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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

#721

Post by tonymet »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #530
tonymet wrote: post #492

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…

I am not depending on cloud storage at all. What do I need to upload onto some cloud? And when I need to sync between devices, or rather want to sync, then I have a Syncthing setup on my server running. No cloud. And copies on participating devices. Sure, it is not directly their fault, when they are treated badly by big tech. Though of course they could have been more careful, and rely less on big tech and cloud. We…

How do you collaborate ? Do you have friends ? A job ? I’m not being rhetorical —- it’s very rare to have friends or a job and not have some ties to the cloud. Even my tiny HOA manages its record in the cloud

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

#722

Post by cyanmagenta »

rvnx wrote: post #657
wpm wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My exact thoughts, if there is no number of email address you can call to get this sorted, that means the legal department’s number is. Even if in the T&Cs say Apple can do this, which it probably does, now they would have to prove it in front of a judge.

In… 5 years, and the prejudice won’t accumulate because your claims will still be based on 5 years ago :/

Monetary damages generally accumulate during the pendency of litigation. Also, it seems unlikely that this would take 5 years to resolve—Apple would presumably just reactivate the account and argue the case is moot now. I mean, maybe they want to establish precedent here to avoid opening the floodgates to this type of litigation, but more likely they’d just settle this one out quickly and quietly and fight the issue when they had better facts. OP’s story is pretty persuasive.

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

#723

Post by tonymet »

IndianShitbombs wrote: post #542
tonymet wrote: post #492

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.

How do you collaborate with your coworkers , customers and friends ? What industry are you in ?

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

#724

Post by sirmarksalot »

zygentoma wrote: post #615
rationalist wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a separate email address for each site is smart, but creating a separate email account for each site is going to be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts with the same phone number. (Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the damage is limited.)

Google allows email suffices a la my account+anything@gmail.com. So you can use different email addresses for different accounts while having only one Gmail account.

I tried this for a little while but quickly stopped as a critical mass of websites broke when I tried using it to sign in. Special characters in your email address is an edge case that produces inconsistent results even within a single product

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

#725

Post by tonymet »

singleshot_ wrote: post #575
tonymet wrote: post #492

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…

How precisely do you reckon a lawyer would help?

The legal Deparment runs most companies . They are the only way to get something bespoke done (like unlocking an account ). And companies are terrified of discovery.

Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims . OP has paid for a service and has a contract

TOS is binding to both parties .

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

#726

Post by haunter »

num42 wrote: post #412

Off-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.

>I assumed

You assumed wrong. Honestly that was never case, but maybe it was better 15 years ago

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

#727

Post by [deleted] »

IndianShitbombs wrote: post #544
rvnx wrote: 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…

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#728

Post by zelphirkalt »

rvnx wrote: post #598
EvanAnderson wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, as the GP said, you're not a normal person and you live in a basement. >sigh The solutions self-hosting storage for non-technical people are terrible. Presumably there's no market for selling a solution that gives individuals data sovereignty. I would guess the margin isn't there and a recurring subscription for something you own is probably unpalatable to a lot of consumers. So this is what we get.

The main side-effect is the lack of trust and integration. For example, if you self-host your email (or more realistically push it on a VPS), then the moment you want to send an e-mail you are going to be marked as spam. To register on some websites you may sometimes receive: “please use real email from gmail/outlook/etc”. When you have a business meeting with a customer: “oh just install Jitsi on your mobile phone”…

I get what you are saying, but the examples are not great:

I've rarely seen (if ever?) a website so stupid and user hostile, to claim that there are no other "real" e-mail service providers out there, other than gmail, outlook, or a maybe a few others. There are services, which reject things like tempmail, that much I have seen, definitely.

Jitsi Meet runs in the browser. Does it not on a mobile phone? Perhaps there is something to this one, if it is the case, that customers in some areas don't even own any working machines any longer and only have phones.

Train tickets, at least where I am from and living, one can always buy, by going to a service center, or online via browser. I never had to use an app to buy train tickets. Even when traveling in China, which is arguably much further in terms of digitization than Germany, I was able to buy train tickets via a website comfortably, upon which the ticket was registered to my passport.

But I get it, there can be such examples.

Though I don't think this really matches the "depend on the cloud" thing. It's more like depending on services, that make use of "the cloud", and not directly using cloud services oneself.

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

#729

Post by sph »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #444
num42 wrote: post #412

Off-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.

Tech stopped being full of tech nerds when 10 weeks in a JavaScript boot camp and a few thousand lines of code in your personal GitHub would land you a $140k remote job. Maybe now we will start seeing a reversion to the people in it for the passion.

Imagine what tech will look like when you don't even need the 10 weeks in a boot camp, just a subscription to Claude.
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