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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

#831

Post by donmcronald »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #556

The untapped answer is litigation. Call a lawyer and file against Apple. It may take several business days, and cost $$$$ but it will absolutely light a fire at Apple and get the attention of many-a-human. And if they ignore it, well, maybe a class action lawsuit awaits.

I considered this a month or two ago when Google safe browsing was erroneously putting domains self hosting Immich on the block list. My family domain got put on the block list and it took me a few hours to figure out that I needed to sign up for Google Search Console just to figure out what sub-domain got flagged.

I thought about filing a claim for enough to cover my time in small claims court, but decided not to. I didn't track my time super well because initially I though it was my fault, but, by far, the huge deterrent is the "what if".

What happens if I take Google to small claims court for damages to a domain I've been using for 20 years? I have that domain tied to a legacy Google Workspace account which was a huge mistake. It's been tied to my email for at least 15 years and, even worse, I've never owned an Android phone that hasn't been tied to that Workspace account.

I don't depend on cloud services for much, but if I want to prepare for retaliation I'd have to migrate my email somewhere else and be ready to deal with family members that have their phones connected to the Workspace account. Who's been duped into photo "backup"? Who's been duped into using Google Docs? How many Play purchases do they have? And, the big one, who's been duped into using sign-in with Google?

Google, Apple, Microsoft all make choosing what's best for the consumer very high friction compared to choices that trap users and give all the power to big tech. Even though I constantly help my family members try to understand why the don't want to get locked into those services they always get deceived into using them. The number of family members unwittingly duped into uploading all their data to OneDrive is in the range of 100%.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft need to be broken into 10 or 20 companies each. Excel should be it's own company. Phone OSes and app stores should be different companies. OneDrive should be it's own company and to compete with Dropbox with zero Windows integration. The web browsers should be separate companies. The AI divisions should be separate companies. Split them up with a wood chipper IMO.

The safe browsing scam is the biggest fraud ever because providers can't opt out of it when it "accidentally" detriments independent or self-hosted solutions.

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

#832

Post by krick »

I probably shouldn't be surprised, but… so, you are saying, Apple can remotely brick YOUR device? For any reason, let alone "because of a mistake"? Heh, and I was considering to buy my first iPhone. I mean, seriously, I can only shrug at the fact that anybody accepts these terms at all.

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

#833

Post by heavyset_go »

Aurornis wrote: post #801
viraptor wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.

I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services. Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked. These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who u…

It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.

It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

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

#834

Post by macNchz »

monerozcash wrote: post #586
macNchz wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in my circles in the US (in an area with tons of alternative options) look at me like I have two heads when I say we don’t have Prime and never shop on Amazon. For many, I think, Amazon has simply been the default option to buy anything for long enough now that it’s ingrained muscle memory.

Big part of that is just that it's insanely easy to use compared to most of the competition. But still, most people go to the shop to buy toilet paper. Once you get used to Amazon, it just saves so much time and effort. The prices aren't bad either, I just checked toilet paper on amazon.com and 30 rolls of good quality amazonbasics toilet paper costs $0.22 more than the equivalent kirkland product on costco.com You c…

I did have Prime for like 10 years, I just eventually realized that between the not-infrequent annoyances with shipping and the endless search results full of total junk and/or fake products it wasn’t as convenient as I’d thought, it more so just became my default.

There’s a corner store about a two minute walk from my front door, I’m certain their toilet paper is more expensive than Amazon’s, but I can have it right now if I want, and I’m not dealing with the stupid interface asking me if I want “18-count (345 sheet, 9 pack)” or the “XL 27 count (256 sheet, 5 pack)” version of the same product.

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

#835

Post by theelous3 »

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…

"we sell gift cards :)"

"and we ban you for buying or redeeming them"

is just top tier comedy honestly.

As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you're a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there's little reason not to.

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

#836

Post by Aurornis »

heavyset_go wrote: post #833
Aurornis wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services. Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked. These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who u…

It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle. It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.

This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well.

First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.

Second, eating M&Ms is a silly analogy because it's so easy to dismiss. Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. Using a mainstream service keeps your overall conversion rate higher and prevents losing customers who don't want to sign up for something new.

Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.

Finally, this is the key point that everyone misses when they say "Just don't use any Apple products" and other dismissive comments:

> It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational. I know it brings some people comfort to feel like they've avoided some risk they saw in headlines, but claiming that nothing is given up or that it's easier to choose an alternative is blatantly false.

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

#837

Post by Aurornis »

franga2000 wrote: post #490
Aurornis wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee You have a fee for transferring from PayPal to your bank account? It’s always been free for me, as long as I don’t opt for the instant transfer option.

Last time I had to deal with that was 8-ish years ago and there was definitely a fee. Can't check now because they blocked my account due to a failed Spotify payment and I don't care enough to deal with their phone support again to get it unblocked

I've done probably hundreds of PayPal transfers to my bank account over a couple decades.

Never once encountered a fee.

Might be related to your country's local laws?

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

#838

Post by DrammBA »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #108
firecall wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One rather counter intuitive way to “backup” your photos is to install Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone! Google and MS don’t charge as much as Apple for storage, and you probably need you need to pay beyond the free limits, but it’s not a huge expense. Once your installed Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone, just tell the apps to sync all your photos all the time! Now I appreciate that isn’t for ever…

The issue with OneDrive is that it doesn’t store metadata like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay for storage for Google Photos and iCloud. If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don’t need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly. I wouldn’t use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn’t support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything…

> It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.

What would be the egress fee to get your data back in case of disaster?

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

#839

Post by yunwal »

superkuh wrote: post #434
yunwal wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In phones you have a choice of iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). Sure, maybe some people can go back to flip phones, but I can’t without finding a new job. This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.

So keep your crappy crap phone for a job and use a real computer for your personal life.

If I get locked out of my job phone that is still devastating, but yes, that's what I do.

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

#840

Post by heavyset_go »

Aurornis wrote: post #836
heavyset_go wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle. It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.

> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle. This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well. First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the mi…

> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.

If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death. This happens with enough regularity that I know multiple people that this has happened to, and the risk is enough for me to never rely on PayPal or its partners for my income.

You seem to understand this with the following:

> Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid.

--

> Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.

I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.

> It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational.

I've lived my entire life without relying on an Apple account, and the few instances that I used one, I hit that risk myself[1] and now have an expensive paper weight instead of a tablet, and a bunch of app purchases I can never use again.

This isn't some hypothetical, it's something that's literally happened to me and people I know. The lesson I learned is not to rely on Apple or PayPal, and believe it or not, that's really, really easy to do.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252971

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