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

hey.paris

851–860 of 1001 posts

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

#851
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…

The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are, due to their being key components in money laundering and scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases where you want to give someone a gift card, you should probably j…

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

#852

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 genuinely makes me a little anxious whenever I come across people whose entire digital lives are dependent on a google/apple account. Just one misstep and it's all gone

it's really hard not to have at least one single point of failure. there's a case to be made that a single cloud account actually reduces the ways things can go wrong to just one point of failure, instead of a handful.

e.g. email on a custom domain. your domain registrar is now a spof AND your email provider for your domain is a spof. and that's just email.

There's obviously a middle ground and ways to have a strictly better personal data posture than before, but it's a multi faceted problem balancing usability, security, and resilience

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

#853

I've shared your post with a friend at Apple. In the past people have emailed Tim Cook directly - his email id is fairly easy to find. Edit: "I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success." This doesn't bode well.

Mr. Fart warned us about this: https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...

One day the engineers will try their best to fix things, but get stopped by management satisfied by high-nines logic. If anyone is falling through the cracks, it's bad customer support.

This bodes poorly indeed.

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

#854
post #665

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 have content on Google and Dropbox but I have live backups. It would be very annoying to be locked out of Google, but I would not lose any data. Anyone can have a NAS, you don't need a while basement or to live inside of one (??!?) Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your resp…

You lose the Google content , since the export is lossy (docs , sheets, slides , etc) . And most of the value is collaborative . You’ll lose anything that you contribute to that’s not in your account . You’ll lose credentials (eg sso to third parties ), messaging access .

You’ll lose indexing and metadata , like Google Drive search , Google Photos search , thumbnails .

It’s a myth to assume the value is in the backup. Most of the value you have is in the access and the application

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

#855
post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have content on Google and Dropbox but I have live backups. It would be very annoying to be locked out of Google, but I would not lose any data. Anyone can have a NAS, you don't need a while basement or to live inside of one (??!?) Yes, those companies should absolutely be forbidden to behave like this, and punished heavily when they do. But until it happens (which doesn't look like it will), your data is your resp…

Yeah, the living in a basement comment was a strange rhetorical exaggeration, as if you have to be feeding and caring for your server 24/7, haha

It means people that don’t use cloud at all can’t possibly work with anyone else

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

#856
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>macOS doesn't require this Technically true but I tried using a mac without creating an Apple ID and gave up. You can't access the store without it so you are locked out of Mac apps that aren't installed by default, and all apps that only distribute through the store now.

I've used macbooks for 15 years and have never felt the need to create an Apple ID. Maybe I've just been lucky but I have never even encountered a piece of software that didn't offer a direct download or brew installation.

Xcode.

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

#857
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying this in a derogatory way, but that pretty much means you are not a "normal" user but someone who is tech savvy enough to not rely on someone else's cloud.

And yet all it takes is buying a piece of hardware and installing an app, something that plenty of "normal" people do every day.

[flagged]

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

#858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) I once had to help a relative sue a bank who had closed his account after he refused to answer their very intrusive questions (they wanted to know details about distant relatives living in another country). They also refused to return his mone…

I'm curious how big the bank was and what country this is in? It's my understanding that banks really don't want your money once they've closed an account, they want you to take it back. Bigger banks, at least in the US, usually do this.

I am guessing it's not that they wanted the money. They thought there was something illegal happening and seized the money. I.e. not for themselves but for whatever law enforcement agency they thought might come looking for it.

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

#859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Didn't they boot him for a ToS violation? > Any lawyer can file a complaint in small claims . No, in many states _no_ lawyer can file a complaint (except his own) in small claims court.

They booted him for TOs violation, that was their action. A judge can decide whether that action was a breach of the contract, or if the contract itself is lawful.

We live in a common law country. It means that the judgement defines the law, not contracts (and not even statute, strictly)

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

#860
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I'd buy Cory Doctrow's Enshittification ebook direct from his website. Surprised to be redirected to Paypal with no other option.

Doctorow has enshittified himself.

in the end, enshitification comes for us all
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