What a nightmare - hope everything will end well.Concerning all those &#x27;bricked&#x27; devices it would be really nice to get some more details concerning the &#x27;block&#x27;.Can you use your iPhone to call someone, can you use your MacBook overall? Login, use Apple Passwords(!), looking at photos within photos app and so on...Or are all those devices completely locked?

&gt; there are things you can&#x27;t backup like shared actively edited iWork documentsIf they’re shared, surely someone else can still access them?

What&#x27;s an iWord and why can&#x27;t it be backed up?

Apple (via Executive Relations) says they won&#x27;t do anything. Guess I&#x27;m stuffed.

I do have backups of most data, including photos, but there are things you can&#x27;t backup like shared actively edited iWork documents, and things like that. I can rebuild from it, but it&#x27;s still a shitshow and my very expensive devices are bricked.

When you are an Apple Developer, as the poster states - it goes deeper and more destructive.

&gt; which shows some questionable judgmentConvenience is a hell of a drug.

To what extent is the victim their own perpetrator? They allow the status quo to succeed by endorsing it. They voted for this with $30,000 of their own money, and they will likely vote again.

&gt; I now do not trust any bank.It baffles me how much this community is opposed to Bitcoin (and fails to delimit it from the rest of the crypto-scams on going) when, for me, it is existential. When you go through 1-2 experiences of bank-freezing and you realize your life is literally at stake here, the abstract debates about energy consumption or speculative bubbles feel like they come from completely misinformed individuals.It&#x27;s like watching someone on a rail track arguing not knowing what is about to hit them.

I&#x27;m curious how big the bank was and what country this is in?It&#x27;s my understanding that banks really don&#x27;t want your money once they&#x27;ve closed an account, they want you to take it back.Bigger banks, at least in the US, usually do this.

&gt; 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 money (tens of thousands) and refused to explain why. No amount of complaining or escalating made any difference, although we did manage to get a nice recording of an employee saying that he thought the bank was in the wrong.It took me issuing court proceedings, plus several more months of negotiating with their lawyer, before they finally settled out of court. Even then they tried to not pay the court fee, and they tried to get us to sign an NDA (I refused to budge on both). Altogether, it took 6 months to get the money.Similar to how people in this thread are talking about mitigating reliance on cloud providers (e.g. with offline backups), I now do not trust any bank. I avoid being in a position where any one bank can ruin my life. That means having multiple accounts and spreading my money around.Luckily for me I have a legal background so when a corp (big or small) does this sort of thing to me I don&#x27;t hesitate to sue them. In almost all cases this causes them to &quot;wake up&quot; and start taking your issue seriously, in a way that the front line customer support reps never do. I recommend this to the author of the original post.

&gt; It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgmentiCloud literally encourages users to opt for storing originals only in the cloud. It&#x27;s marketed as such, it nags you about this every now and then, and iCloud is the preinstalled default cloud storage on every iPhone. Consider non-techies dealing with this too.

You can probably use a GDPR personal information request to get photos and data at least. Doesn&#x27;t help with other stuff you&#x27;ve paid for though.We really need laws for this sort of thing. They should have included it in the DMA for gatekeepers.

&gt; 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.)To me this is the biggest problem. Just like a bank can decide to close your account at any time, it&#x27;s reasonable that Apple (or any business) could do the same. But they can&#x27;t keep your stuff.You can say &quot;don&#x27;t be naive and assume your cloud data is safe&quot;, but in today&#x27;s world that&#x27;s like saying &quot;don&#x27;t keep your money in a bank&quot;. The reason I pay for iCloud storage is because it&#x27;s supposed to be safe (safer than my local HDD going bust or getting lost).

This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, 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.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when they close your account. Regardless, never assume cloud data is in safe hands.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidal.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tidal.com</a> ?

