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

hey.paris

941–950 of 1001 posts

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

#941
About 11 months ago, this happened to my Apple account that I’ve used for over two decades, with purchases worth probably tens of thousands.

Apple Support told me these “decisions are taken in a higher department” and escalated me to tier 2, who insisted: “we’ve determined your account doesn’t meet the conditions to enable it.” Their suggestion was for me to create a new Apple account.

Then, three days later, my account was suddenly re-enabled; and it has worked perfectly ever since, as if nothing happened.

I hadn’t used gift cards in nearly a decade, so my guess (and this is pure speculation) is there must be other flags affecting older accounts.

The whole episode was utterly kafkaesque, and it’s made me much more cautious about relying too heavily on the whims of our private megacorp gatekeepers.

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

#942
post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something. Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward. The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people. Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare…

My model for this is to have one nerd per group of people, who runs digital infra for the community. I'm that nerd for my friends, and run a bunch of self-hosted services that people I personally know use. Some of them even pitch in to help pay for the hosting costs (though not my time).

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

#943

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad-faith comparison, and it's making me wonder how old you are if you're conflating iCloud lockout with sexual assault. Apple's EULA, which the OP agreed to, gives them the right to suspend services for whatever reason they want. You're only allowed to use the service by offering consent to be removed, thousands of services work that way. OSS, and the fact that it doesn't have this weakness, is orthogonal t…

> That's a bad-faith comparison, and it's making me wonder how old you are if you're conflating iCloud lockout with sexual assault. It's called exaggeration, and it was a reply to a smug comment. If you want apples to apples: imagine you have a reputable locker service containing your money, important documents and potentially photos spanning decades . *Billions* use it with success, it's a trillion dollar company th…

> And this is not normal,

It's extremely normal. Click on HN's own legal agreement and see for yourself: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/

  You acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to terminate accounts that are inactive for an extended period of time. You further acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to change these general practices and limits at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice.
> No wonder OSS is losing when this is a hill you're willing to die on.

Again; "losing" is us-vs-them language that you know misrepresents OSS' goal. There is no way to create a OSS alternative to Apple ID, or Hacker News. There's frankly not any good-faith legislation that would prevent TOS and EULA agreements. This is the uncomfortable reality of our tech-encumbered world.

You want regulation? Regulate who gets your money. Vote with your dollar, and stop pretending to be a victim.

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

#944
post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s helpful context . How do you collaborate ? For example when a customer or partner sends a Google Drive / Dropbox folder for you to contribute to ?

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

#945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you . I feel like many are reaching to take offense to a common idiom

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

#946
post #743
post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's an iWord and why can't it be backed up?

Nobody said iWord.

My apologies, I see I've misread it. Still don't know what iWork is. Surely what the question referred to was obvious

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

#948
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the average person, including buying apps, this simply isn't a reality. And Google will now be throwing up massive "OMG! You're going to install an app that isn't from the Play Store?!" warnings to anyone that tries, including requiring some degree of technical skill to do so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908938 You can nitpick this, but the truth is my comments are about the average user, and from that…

The AOSP exists. You're just wrong, regardless of what arbitrary goalpost the average person considers accessible.

From my post:

An Apple account, or a Google account is required to use an iphone or pixel in its default config, and all the features it entails.

Are you suggesting Google is selling Pixels with pure AOSP? Context counts.

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

#949
post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? I am looking for a way out. I kind of self hosted for decades on a virtual server until I couldn’t keep up with it. So much stuff broke something in the stack, bringing the server down. Often, I had to initiate a full lock down on everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two.

I don't know exactly what you are looking for. But dropbox for cloud storage. Proton for email. There are options around.

[deleted]

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

#950
post #948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AOSP exists. You're just wrong, regardless of what arbitrary goalpost the average person considers accessible.

From my post: An Apple account, or a Google account is required to use an iphone or pixel in its default config, and all the features it entails. Are you suggesting Google is selling Pixels with pure AOSP? Context counts.

>> regardless of what arbitrary goalpost the average person considers accessible.
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