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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

#901

Post by Ylpertnodi »

griffzhowl wrote: post #762
bambax wrote: 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's a joke.

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

#903

Post by valleyer »

g947o wrote: post #584
valleyer wrote: post #12

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.

Basically, I bought a physical Apple gift card via the Apple online store, and it was never delivered. UPS tracking (on Apple's own site) showed it never left the origin. I called to get it re-shipped, and they (in so many words) accused me of fraud, because apparently the gift card had been redeemed and drained.

Obviously someone either at Apple's gift card printing contractor or at UPS snatched it.

Apple's suggested "solution" was for me to issue a chargeback on my credit card -- yes, the vendor suggesting a chargeback. I refused, because the credit card in question was my Apple Card, and I have read elsewhere that doing something like this can lead to your Apple account getting locked.

The exec escalation was the only way I got it resolved. It was Kafkaesque.

I think one major lesson to take from this (and other physical gift card vulnerabilities, like people that go and peek at the numbers on unredeemed cards in stores and then wait for them to be loaded) is: don't use physical gift cards anymore.

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

#904

Post by econ »

pests wrote: post #760
nullfield wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only “use cases” I’ve seen are discount or niche. For example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into, generally, some small enough business that these messes aren’t likely to happen, where the point of the gift is specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place that you know someone lov…

I used to buy a gift card every ~week at a local sandwich place near where I worked and ate at every day. Their deal was a free meal (sandwich, chips, drink) with a $50 gift card purchase. Then I'd just pay with the card until it ran out.

If you buy them in bulk for employees they get progressively cheaper. It also matters how many customers you can serve vs how many you have and what you spend to get one customer into your store. If you spend 500 per day to get 100 customers into your brick and mortar store you can also give/spend 500 in discounts to get 100 more. If only 60% redeems the card the other 40% is profit. ETC

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

#905

Post by fragmede »

kibwen wrote: post #441
amelius wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised that evangelists keep thinking they are safe from the evil of big corporations.

If you don't have root access to your machine, it's not your machine. If you don't have root access to the machine your data is on, it's not your data.

If you're a scientist at an institution, why would you need root on the cephs or whatever storage system?

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

#906

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

I deeply sympathise with the author.

Nevertheless, the irony of this is overwhelming: a guy who spent his life promoting a company whose model is "we deeply control the products you use" gets burned by the fact they deeply control the products he's been using.

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

#907

Post by dangus »

This is one reason I moved to a cloud photos provider (Ente) with an automated continuous export feature so that everything can go to my NAS.

Also because I know big tech has no real customer support.

It’s no comfort to OP though and I feel very sorry for them.

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

#908

Post by econ »

igor47 wrote: post #811
Aurornis wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News headlines about bad things happening in big cities and they've concluded those bad things are happening all the time. So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn u…

Huh you got me with this analogy. On the other hand, can't this be said about any bad thing? Few bad things are always bad. A few examples: * My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I own guns and nobody's died yet * My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they bite sometimes * My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because he's…

By using a service you also chose to support it.

This is how one should make the choices.

You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep.

When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere.

It's how we are suppose to keep people honest.

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

#909

Post by ranger_danger »

dotancohen wrote: post #737
ho_schi wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Microsoft. Stay as far away from BigIT as you can. Linux or BSD are there for many good reasons. This is another one.

Other than Android, what viable Linux options exist for mobile devices?

What is your definition of viable in this context?

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

#910

Post by bambax »

tonymet wrote: post #854
bambax wrote: 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…

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…

I don't have anything serious on Google drive, just some files I share with third parties that primarily exist on my network; and certainly no photos. Photos are on my NAS which is backed up on several disks; I publish them on a small app that I built, self-hosted (after years with Smugmug I left them two years ago).

Most accounts with third parties use domains I own that are not on Google in any way. Some still use a gmail address and I need to migrate those. But nothing essential.

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