I’d look at Navidrome, Jellyfin or Plex. Spin one up and stream your music from that.

oh man, I started with iTunes Match because that&#x27;s the only service that I could use to backup all my MP3s, and now it&#x27;s all messed up and so much music has just disappeared from my playlist... so sad.Unfortunately I still don&#x27;t know a service I can use that will allow me to sync my current MP3s &#x2F; what I have in Apple Music, and export it if I need it. There&#x27;s really an issue of owning data and being able to take it elsewhere :&#x2F;

Same story here. I&#x27;ll never go back to Apple Music, even if only for streaming. I had hundreds of tracks and albums just demolished by something related to iTunes Match, didn&#x27;t realize for months, and didn&#x27;t have a solid backup system at the time.

Given how Apple Music has completely fucked up my wife’s music collection, I can’t imagine them being able to unfuck your situation at all. So sorry.

Add and verify another primary email address.On a device: Settings &gt; (iCloud user) &gt; Sign-in &amp; Security -&gt; (+) {{name}}@gmail.comIf that doesn&#x27;t work, then use the dot trick.. y.ourname@gmail.com = yourname@gmail.com.

Also any dot in your email is ignored by gmail. a.b.c@gmail.com is equivalent to abc@gmail.com. You can try using your.email@gmail.com.

&gt; making another random emailyouremail+anystring@gmail.com will always redirect to youremail@gmail.com Before making a random email address, try using youremail+f1@gmail.com or something similar.

It sounds like you unfortunately have gotten yourself kinda stuck, but I very much sympathize. I too have an account dating back to iTools, and for a long time it was a major frustration that I was stuck with that original email address as unchangeable for the Apple ID, unlike newer accounts. However, some time in the last, I dunno 3-5 years maybe? I can&#x27;t remember now the exact time I noticed, but after over a decade of requests and fading hope Apple actually did allow me to change the email address for that Apple ID, which I shifted to my own domain. So for anyone else who hasn&#x27;t checked in a long time, worth noting situation might be marginally better now.Re: &quot;mac.com isn&#x27;t doing email anymore&quot;, all the original mac.com email addresses still work fine. Apple has played around with various domains (mac.com&#x2F;me.com&#x2F;icloud.com) over their decades of bumbling with online services but they made them all interchangeable for older users, mails to the original @mac.com emails still go through. Even originally made aliases (they allowed 5 with iTools) still work. Not sure what your issue was on that one.Finally yeah, &quot;&quot;security&quot;&quot; questions are one of those horrible legacy anti-patterns that I will cheer to see finally be dead and buried. If you try to answer them honestly probably anyone can learn it with a bit of online searching, if you go for more obscure stuff they&#x27;re easy to forget defeating the purpose. It&#x27;s really best just to treat them as extra passwords, use random alphanumeric values and keep them in your password manager same as the password. Apple has also fumbled around with recovery over the years, at one point you had options to have a manual recovery key you could save but I think that&#x27;s dead and can&#x27;t set it up after already forgetting. Maybe if you go in person to a store with physical ID and evidence, if you had payment associated with the account and have that credit card for example that might do it.If you have nothing of value tied to the account though probably no reason not to just abandon it.

It doesn&#x27;t sound like you use your old Apple account. Why don&#x27;t you abandon it and use a new one?

I have had an apple id problem myself, for the past N years. Mine is an old mac.com account, which has my Gmail address as the backup email (and the primary one now that mac.com isn&#x27;t doing email anymore). Because of this, I cannot sign up for a new account with my Gmail (it is tied to the older mac.com account).I&#x27;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&#x27;d love to know. I would way rather pay apple actual money than go back to torrenting the races.

That reads as rewarding them for taking your account hostage

You can manage Apple subscriptions using your web browser (no Mac&#x2F;iPhone needed). The subscription management page is:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;account.apple.com&#x2F;account&#x2F;manage&#x2F;section&#x2F;subscriptions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;account.apple.com&#x2F;account&#x2F;manage&#x2F;section&#x2F;subscriptio...</a>

If Apple engineers read this: I can&#x27;t sign in into my iCloud account from my android phone, it just doesn&#x27;t work, meaning I can&#x27;t manage my subscription like HBO now that I switched to an android phone.PS: My plan is to wait for Apple to release a folding iPhone to move back!

