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 so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.

It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.

After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer

I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion.

Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things

That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I'd be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.

I am surprised that with such a pedigree, the author doesn't already have contacts at Apple they could reach out to for that personal touch.

There was a time when I accidentally deleted some photos of which I had only one copy. I blamed myself for being stupid not having a copy but also money was tight for additional drives.

Then there is this: depending on a service provider and then blaming them for something like this. The problem is that now you are losing trust in service providers (of which there should be little to begin with) and on top of that you are also blaming yourself for depending on them. However you have to create a trust model where your fault allows you to have a service helping you with it while a fault at the service provider will allow you to restore data from your end too, getting the best of both worlds.

MacOS and Windows / Google with always logged in systems that lock you out completely at their will is an example of how your devices are not owned by you to begin with and then trusting them with your data as well means your digital life is basically owned by them completely.

Now imagine that there are no humans to solve this but endless LLM bots that respond with generic responses because the LLM has never seen a problem like this. I want to point out that owning your data and hardware is really important if you depend on it and your business especially does.

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 collaboration . You end up using what your team uses .

You can try to be that “own cloud” snob but it only works if you live in a basement

Every normal person has content in Google , iCloud , OneDrive , Dropbox and maybe more. That’s 4+ single points of failure

You’re just not imaginative enough if you think you’re safe .

OPs only recourse is an insider or a lawyer

[Quote]

Yes they do still get activated at the checkout. But when you go to redeem, the code is missing the last digit or two so it doesn't work. People take the unactivated gift card, tamper with it to get inside carefully so it's not detectable, scratch and get the code, remove the last digit or two, replace the scratch off layer, put the unactivated gift card back on the shelf. Then after you activate the gift card at the checkout, they redeem it.

[/Quote]

From this discussion

https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/937339

ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission): The primary enforcer of gift card laws, ensuring businesses comply with the three-year minimum expiry, clear terms, and fair practices.

You don't have to self-host everything in your basement, and you don't have to hand your entire digital life to Google or Apple either. Mail, CalDAV/CardDAV, Immich, Nextcloud, OpenCloud, OpenTalk, web hosting, Kubernetes, simple VMs.. whatever ... fully managed, run by local or independent providers or by the company behind projects, without Big Tech lock-in. If chosen wisely, you can migrate, take over, or bring it in-house when you want. Just spend a few bucks and do some company research. Same as you would when choosing craftsmen, lawyers or something else.

For example, that's actually how we operate as a company for some of our customers and even a few single persons: we provide SaaS AND setup documentation. Customers can transparently take over at any time. We even help separate domains, credentials, and administration from us. Convenience without captivity. I am sure there are hundreds of shops like ours, providing comparable services for people in their wider neighborhood.

It's hard to believe EU governments are actually considering mandating iOS and Android as gateways to access government services. It's a level of ignorance that's unfathomable.

This story is also exactly why I invest precious time running a Linux machine in the basement that rclones my cloud drives locally, as well as having full local copies of my webmail contents.

How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what's the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..

I will also never have an electronic ID. We (Switzerland) were dumb enough to vote yes for it but we are giving away our freedoms eventually.

We need regulations to ensure vendor cannot lock in users and cannot threaten them. Everything should work like if you have your own domain and use email. If your provider go nuts, move your hosting and change your MX and point your local copy to it.

This should not be reserved to some nerd like me, it should be an universal right.

It is already late, but it can be reversed. We need for more sotires like this one to errupt, so people understand.

2. Last time there was a post where this happened to someone, I looked into what you can do if you're locked out of your Apple ID or Google Account.

I know people will say "just self host", but all of the self-hosting solutions are not friendly to families or non-tech people. Telling my extended family to tailscale into my server to look at family photos from vacation is a total non-starter. All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with devices.

That said, there are straightforward options to deal with this (at least the data part), if you plan ahead. The high level strategy is to setup backups that let you get _a copy_ of your data not tied to any login you don't control. It's a bummer to have to go through these hoops, but again pragmatically, I'm stuck using these services to participate in modern life.

For Google Drive, you can rclone your data to a computer of your choice to get a copy of your data not tied to Google Account. It will even convert G-Suite files to Microsoft Office format, so you have a copy of the data offline.

For Google Photos, I'm not aware of a great way to get the data - rclone only gets low quality copies of photos. I'm an Apple user, so I didn't dive too deep here, perhaps the HN hivemind knows.

For iCloud and Apple Photos, you have a lot of options. You can use Parachute backup or the PhotoSync App to get a copy of your data not tied to your Apple ID. If you have a mac, you can also setup your mac to download everything offline, and do time machine backups - they are not tied to your Apple ID.

