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

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

#91

Post by oarsinsync »

Hizonner wrote: post #63
oarsinsync wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. My bank is able to verify me remotely to login to their app from a new device in under 15 minutes, just with a photo of my ID card and a video of my face. And the…

Your bank verifies that against the copy of your ID that was collected in person when you opened the account (unless you're using some fly-by-night FinTech "bank", anyway). At a minimum , the bank has already collected, and checked, a bunch of other information that it can use to verify you (more than Apple can collect without mass user rebellion). It has reasonable confidence you haven't lied about that information.…

Online-only bank Chase from JPM, charges me £0, has a £10k limit on transactions without requiring further verification, and successfully verified me online in under 15 minutes, despite having never seen any of my real documents in person, despite me logging in for the first time in 2 months from a new device that they’ve never seen.

Meanwhile Apple is unable to manage to identify its own customers in its home jurisdiction.

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

#92

Post by voidspark »

eesmith wrote: post #90
voidspark wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a free service. One of them had a 2TB+ iCloud account. That has a monthly cost. Not free. The free plan only gives you 5GB storage. Apple is not an advertising company. We pay for the phone and we pay for iCloud.

Apple is too an advertising company. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/ > Oct 20, 2022 - Apple Is an Ad Company Now > There’s a side to Apple most iPhone owners don’t know. There's Apple the hardware company, the one that has spent the past several weeks showing off new phones, a more rugged Apple Watch and some confusing new iPads. Then there’s the other, quieter Apple, focused on something of a…

Should be obvious that I meant their main business and revenue stream is not ads, unlike Google. We all know that Apple sells some ads

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

#93

Post by eesmith »

voidspark wrote: post #92
eesmith wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is too an advertising company. https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/ > Oct 20, 2022 - Apple Is an Ad Company Now > There’s a side to Apple most iPhone owners don’t know. There's Apple the hardware company, the one that has spent the past several weeks showing off new phones, a more rugged Apple Watch and some confusing new iPads. Then there’s the other, quieter Apple, focused on something of a…

Should be obvious that I meant their main business and revenue stream is not ads, unlike Google. We all know that Apple sells some ads

It was not obvious. You can both pay for a service and be the product, while I read your comment as dismissing the second possibility.

FWIW, from the 2022 Wired article:

> Insider Intelligence, a market research firm, estimates that Apple brings in $4 billion a year from ads. ... Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates Apple will have a $30 billion ad business by 2026. That’s about the size of iPad sales in 2021, or a bit under half the company’s services revenue.

The growth in ad revenue is large enough that Apple's latest 10-Q highlights it: "Services net sales increased during the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same quarter in 2024 due primarily to higher net sales from advertising, the App Store and cloud services."

At what point will you consider Apple to be an advertising company? Not until ads are 50% of revenue?

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

#94

Post by newsclues »

20after4 wrote: post #50
newsclues wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh no a hard problem. Too bad we don't have smart people to solve it.

You know there are smart criminals who use fake, or fraudulent passports and travel documents? And yet we still go through the process of using them because a system with some control is better than chaos and no control.

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

#95

Post by theshrike79 »

crote wrote: post #61
duskwuff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Apple has such a process in place: https://support.apple.com/en-us/118574 (The details aren't all laid out on that web page, but Apple support may ask for information like purchase records to confirm ownership.) Wh…

I think you're jumping the gun here. An account is supposed to belong to a single person. If you are able to definitively prove that you are that person (for example, by showing up to an Apple store with your ID card), you should be able to restore access to it. An abusive partner won't have access to that. Refusing restoration when someone else has access to it is understandable, but it works the other way around as…

> An account is supposed to belong to a single person.

Supposed to yes. But in practice there are WAAY too many adults giving their kids devices without a specific child account. People have shared FB profiles ffs.

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

#96

Post by JKCalhoun »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #51
JKCalhoun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> she immediately wiped it remotely > She was one of those that saw her device head to Asia What, the guy just jumped into the Pacific and started swimming?

She watched its location using Find My on her laptop. It was last pinging her somewhere just north of Hong Kong (in fact it says: "Montery Plaza, 9 Chong Yip St, Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China").