&quot;Beat the Grass to Startle the Snake&quot; (打草惊蛇)You would be better off in the US. Trust me, nothing creates bigger fuzz than complaining to financial authorities.

There are escalative methods to employ in such situations.In many legal jurisdictions, a &#x27;demand letter&#x27; holds weight. These can be served by courier, with proof of delivery as valid. One aspect of such a letter is a hard, specific time by which you will start legal action, along with associated additional costs.You have two paths after the letter. The first is small claims court, or normal court. In many places, small claims court does not allow lawyers, and the judge will even have to explain any confusing terms.Which means the playing is leveled, including reduced or no disclosure requirements, and legal cost assignments. Where I am, it&#x27;s $100 to file.The goal is to force a fix, at threat of legal consequences.I am sending an email.

It appears that the only way to reach Apple Customer Relations is by way of writing a formal letter to:Apple Pty Ltd, PO Box A2629, Sydney South NSW 1235

Absolutely, but that doesn&#x27;t solve my immediate issue of my devices and accounts, but of course I will do that.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tascat.tas.gov.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tascat.tas.gov.au&#x2F;</a>

Civil tribunals in Australia (an equivalent of small claim courts in other countries) do not involve lawyers in vast majority of cases and encourage self-representation instead.In fact, the NSW Civil Administrative Tribunal explicitly requires the Tribunal’s explicit permission for a person to be represented by somebody else, including a lawyer.But tribunal&#x27;s decision is binding on the commercial entity, should it be found at fault and incurs penalties for avoidance or non-compliance with the decision.

Book a date with TASCAT. I haven&#x27;t used the Tasmanian one but in NSW it cost me a couple tens of dollars from memory and I got a response in days. Once the case lands with the _LAWYERS_ who are expensive, it&#x27;ll get resolved.

I still don&#x27;t get why my friends and family think gifting a less liquid form of money is better than just giving cash.Gift cards are the best proof against the existence of the homo economicus, that&#x27;s for sure.

It seems OP bought the gift card themselves as a means to top up their account balance (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46252989">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46252989</a>). They basically used the gift card as an alternative payment option.

Gift cards are great for companies you don&#x27;t trust with (up-to-date) payment details. Amazon, Google, Apple, whatever evil megacorp you can think of, they all have made the news with stories like these, and they have proven time and again that they will stand by and defend their arbitrary decisions in court if they have to, because involving basic human intellect in the chain is too much of a fraud risk.Even if you like their services, who knows what they&#x27;ll do when they have access to your credit card information directly. I can completely understand why someone would pay for their services with gift cards bought from a well-known, respectable store instead.

It&#x27;s baffling that gift cards are so popular. You&#x27;re essentially paying to decrease the value of your own money by restricting its use and adding an expiration date (and handing to someone as a gift as if it&#x27;s a thoughtful alternative to cash).An even more egregious case is the corporate credit card. The company dictates its use exclusively for business expenses, yet pushes all the liability onto the employee. The business gets a massive, interest-free credit line with absolutely no risk. The company gets the float, and the employee gets the bill and the potential credit damage if anything goes wrong.&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;

I didn&#x27;t see a timeline but there were indications that the author has been trying to resolve this for much longer than one day.Regulatory agencies can forward complaints to other authorities and act based on them even if they can&#x27;t resolve the particular issue for the complainant.

It is saturday! Guy had a trouble during non-business times and advice to make a complaint to ACCC?
People who unlock accounts do not work on weekends, it is not front line of support who works all the time.
What happened with giving a chance to people (which is Apple consists of) to actually do something before complaining to 4 letter agency?
Also ACCC will not deal with such complaints. It says right on their home page.