I will also add Synology NASes have a super, super easy to setup way to do all of this stuff (HyperBackup plus Synology Photos app) that's borderline worth the cost of admission on it's own, even with Synology's recent turn to the dark side. If you have non-technical family, you should strongly consider pointing them in this direction, if you can use a smartphone you can probably get this working.

I can understand this happening if it was a freshly created account topped up with a sus gift card but it’s unacceptable that the first action is to completely block an account with history.

Even more concerning is the nonchalant support response to “go create a new one” with emojis. C’mon Apple — this is just a terrible way to respond to this situation.

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.

It's not really about winning the claim. It's about getting them to acknowledge you and hopefully resolve it before the court case comes up. That is, you want them to "settle" by restoring your account.

IANAL and YMMV.

You should approach a lawyer to petition Apple and the Tasmanian police on your behalf.

Given how invested you are in the Apple ecosystem I can’t fathom why you would go get an Apple Gift Card from a store to do this kind of transaction, though. It wouldn’t even cross my mind to do it that way.

One day he was bricked from his accounts because he ran afoul of Apple’s ToS. The problem then was I couldn’t feel sure that he hadn’t actually done something which a reasonable person would say should result in account closure.

Paris’s case is much more strange, because it feels more likely to be a false-positive.

There is no legal right to have an account with Apple or Google, and I’m not sure I want there to be. But so much of our lives are built on these services and these stories erode our trust that the services themselves can handle the responsibility of adjudicating acceptable use. We need our digital accounts to be robust in the very long-term, even when there are bad actors who want to do all manner of bad things. And we need to feel confident that a properly empowered human reviewed the case and can articulate the reasons for a ban. When we charge a person with a crime, we tell them what the crime was and give them due process to fight it. I’m not sure I want the courts to decide these questions but we need some more due process when it comes to account termination.

Why in the world do we let tech companies adjudicate our service relations?

I'm curious about the apple's passwords app. Where you able to use it? What about passkeys?

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.

How many account lockouts must occur before we accept that digital life built on permission rather than ownership is inherently fragile?

Slightly different issue involving the Apple credit card, but it’s just as insane that there’s no separation between the different parts of Apple.

For that reason I will never have an Apple Card, and I guess I won’t be redeeming Apple gift cards with my Apple ID.

If this situation somehow escalates until they have to take action, they will already have made so much money that is not a blip.

They don’t care. You as an individual customer means absolutely nothing.

https://skogsbrus.xyz/dont-put-all-your-apples-in-one-basket...

This does not seem strange to me and could be a course of action. When I moved my domains off Google because of this type of "banned without recourse" possibility, I found a registrar that had a physical address, small office, and people listed on the company website (porkbun) so in the worse case I could fly to the office and straighten things out.

No mention of even going to an Apple store. Maybe the nearest one is very far away from him?

She told me to email Tim Cook directly (his email is entirely guessable).

I did this and within a day or two my access was restored.

Since then I have been removing myself from the ecosystem - my email is from hey, file sync on Dropbox, obsidian for notes, whatsapp for messages. Sometimes it doesn’t feel as joined up, mostly it is way better.

Moved to framework computers + omarchy last month and am not looking back.

https://www.accc.gov.au/

And there are also separate bodies for each state.

Any company or entity ought not to be allowed to wield power over our lives, like locking someone out arbitrarily, let alone via some asinine, half-baked algorithm.

If you are buying large amounts of gift cards and then redeeming them, it is critical that your purchasing patterns do not look suspicious, such as buying more things that a normal user might need: multiple iphone wallets, multiple iPhones, or similar items.

Time to say bye to Apple and Google for good...

Break that discipline and you are exposing yourself to this danger.

I've started on my de-appleification plan in earnest this year:

https://blog.majid.info/quit-apple/

The thing is, that account was just used for dev. things for the US company, which builds/sells software for the US federal government (among the other US entities).

It would not be very wise to do fraud.

That‘s always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and should be illegal

No appeal, no reasons given, no possible way to create another account.

Just. Banned.

The companies need to be big enough to provide the amazing services they do, but once they are large enough they will never care about individuals.

My internal model of large companies is that they are intelligent, psychopathic aliens. The people in them are like cells in our body, important for the function, but with no agency, and they are not who you are dealing with.

You're dealing with the company, and it's an inhuman, psychopathic alien.

My own experience with big tech account bans was much milder, so I learned my lesson without much pain. I got a "free Azure credit to learn cloud computing" email from MS, redeemed the credit, created a VM, started clicking around the settings and got locked out. Raised a support ticket, asked what I did wrong, told my account was flagged for suspicious activity. I asked what I did wrong again and got a reply that my case had been reviewed by a human and that my Azure account wouldn't be reactivated. Thankfully, my primary MS account didn't get banned for that.

