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Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#41

Post by cyral »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

I'm curious why Apple has let it get this far that court cases are underway and WaPo is writing an article about it. What's in it for Apple? Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something. And this isn't like Google or Facebook where accounts are free, preventing…

> Is there some kind of huge liability question if they ever facilitate giving access to the wrong person?

This is what I was thinking as I read the article. Imagine what will be written about them when they do give iCloud access to an impostor. Depending on what's on their account thieves could dedicate a ton of time to social engineering Apple into recovering the account. The article mentions police reports being "proof", but that doesn't seem like solid evidence considering how easy it could be to fake a police report from one of the tens of thousands of jurisdictions in the US. This is a problem for a lot of industries actually, i.e. banks and death certificates.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#42

Post by wmf »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #23
alabastervlog wrote: post #10

It took me a minute to figure out how this works, but it must have something to do with using a "lost password" email reset on the iCloud account, and having the relevant email account logged in (or saved to the password manager) on the phone itself, so that all you need is the passcode to get into the iCloud account. Something like that?

I still can't figure it out. My daughter had her iPhone stolen in L.A. — she immediately wiped it remotely. The thieves were unable to access it. I got her a new iPhone pretty fast (the budget one) and she was back in business, back in her iCloud account. (She was one of those that saw her device head to Asia. She got a handful of text messages pleading with her to remove the stolen device from her account but she ig…

You got lucky with dumb thieves.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#43

Post by anonym29 »

Trust the megacorporations.

Trust your government.

"It works well for everyone else, why are you being so weird by not doing what everyone else does?"

Grant the megacorporations control over your entire life.

Your government will protect you from the megacorporations.

"Self hosting? Open source? Linux? You're weird, just get an iPhone."

The megacorporations never make mistakes.

The government never makes mistakes either.

"What's wrong with you? Are you seriously too poor to afford an iPhone? Get a blue bubble already."

The megacorporations never lie to you, they never manipulate you.

Even if they tried, your trustworthy government would stop them.

This message brought to you by social conformity norms that are most certainly NOT subtly reinforced by the same billionaires and trillion dollar companies that benefit from them.

/s

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#44

Post by deadbabe »

mingus88 wrote: post #30
tacker2000 wrote: post #14

Why should Apple open this can of worms and give users access to locked out data. How would this process even work on a larger scale? In the end if you dont backup your data locally, then its not your data and you risk losing it. If your business shuts down because you lost your phone its your own fault for not mitigating this type of risk enough.

Have you ever tried to fully backup data from iCloud? I try to do it every month because I am that type of techie. They don’t make it easy. For photos, i have a 2TB family plan. There is no export functionality I can centrally backup my families photos and shared albums The supported way to do this is to use a Mac, force it to store all images locally in settings, then highlight all your albums and File->export This…

This isn’t that hard, you can just automate this with a script and cron job running on a cheap Mac mini.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#45

Post by leptons »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

I'm curious why Apple has let it get this far that court cases are underway and WaPo is writing an article about it. What's in it for Apple? Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something. And this isn't like Google or Facebook where accounts are free, preventing…

>People spend thousands of dollars on Apple devices

As long as the people cut off from the walled garden amount to less than a rounding error in Apple's bottom line, they simply don't care. They will only care when a judge forces them to care, as we had to find out the hard way in a class action lawsuit against Apple. We won, but they lost us as lifetime customers. My wife even owns Apple stock and refuses to buy anything else from them and warns others against it. They could have made it right for practically no cost to them, but they chose the dick move, and they were forced to pay out in the end anyway.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#46

Post by throwaway48476 »

EA-3167 wrote: post #8
throwaway48476 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A security model that the user does not understand and contains traps is not a good security model.

Is there a security model that's both highly secure, and foolproof regardless of the mental faculties of potentially billions of diverse users? I think the answer is, "Obviously not," so the real question is whether or not the necessary compromises made here represent acceptable measures.

Security requires education. A new purely mechanical lock took two weeks before it was routine.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#47

Post by monster_truck »

mingus88 wrote: post #30
tacker2000 wrote: post #14

Why should Apple open this can of worms and give users access to locked out data. How would this process even work on a larger scale? In the end if you dont backup your data locally, then its not your data and you risk losing it. If your business shuts down because you lost your phone its your own fault for not mitigating this type of risk enough.

Have you ever tried to fully backup data from iCloud? I try to do it every month because I am that type of techie. They don’t make it easy. For photos, i have a 2TB family plan. There is no export functionality I can centrally backup my families photos and shared albums The supported way to do this is to use a Mac, force it to store all images locally in settings, then highlight all your albums and File->export This…

I've found it much easier to request a copy of my data and download it all in 25gb chunks. It's still not great, the download speeds are extremely slow and they are prone to failure. For being something that I (used to) pay for, this was one of the reasons I stopped.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#48

Post by aianus »

crazygringo wrote: post #9

I'm curious why Apple has let it get this far that court cases are underway and WaPo is writing an article about it. What's in it for Apple? Surely it's easy enough to define some kind of verification process based on various pieces -- phone number, credit card, purchase receipt, etc. -- and requiring a police report to be filed or something. And this isn't like Google or Facebook where accounts are free, preventing…

They don’t want to give these powers to a large number of customer service reps who can be bribed or coerced or socially engineered into transferring accounts to bad guys.

Look what happened to the mobile carriers and sim-jacking.

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#49

Post by encom »

anonym29 wrote: post #43

Trust the megacorporations. Trust your government. "It works well for everyone else, why are you being so weird by not doing what everyone else does?" Grant the megacorporations control over your entire life. Your government will protect you from the megacorporations. "Self hosting? Open source? Linux? You're weird, just get an iPhone." The megacorporations never make mistakes. The government never makes mistakes eit…

Social Credit Score++

Re: Thieves took their iPhones. Apple won't give their digital lives back

#50

Post by 20after4 »

newsclues wrote: post #18
Hizonner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but what model would you suggest? Apple has no adequate way to actually verify who anybody is without (a) forcing them to physically visit one of a small number of offices (it can't be every store), and (b) probably charging a significant fee to cover the cost of doing real verification. And even that demands assuming that the identifying information on the account is right.

Digital identity is an essential aspect of modern life. The fact that the government doesn’t have a great standard for identity and it’s left to banks and tech companies is crazy.

Identity is a really hard problem to solve. Just about any scheme you can think of to verify identity, some smart criminal can think of a way to exploit or circumvent/abuse the system.
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