Since your money is gone, I would file a complaint here: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.

Even if you helped and this is fixed, consider the privileged situation you are in to even get this fixed. Most &quot;normal&quot; people would be doomed to lose their entire digital life. Evangelizing for a Megacorp is dooming more people into willing incompetence and dependency.Reconsider at least that part. You can work with and use their products (as I do at work with the GSuite or AWS) but I will never recommend or evangelize for them or rely on them with things I care about.

I would like to think you&#x27;re wrong, but if they fix this, you&#x27;re possibly right. My career is built on Apple technologies. I don&#x27;t love that I&#x27;m captured by a vendor, but I have a lot of knowledge, and building to that level elsewhere is hard.I just want to keep using my stuff, and getting on with the fun things I get to work on. I don&#x27;t have a strong attachment to Apple, I have a strong attachment to the familiar productivity I normally have.

Good.  Don&#x27;t be afraid to follow up if they drag their feet.  Be respectful but persistent.  I&#x27;m sorry this is happening to you.  It&#x27;s a shitty feeling.

It&#x27;s been done, a few days ago. Nothing yet, but here&#x27;s hoping.

I have a friend who did this last year after he had a poor support experience with AppleCare for his Apple Watch and he got a call from Executive support early the next morning

Mine happened earlier this year, FWIW.Believe me, I have no desire to defend Apple. Their behavior absolutely sucks. I just want a good resolution for the author of this blog post.

I don&#x27;t see stories anymore from this working. Back when it was under Jobs, there were more concessions from his team operating the account. And maybe in the early Cook years. Apple has trimmed a lot of fat.I did read about part of the product development org having a standup about trending social media cases, and prioritizing followup on items that were under public scrutiny.

Basically, I bought a physical Apple gift card via the Apple online store, and it was never delivered. UPS tracking (on Apple&#x27;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&#x27;s gift card printing contractor or at UPS snatched it.Apple&#x27;s suggested &quot;solution&quot; 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&#x27;t use physical gift cards anymore.

Care you write it down somewhere and share it?I imagine it could be helpful to other people in the same situation.

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&#x27;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.

Getting a special &quot;notice me on social media (like HN)&quot; fix won&#x27;t actually fix the problem with using Apple&#x27;s systems. It&#x27;s just a temporary reprieve until some other aspect of their control of one&#x27;s life breaks (by accident or indent).

I simply manually periodically download everything to disk&#x2F;software raid.  Really important&#x2F;sentimental stuff like baby photos and videos I have on DVD with par2s.

Sync to Dropbox -&gt; Dropbox hourly &amp; monthly backups to my NAS using Bvckup2.(One of these days I’ll setup my NAS to backup offsite fo a #3 backup).I know that others with Macbooks sync their whole library to their Macbook and then Time Machine to a NAS as their copy #2. Is this vulnerable to the problem in TFA?

&gt; It requires to have a full copy locally.yeah that&#x27;s the thing. When my iPhotos library exceeded 1TB I lost the ability to store the full local copies. Since then, iCloud itself has been the sole source.Looks like there&#x27;s some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;parachute-backup&#x2F;id6748614170?mt=12">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;parachute-backup&#x2F;id6748614170?...</a> (no affiliation)

I run Arq Backup automatically in the background.It copy Photos, iCloud files and my mails once every days to S3 with incremental backups.It requires to have a full copy locally.Works great!It is not hard to configure once, with the proper folders and settings.

For me personally Immich is a non-starter because its not end-to-end encrypted.

immich is an extremely polished, FOSS alternative to google&#x2F;apple photos. It&#x27;s an investment, but a 4 bay NAS running immich should do nicely. Additionally I backup snapshots to Backblaze B2 via restic which runs another $5&#x2F;TB

this? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;boredazfcuk&#x2F;docker-icloudpd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;boredazfcuk&#x2F;docker-icloudpd</a>seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don&#x27;t have a mac in the middle

I run a Synology NAS with a docker container that periodically downloads new iCloud Photos to a local directory.