Conclusion #1: it's frankly insane that a big tech company can fully terminate your account with no means of recourse. People like to mock the EU and its lawfare, but I think it is the best candidate to force the tech firms to implement some sort of firewall between their various services, so they can't terminate your access without prior notice or without compensation.

Conclusion #2: those who are reading this, don't put all your eggs into one basket and teach your friends and relatives to do so as well. That is, if you have to use the services of various big tech companies, spread them around. Have a boring account with one company that you use for free stuff, a boring account with another company that you use for paid services (if you can purchase services X and Y from two different companies, do so), a boring account with a third company that you use for getting paid, a fourth account that you use for shitposting and getting into arguments with internet strangers.

I have fresh experience of setting up Azure/M365 and AppleDev for my startup. Those things are scary as f*uck, in many perspectives:

(1) Dark patterns everywhere (click this checkbox and we'll buy you a license, oops +xxxxx €/$ per year just came; get one-month trial for O365 to get bizaccount, select 1 license, see that there is 25 licenses (~ 4k €/$) to be renewed if I don't cancel).

(2) Microtransactions everywhere (e.g. Azure VM SSD I/O: every read/write operations costs), DDOS and 10/100 k€ bill coming. Everything "scales", especially bills. And no billing caps, of course.

(3) Codesign with Microsoft: I have option to wait weeks for freight ship to ship USB cert token (if it ever survives past toll/postal service after that), or use AzureKeyVault, but that is officially only for companies that has taxes/accounting for 3 years of operation. So no startup can use that by this requirement to codesign?!

(4) AppleDev (and kind of Azure/MS too) requires DUNS number, which takes 6 weeks to get in normal case. Apple's 5 bizday route doesn't exist anymore (at least not for non-US-based companies). Or just use D&B magic link from Grok and get it immediately in 5 mins.

(5) If you base your business on Azure/M365 and AppleDev and be obidient and compliant (as I am doing/being, because I'm building real legit and long-term company, not some hussle project), it still doesn't matter, because they can just can decide by human/ML to shut your business operations and means of living. And getting answers like in the title's article's screenshots with those emojis are just the most non-human interaction that there can be done for affecting so devastatingly to someone's life/business.

These are the most disgusting things that I know of.

  - that Apple *can* always *just* disable their account
  - that Apple regularly *does* do that
  - that Apple does not care about them at all

We need more stories like this hitting the mainstream news until even a non-technical person's reaction to this is "well, what did you expect?"

Not too keen on passkeys without an easy way to backup.

Same goes with sign in with Google and Apple.

Centralization of power in unaccountable organizations has always been a recipe for disaster.

I could suggest some slogans:

"Apple. Not even once."

"Friends don't let friends use Apple."

But I think this is a problem that merits more than slogans.

Am I missing something? My current perspective is that not only am I free of all the hassle that comes with building for a closed ecosystem, such as managing a developer account and using proprietary tools, it also comes with much harder distribution. I can put up a website with no wait time and everybody on planet earth can use it right away. So much nicer than having to go through all the hoops and limitations of an app store.

Honest question: Am I missing something? What would I get in return if I invested all the work to build for iOS or Mac?

I've managed to reset the password, but I must answer a security question to log in. I mean, I answered those security questions probably a decade ago and I do not know what they are anymore. You can reset your security questions, but to do that you need to use an iPhone (last one I owned was a 4) that is still logged in, or, answer a security question. Which is as we established, the problem.

So every couple of months I log in, try a few other possible answers, get them wrong, and get locked out for a bit.

Anyway, I need to get this fixed my march, due to apple being the formula one streamer in my country now, so I have to actually solve the problem of logging in to my apple account. Or, I guess, making another random email just so I can watch f1. Sigh.

But if anyone knows how to reset security questions, I'd love to know. I would way rather pay apple actual money than go back to torrenting the races.

Why do people still do this, why??!? This is not an ignorant user! The author (and victim) has written several books about Apple tech, how do they not know that these "platforms" cannot be trusted with anything -- especially data that isn't backed up somewhere else!

Companies don't care about people, and the bigger they are the more evil they behave. They need to be treated like hostile business partners because that's what they are. They're only after money and absolutely nothing else.

This is not some radical leftist manifesto, it's the plain reality. And it's not new either. It's always been like this.

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.

you can in the meantime, and for the future, try compartmentalizing services you use. the old saying of "all eggs in one basket" applies here as well.

VPS, hard drives, etc. are cheap and keep you more in control of your own data than you're with big tech.

On a meta note, Fuck Apple, I'm so glad I didn't pursue an iOS developer career 10 years ago.

Google and Apple can and will delete your content at any time for any reason and there is no appeals court.

