Live data from Hacker News

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

hey.paris

581–590 of 1001 posts

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

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I meant a $1 a month per TB for AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive That was my bad.

I am definitely a fan of B2.

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

#582
I had this happen to me once while traveling, and then by random chance I ran into a former Apple Store employee at a hostel.

She told me to email Tim Cook directly (his email is entirely guessable).

I did this and within a day or two my access was restored.

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

#583

> 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 went to Uni with this person (though I doubt they remember me.) They have a very high reputation. If anyone should be able to resolve this, it’s them — that they can’t, and they have to go public, is absolutely terrifying and should make Apple execs pay attention.

I mean that. Exec level. This story and that this specific person cannot get it fixed indicates absolute failure.

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

#584

Send this in an e-mail to tcook@apple.com. He has a team that reads for stuff like this and can magically fix issues. I've had to do it before, also for a gift-card-related problem (different from yours), and I was contacted by a member of the Apple executive escalations team a couple days later.

Care you write it down somewhere and share it?

I imagine it could be helpful to other people in the same situation.

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

#585
post #195

I treat apple ID and google ID like throwaway accounts. I would never trust anything valuable to either. The problem is that it is very hard for "usual people" to do that. I will also never have an electronic ID. We (Switzerland) were dumb enough to vote yes for it but we are giving away our freedoms eventually. We need regulations to ensure vendor cannot lock in users and cannot threaten them. Everything should work…

> The problem is that it is very hard for "usual people" to do that.

Exactly, for all the victim blaming in other comments, try to explain 3-2-1 backup to non-technical people and you'll be met with glazed eyes.

Sadly I think it's going to take more people losing their irreplaceable data and for the network effect of having it happen to someone close to actually see any change.

There's a surge of people losing their Google accounts with hackers abusing parental controls at the moment, although I suspect a lot of those people will just move to Microsoft or Apple thinking they're safer until they get burnt there too.

As more non-deterministic AI is built into abuse systems it's inevitable that there'll be more false positives, couple that with impossible to access human support to override the decisions, it's a risky time to trust your irreplaceable data with anyone but yourself.

You could do everything right and still get locked out.

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

#586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in the US? I'm just always a little surprised to read things like "i couldn't live without Amazon," and i wonder if there are no other alternatives for two day shipping on other countries or what it is that keeps people stuck on Amazon instead of using other next-day deliveries

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 can order almost everything you need in the same app, whenever you feel like it. Just a couple of clicks, no need to fill in delivery information or anything.

The only part where YMMV is receiving the parcels obviously.

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

#587
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…

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?

I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself?

I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.

A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card.

Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access.

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

#588

You may want to consider filling a small claims lawsuit against Apple for the maximum amount of damages your state permits in small claims. It's not really about winning the claim. It's about getting them to acknowledge you and hopefully resolve it before the court case comes up. That is, you want them to "settle" by restoring your account. IANAL and YMMV.

The OP is in Australia, but I'd like to add some advice which would apply in the US: Apple is one of the few organizations which does not use an arbitration clause, which means suing in court really is an option.

(With the exception of some services like their credit card, but you can opt out of that more easily than any other arbitration clause I've seen.)

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

#589

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…

[deleted]

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

#590
hopefully he’ll get resolution by bringing his case to the “media”. Still, for someone who heavily presents the argument that he’s a professional writer and even says “I am asking for a human at Apple to review this case.” , I find it odd that he tries to make his case via an obviously ai-written post.

I mean, isn't writing what you said you do for a living?

Post reply on HN