Not an iCloud user, but I use Immich on my NAS.

What&#x27;s wrong with `imessage-exporter`?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ReagentX&#x2F;imessage-exporter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ReagentX&#x2F;imessage-exporter</a>

The imessage db is literally just a sqlite db. If you have a Mac you can read the entire thing with an applescript. It’s really easy from what I remember from years ago

I run a nextcloud [1] instance and use it for contacts, calendars, and reminders1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextcloud.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextcloud.com</a>

I self host an Immich [1] instance to backup photos on my iPhone. It’s OSS and has a level of polish I’ve rarely seen in free software. Really, it’s shockingly good. The iOS app whisks my photo off to my home server several times per day.What I’m not sure about is how to backup things like iMessages, Notes, and my Contacts. Every time I’ve looked, it appears the only options are random GitHub scripts that have reverse engineered the iMessage database.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;immich.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;immich.app&#x2F;</a>

I keep copies of any important stuff i need on my server, and in a few hard drives at my home. i don&#x27;t use any &quot;cloud&quot;.

Back in the iPhoto days I used to symlink the library to an external drive.

The issue with OneDrive is that it doesn’t store metadata like the photo location, its damn near useless. But I do pay for storage for Google Photos and iCloud.If you take all of your photos from your phone, you don’t need your Mac at all. Google Photos will sync directly.I wouldn’t use BackBlaze (the $7 a month service). It doesn’t support NAS at all and it has to phone home every 30 days or it will erase anything that is stored on external drive.I would use an app that backs up to their B2 service.I personally just use my personal AWS account to back up my Plex media and just use the AWS s3 sync command using the AWS CLI and store everything in S3 Deep Archive. It’s less than $2 a month for 2TB.

One rather counter intuitive way to “backup” your photos is to install Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone!Google and MS don’t charge as much as Apple for storage, and you probably need you need to pay beyond the free limits, but it’s not a huge expense.Once your installed Google Photos and One Drive on your iPhone, just tell the apps to sync all your photos all the time!Now I appreciate that isn’t for everyone.But it works, is reliable, and requires no technical knowledge of running your own service.The other thing to do is setup a Mac that synchs all your iCloud data, One Drive documents and Google Drive.Then back up that device with Backblaze.This gets expensive as a Mac with decent levels of storage isn’t cheap!I live in fear everyday or my primary Apple and Google accounts getting locked!I’ve had accounts since day one of iTools and very shortly after Gmail launched….

I&#x27;m not familiar with the &quot;Photos Library.app&quot;, but I have an m4 mini with my photos in a Photo&#x27;s Library. I&#x27;d love to know your script to rsync the photos into a separate drive&#x2F;directory

At least as of Sequoia, the Settings &gt; iCloud &gt; Drive &gt; Optimize Mac Storage option enables iCloud Drive files to be stored offline. Likewise, right clicking any iCloud Drive files in the Finder includes a Keep Downloaded option. Since I minimally use iCloud Drive, in the past (older OSes) I also had Hazel make copies of iCloud Drive files so they were certain to be in backups.

Arq [1] has an option to &quot;materialize&quot; dataless files, basically forcing them to be locally available. The only issue is if it&#x27;s a large file and it gets pushed off device often, you can burn a lot of bandwidth re-downloading it over and over again.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arqbackup.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arqbackup.com</a>

For iCloud Drive have a look at rclone. You can run it straight from your Linux machine

Time Machine backups to a samba share on the Linux box would get you both the Photos library database and the iCloud Drive stuff. It also means you don&#x27;t need to bother with the external drive.There is a keep all files offline setting for iCloud Drive (turn off &quot;Optimize Mac Storage&quot; in Systems Settings).