"I have contacts in Apple, I'm better than all those losers". Well you were, until you were not.

Incidentally, the guy's .paris domain name may be next unless you are a resident or have a business related to the region of of Ile-de-France

The stories of online-only service failures are legion. And yet if you can get face to face support, even one person can do so much. The gap is infuriating.

I didn’t notice, do you have a Brick and Mortar Apple Store you can visit? I can’t help thinking this as I read the post.

Of course this is not a physical hardware issue. Where a store employee could just hand you, say, a new phone. This is on the level of getting a slot on Tim Cook’s day planner, though I imagine the person with the ability to fix this is an underling many levels down Cook on the org chart.

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.

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.

This is the kind of thing they need to be sued on a massive scale for to solve but it's too rare and too expensive for anything to ever happen to them for it.

...and then nothing. No sorry, no "here's what went wrong", no blog post to address the angry masses, no recognition, reconciliation, or reformation. Just things working again and silence.

Musk/Jobs archetypes, though unpalatable at a personal level, are valuable in their willingness to burn themselves up to fight the "system" vs bureaucratic types who just fall in line and elevate what is a political issue into a Sacred Value

I know this might sound cynical... But the author should really understand that Apple gives less than zero fcks about them. Apple is known (and, weirdly, loved) for being tyrannical in this sense. Apple is known for their "my way or the highway" approach to anything, without much explanation and with self-attributed "we're always right" attitude.

> The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media.

And that's why people complain about Apple's walled garden. Given the size of the damage I'd look into getting a lawyer involved, and possibly try and get Apple to court (in coerce them into being reasonable).

Frankly, I'm taking note of the archived page (https://archive.is/jrsLV) that I will reference to anybody that will ask why not to trust Apple in the future. Note that Google is also known for having a similar approach (there is no way to get support if something like this happens UNLESS you happen to know somebody inside google). Amazon on the other hand has made customer support one of its defining traits.

Btw if you are doing any decent amount of tech stuff, you should REALLY get off walled gardens and at the very least have an on-premise backup solution (an off-the-shelf nas with spinning disks could be a good starter solution).

On the other hand, great learning case on putting eggs in one basket and on "own nothing and be happy".

They feel convenient, but they will keep changing their TOS to disadvantage you further and further as time goes on.

Everything you upload is scanned into their AI to create a profile about you that they can then exploit (once again, to your disadvantage). They do it despite regulations against it (Who's to say what they're complying with, deep in their complex data centers? Who's gonna even check? And how?) This is why online services that take control of your data are such gold mines (subscription fees, analytics, profiling, etc). They get you coming and going.

And of course, the account terminations: The earthquakes and "natural disasters" of the online world that destroy lives with no consequence or care.

When your data is not in your sole possession, you own nothing.

Even though I:

- had my recovery password

- re-confirmed the email

- re-confirmed my phone

They just kept telling me "we'll contact you in two weeks", and kept not following.

Then after the 4th recovery they sent me my recovery link on email (in any case weeks later).

Worst of all? Their privacy and security they keep repeating like propaganda are beyond bogus. Sure, they de-logged me from all of my accounts, that I appreciate, but I had 0 issues accessing all of the contents on my hard drive if I was a thief with a simple script in recovery mode I could still access everything. Where's the security? Propaganda only non-technical normies believe and then repeat.

I'm never ever buying Apple products ever in my life, I've got MBPs that my clients send me, but that's it.

Speaking of which, the guy's .paris domain name may be next unless he is a resident of Ile-de-France etc.......

Absolutely horrible black mark on Apple.

I'll be buying an external HDD to download all my photos / iCloud docs to. I've been too trusting.

I mean, isn't writing what you said you do for a living?

Don´t check in to Hotel Cupertino or soon you'll be singing along:

   Mirrors on the ceiling
   The pink champagne on ice, and she said
   "We are all just prisoners here
   Of our own device"
   And in the master's chambers
   They gathered for the feast
   They stab it with their steely knives
   But they just can't kill the beast

   Last thing I remember, I was
   Running for the door
   I had to find the passage back
   To the place I was before
   "Relax," said the night man
   "We are programmed to receive
   You can check out any time you like
   But you can never leave"

If this doesn’t get fixed, I’m going to have to rethink a lot of my digital life, including my company’s.

Seriously can we fucking have any products that work, in the 21st century

Or is the answer just "lol automation is cheaper"

Well, it can always be you.

I don't know what the solution is, but I think part of it is deliberately divorcing yourself from the big players as much as you can, which isn't much for some people, and encouraging government efforts to break them up and pull down garden walls whenever the opportunity arises.

This is what government is for even if we've forgotten it in some places.

Let's just hope more people read the story.

PS: My plan is to wait for Apple to release a folding iPhone to move back!