your home network and you’re fine. Or fork it and make a PR and make it e2e encrypted.

You can’t just “fork it and make a PR and make it e2e encrypted”. All the features run serverside, e2ee is fundamentally impossible because of its design, of which you seem to know fuck all.

I’m being dismissed by I run a rather large homelab and I still want my photos iCloud like, where end devices decrypt and run ML. Immich is a Google Photos clone where you give it everything and some server does all the magic.

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

#547
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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. If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o

[flagged]

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

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backblaze doesn’t erase after 30 days… I’ve had a computer be offline from it for several months and it still retained all data. And you can use the backblaze docker container to run on a NAS, much much much cheaper than B2. Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well. Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS, back up to that, and then back up th…

> It has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything that is stored on an external drive It’s actually more nuanced. It will back up files on a USB attached drive. If it doesn’t see the drive attached for 30 days, it will erase the backup. If you have your computer off for more than 30 days and you bring your computer back on and the USB drive isn’t attached when it connects to BackBlaze, it will erase it.…

> AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.

Only if you’re backing up nothing and using non-encrypted files and making sure you don’t delete anything (rsync with delete turned off). I tested this not even three months ago. I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that. No need to even trust a single provider. If you’re never changing your files AND you don’t care about encrypting them then yes GDA is fine and pretty cheap. Otherwise wasabi and backblaze get more done for less cost.

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

#549
post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot of arrogant people here who think they are safe and better than anybody and blame OP. It is totally normal in today’s world to depend on cloud services and reasonably difficult to do without it. In China: no WeChat you are practically dead. Here try to join meetings without account, try to send a message on WhatsApp without account, etc… a lot can go wrong very fast. What if you used your Apple account as SSO to…

Very true. And account integrity check pointing is stochastic and more aggressive so at any time there are people being locked out . One of 20 of your services could lock you out tomorrow and that means you’re blocked from coworkers and family

[flagged]

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

#550
Companies like apple should be liable to pay many millions in damages for this kind of shit. The people should make it hurt so much for them that they think twice before doing it without having a clear and working appeal process where you are clearly explained what happened and guided through it.
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