I run a separate Mac Mini that has the full iCloud Photos library on a massive external drive, set to &quot;Download originals&quot;. I then rsync that filesystem to a separate Linux box. This works but you must not ever disconnect the external drive.I don&#x27;t have a solution for iCloud Drive, as there wasn&#x27;t a keep offline setting last time I checked. So use it only ephemerally.

sushtrain seems like the best option for syncthing at the moment. its a bit more polished than mobius. neither of them sync in the background but i think i remember seeing someone using shortcuts to open the sushitrain app every now and again to wake it up so it would sync

&gt; How are people handling this these days?Syncthing is wonderful, and does a great job of syncing between an Android phone&#x27;s photos&#x2F;videos and a laptop. And if you have regular automated backups of the laptop, you&#x27;ll have backups of the photos&#x2F;videos too.For an iPhone, perhaps you could use iTunes to sync to a computer and back up that computer.

I&#x27;d like to give a special shoutout to the PhotoSync app. It has one killer feature that Immich does not (at least last time I looked): encryption at rest. I think someone breaking into my house and stealing my NAS is a real possibility (unlikely, but I&#x27;d give it higher odds that getting locked out of my account like what happened in the article), so this is super important to me.You could put Immich data on a LUKS volume I suppose, but then you have to fiddle with your server every time it reboots.I did PhotoSync for a while, but now I just set up my Mac to download my whole photos library, and do Time Machine backups of my Mac. This gets two copies of the data not tied to my Apple ID (the one on my Mac&#x27;s local disk, and the one on my NAS on the time machine volume).

Wow. This is a cautionary tale. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be as devastated as this poor chap, but as it grew I realize I&#x27;ve allowed my iCloud photo library to become a single copy.How are people handling this these days? If i wanted to ensure a full backup of everything on my iCloud to a NAS, what&#x27;s the best way these days? Seems like they make it difficult by design..

You can use an Android phone without a Google account.

The broken logic is that it will expose why the account was flagged, and thus, allow &#x27;bad actors&#x27; to better navigate and bypass such flags.Of course, this is absolutely silly and beyond absurd, for bad actors share information of forums, can deduce fairly easily, and even have help from people on staff.Such actors typically know about detection and flagging methods within days of implementation. There&#x27;s literally zero benefit to secrecy. None. Security through obscurity can be a beneficial additional layer, but it simply never helps here.We really should pass a law requiring full disclosure of the precise method of banning. I can even see a &#x27;trial&#x27; period, where accounts activated (and used!) for 3 months receive this benefit, but new accounts, or new + dormant accounts do not.This should likely be coupled with mandated full refunds of phones or computers, as an example.Note that this isn&#x27;t a &#x27;free&#x27; account we&#x27;re talking about here. 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. These accounts aren&#x27;t free, they&#x27;re part of purchase cost, and core-required.(Even if it&#x27;s a, for example, Samsung phone? It comes pre-installed, with uninstallable Google Play cruft, as part of an agreement with Samsung. Same conditions need apply here)

Usually if you get punished they have to tell you the crime you committed.That seems like a dangerous loophole.Imagine being banned from all online activities without any reason given.

&gt; That‘s always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and should be illegalit is very likely illegal to tell him. it was triggered by the use of a gift card, and therefore very likely to be AML, and in many places (I am not sure about Australia specifically) it is illegal to provide information in the circumstances.

&gt; Support staff refused to tell me why the account was banned or provide specific details on the decision.That‘s always the most kafkaesque part of these problems and should be illegal

&gt; It&#x27;s just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What&#x27;s the rationale?If I need to guess, gift cards are sold online in money laundering schemes, also on some platforms they are used to let you buy apps from a lower priced country

&gt; And with this there is lot of things coming, like AML and what notWhats coming?

