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Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#452If I were the person at Apple in charge of this kind of matter, I would ignore this case, just as I do for other regular people. Everyone should be equally not cared for by Apple. That's how Apple sucks in a way I can accept myself still using their product.
Agreed.
If the only way to get your digital property back is a public plea to your Lord, that's called feudalism. Everyone should be treated fairly, not only those who can get their public pleas heard.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#453Just 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.
Do Yubikeys even work with iPhone? Besides, if the account is locked, how would that help? The issue isn't a forgotten passcode or passkey.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#454Perhaps the most annoying thing about this, certainly after getting traction on HN, is that his account will be reinstated....
...and then nothing. No sorry, no "here's what went wrong", no blog post to address the angry masses, no recognition, reconciliation, or reformation. Just things working again and silence.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#455It'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 definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset. I've been reading about Lovecraft's Old Ones. Apparently they have no ill will towards humans. They just sometimes cause harm without realizing it, while going about their business.
I watched an interview with Elon Musk a few years ago (circa 2018?). I'm no fan of him but he was asked about AGI and he kinda just said matter of factly, AI can view humanity as we view anthills. We don't really care about anthills, but if they're in the way of us building a neighborhood in an area then goodbye anthill.
I'm not sure if I like that take because of how horrifying it is, but I found it very interesting that harm can be caused so nonchalantly by more powerful entities, since humans already view themselves as the most powerful entity.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#456Off-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.
HN hasn't focused on those topics in a long time, they rarely are on the front page. Skip the top 20 articles and you'll start to see some interesting content instead of all the VC & AI drivel.
Hackaday is a content aggregator site that usually has more content on these topics - https://hackaday.com
Or there are still some good old blogs out there with RSS feeds http://www.righto.com/ http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/ https://blog.ret2.io/
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#457Earlier 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…
Why does Apple sell giftcards?
Some cultures stigmatize gifting money, yet gifting corporate scrip is fine.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#458This is horrible and a big reason why I refuse to go “all in” on Apple, Google, or Microsoft (among other reasons). Apple is the one I’m closest to given my hardware, though. Given how invested you are in the Apple ecosystem I can’t fathom why you would go get an Apple Gift Card from a store to do this kind of transaction, though. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to do it that way.
Yeah it seems odd, and if Apple won't tell him or do anything, it might be because they can't: such as circumstances of an active police investigation.
We are obviously not going to get a fuller idea about this situation from a blog post, and while I won't assume that the author has done anything wrong, there have been similar stories in the past where the affected individual was deliberately withholding the whole, much more illegal, story.
Presuming his innocence: What could have happened here is that the gift card he's purchased has been marked as part of a scam operation. Apple gift cards are frequently used for "tax bill" and "police fine" scams in Australia (where they are sold there is often signage informing people of that.) So potentially this person is accidentally roped into that.
Also it's not entirely unheard of to purchase gift cards for long-time users (who would normally just use their linked credit card), as the cards are often sold in the retail space with a 10% discount, or can be redeemed as rewards through points/loyalty schemes.
With all that said, at this point if he's not getting anywhere, he should approach a lawyer, as they'd be able to petition on his behalf (whether that is to Apple or to the state of Tasmania.)
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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]
If he succeeds, perhaps you shouldn't care. If he fails, you should care, because that means that the average person will certainly fail. They will lose the cancer test results on their iPhone, the job they use the iPhone for, possibly their home, the copies of their birth certificate on their iPhone, and the friends they could crash with but whose phone numbers they've forgotten because they only communicate with them through iMessage.