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

#97

Post by Hizonner »

oarsinsync wrote: post #91
Hizonner wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bank verifies that against the copy of your ID that was collected in person when you opened the account (unless you're using some fly-by-night FinTech "bank", anyway). At a minimum , the bank has already collected, and checked, a bunch of other information that it can use to verify you (more than Apple can collect without mass user rebellion). It has reasonable confidence you haven't lied about that information.…

Online-only bank Chase from JPM, charges me £0, has a £10k limit on transactions without requiring further verification, and successfully verified me online in under 15 minutes, despite having never seen any of my real documents in person, despite me logging in for the first time in 2 months from a new device that they’ve never seen. Meanwhile Apple is unable to manage to identify its own customers in its home jurisd…

> charges me £0

You haven't figured out that there are hidden charges? They're not giving you an account because they love you. They're giving you an account because they're making money on your deposits and/or transactions and not passing it on to you. And the money they're making is pretty proportionate to their risks; the more money you have to lose, the more they're going to make.

Whatever revenue iCloud manages to eke out of a random iPhone is going to be far less, and far less correlated with risk. Apple has to structure the system around the user who buys zero premium services.

> has a £10k limit on transactions

So a low limit by the standards of what we're talking about here, and a nice, quantifiable, insurable amount to boot. Which, as I said before, is the most important part of the whole thing. Oh, and I suspect you'll find out that the limit magically gets lower if the money is being sent to wesellgiftcards.com or whatever.

The person featured in the sob story here claims to have lost an entire career. That's going to be worth quite a bit more than that transaction limit, but how much more is hard to say because it's unquantifiable. It is of course stupid to make that dependent on your iPhone, but Apple still has to worry about it if Apple starts trying to take on responsibility for that kind of stupidity.

> despite having never seen any of my real documents in person

You should get a more responsible bank. Although nowadays they may be able to pull, for instance, your ID pictures from government databases to compare with whatever you send them over the Internet... since they have the numbers (and maybe the authorization) to do the lookups. Unlike Apple.

> Meanwhile Apple is unable to manage to identify its own customers in its home jurisdiction.

"Home jurisdiction" is irrelevant. It's not about where your headquarters are. It's about where you operate. Whatever Apple sets up in its "home jurisdiction", it also effectively has to support throughout the world. There aren't enough phone buyers in Cupertino to support Apple's valuation.

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

#98

Post by voidspark »

eesmith wrote: post #93
voidspark wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should be obvious that I meant their main business and revenue stream is not ads, unlike Google. We all know that Apple sells some ads

It was not obvious. You can both pay for a service and be the product, while I read your comment as dismissing the second possibility. FWIW, from the 2022 Wired article: > Insider Intelligence, a market research firm, estimates that Apple brings in $4 billion a year from ads. ... Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates Apple will have a $30 billion ad business by 2026. That’s about the size of iPad sales in 2021, or a…

Just using common sense.

$4B is less than 1% of their revenue.

If they can grow their ad business from $4B to $250B (50% of revenue) then yes maybe I’ll call them an ad company, but I am talking about their reality today, and the reality of Apple for the past 50 years, not fantasy or fiction.

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

#99

Post by ghusto »

Hizonner wrote: post #7
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.

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.

> OK, but what model would you suggest?

I don't know, I'm not a multi-billion dollar multinational organisation employing some of the smartest and highest paid engineers in the world.

Off the top of my modest head though, an ID check at one of the thousands of stores they have around the world sound like it could work.

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

#100

Post by eesmith »

voidspark wrote: post #98
eesmith wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not obvious. You can both pay for a service and be the product, while I read your comment as dismissing the second possibility. FWIW, from the 2022 Wired article: > Insider Intelligence, a market research firm, estimates that Apple brings in $4 billion a year from ads. ... Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates Apple will have a $30 billion ad business by 2026. That’s about the size of iPad sales in 2021, or a…

Just using common sense. $4B is less than 1% of their revenue. If they can grow their ad business from $4B to $250B (50% of revenue) then yes maybe I’ll call them an ad company, but I am talking about their reality today, and the reality of Apple for the past 50 years, not fantasy or fiction.

I think you are using gross sales?

We can see from Apple's 2024Q4 10-Q that "Revenue" is described as "Net sales", and that Q4 had $8 billion for the IPad, so about $32 billion for the year - comparable to the prediction of "$30 billion ad business by 2026".

Total net sales in Q4 was $124 billion of which $26 billion was services (where ads and Google income are placed).

The $4 billion was from a few years ago. The actual number doesn't seem to be published, but the numbers seem more like 7-8 billion, which is about 5% of revenue, not less than 1%.

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