That doesn&#x27;t explain why an entire account is shut down, rather than just use of gift cards. Hammer to crack an egg, and just plain lazy&#x2F;incompetent

Well from my view as European working in finance. Handling money for customers to pay (buy apps) likely requires an e money license (not sure about other states). And with this there is lot of things coming, like AML and what not.
So disabling the account might be due to regulations required for the e money license.Of course Support should be able to resolve this if proves are given

anything can trigger this. it is totally at the company&#x27;s discretion

My coworkers report these to me every single business day. They’re usually like:&gt; Hey, it’s me, your CEO. I’m in a meeting with our big customer and I need an urgent favor. Thanks! You’re a life saver.&gt; - Mr. CEO

&gt; What&#x27;s the rationale?Gift cards are used by phishers. In our institution, we routinely get personalized spam mails (in the name of the corresponding group lead of the recipient, sent via GMail -- this is not low-effort) that ask whether they are available and, when (accidentally) responding, ask for Apple gift cards.

Selling gift cards is like borrowing money at 0% interest. And because some people forget and never use them, it&#x27;s negative interest.

Yeah I dont remember the details but I remember a developer at a studio causing their account to lock up when google shut down the previous studio he was working woth account

Unfortunately, when you access multiple accounts from the same set of IP addresses and browser signatures, you can bet Google, Apple, Microsoft, and any other large company with that level of information collection has probably correlated all of those accounts to you.  The company may lock them all if any one of them is suspected of &quot;bad behavior&quot;.

&gt; It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.

I always wondered why sites like g2a sell gift cards at a price higher than the gift card is actually worth.A lot of things are clicking into place for me in this thread.

&gt; What&#x27;s the rationale?Most likely stolen cards. Stolen credit cards are used to purchase gift cards which are then resold to unsuspecting buyers. Think of it as stolen money laundering.

Honestly, good riddance. Just abandon that company and everything they touch.

Emailing jeff@amazon rapidly solved the problem for me when I was in the exactly same situation.Of course it&#x27;d have been nicer to tell them to fuck off, but living without Amazon would simply be far too inconvenient.

I am in a situation right now where Amazon delivered a fake product. Support suggested they can also try redelivery, and when I asked what if it happens again, they said it should not happen.It happened - fake again. Now the customer support flow is: you upload images of the product (max. three), and the system approves the verification or rejects it, and then you have a way to contact customer care. System rejected. The trick is - they do not know why the rejection happened, they are not able to tell me, they are confirming the images are very clear and crisp, but they can&#x27;t do anything to help me because the system leaves them with zero options to move forward - in fact, there is no further escalation matrix either. Nada!The bank (credit card issuer) refused to raise the chargeback because &quot;but the merchant &#x27;delivered&#x27; the item&quot;. But it was fake, so? No, no, it &quot;delivered&quot; - that is what counts, so you have to sort it out with the merchant. But they are refusing any further help. You have to sort it out with them. And so on... in a loop.Can I take them to court? Sure. It may take weeks, months, and maybe years, and even then, in the end (if I win), the court may just instruct them to refund and possibly (possibly!) compensate a trivial amount for legal expenses, which is never even remotely close to the actual legal expenses in this country&#x27;s courts.Just stonewalled. It almost feels Kafkaesque.

And yet you keep paying money to this company. That is on you.

Amazon expects you hire a consultant that is a buddy with the manager responsible for closing your account, and bribe them through that engagement to re-enable your account. They started doing that a decade ago with the mass-banning of legitimate sellers.

I had Amazon close my old, almostt-unused account in Amazon-in-another-country because I dared to add a new payment method.I proved them who I am, that the new payment method (virtual card from a well-known organization) is mine, everything.After lots of back-forth I&#x27;ve been informed their decision is final.I HAVE NOT BREACHED TOS. 
I wish I has a major law company behind me to force them to admit that.Very happy it was my almost unused account, heavily went down with my purchases in mt main account (in my usual country of residence) as well.And yes, I use login-with-companyName as sparingly as possible. We are not the users, we&#x27;re beggars.

Gift cards are huge in the B2B business as they are used a lot as gifts from companies to employees.

It’s a financial gimmick. The company realizes the income immediately while service is rendered later. This has positive impact on the finances.

&gt; which make zero financial sense for the consumerNot in all situations. Because of various cross promotions between car insurance, supermarket and airlines, by using gift cards for groceries I get an effective ~9% discount every time. That really adds up over a year.For Apple and others, you can use secondary gift card market to get some discounts too, if you wanna risk it.

One practical reason gift cards exist is tax treatment. In the UK, small non-cash gifts to employees can be tax-free under the “trivial benefits” rules (each under £50, not cash or cash-equivalent). For owner-managed companies, directors have a £300 annual cap across such benefits. Cash or cash-redeemable vouchers don’t qualify and are taxed like salary.

It would make more sense to stop offering gift cards, which make zero financial sense for the consumer, but why stop offering a lucrative product that people buy because they&#x27;re bad at logic, when you can just shut down accounts and greatly inconvenience people at no cost to you?

&gt; The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.On that note[1] is a good read (Cmd+F: &quot;suspicious activity report&quot;), although this specific case is about gift cards, but the AML&#x2F;T&amp;S etc. space is remarkably similar.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitsaboutmoney.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;debanking-and-debunking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitsaboutmoney.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;debanking-and-debunki...</a>

&gt; The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.Yes, in many countries they are, but I don&#x27;t think the laws are dictating Apple to completely turn off the accounts, but instead dictate that Apple should take measures against it.They could disable those gift card features + Apple wallet&#x2F;pay if they suspect fraud, and if no one complains within a month, then disable the entire account, rather than start with disabling the account. Would give them space&#x2F;time to investigate, and wouldn&#x27;t be a huge pain in the ass when the inevitable false-positives happen, like in this case.

Ironically, I had Amazon flag and undo some gift card purchases (of cards, not with cards) that I made for Christmas, while myself thinking about this category of problem, about why cards are a mechanism for scams rather than specifically money laundering.The cards were to family members that I normally send gift cards to at Christmas, and the activity was counted as &quot;sus&quot; even though I was asked to validate my card number and expiration date before being allowed to make the purchase.

AML = ?(edit) Ah, right, anti-money-laundering, found it in your last sentence.

&gt;At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult.For a good reason! You, as a rule, really don&#x27;t want to tell the customer why you&#x27;re blocking them. What will happen in the end is that you will be facing federal charges for assisting the money launderers because you kept telling them what they&#x27;re doing wrong.

I don’t mean to defend this, but I know from experience that gift cards are frequently used for money laundring. The laws against that are very strict, incentivizing companies to overshoot and block false positives.At the same time, AML solutions tend to be a closely guarded black box which simply tells you to block a customer, finding out why is pretty difficult.To add more to the problem, some anti money Landry solutions are … AI powered.

&gt; If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy&#x2F;redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o

&gt; If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy&#x2F;redeem Apple gift cardsYou&#x27;d think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.

&gt; such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sockI mean that is a problem in itself :D

It seems you haven&#x27;t learned the whole lesson. You&#x27;re close, though. If you&#x27;re going to be skittish, there&#x27;s a better and easier set of rules. Don&#x27;t use anything that involves an Apple ID.

An even better advice: Don&#x27;t buy Apple.

It’s against money laundering. Onerous regulations being interpreted highly defensively create these kind outcomes.Neither the people creating the legislations nor the people at Apple responsible for these flows care very much about collateral damage.

I&#x27;m the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?

I skimmed some of the comments from that giant Reddit thread. A lot of people responded that they’ve been buying even more Apple gift cards without problem.One commonality among the stories in that thread from people who had problems was either switching their App Store country or using their App Store account primarily from a different country than the setting.

The &quot;gift card&quot; 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 just give them cash.

&quot;we sell gift cards :)&quot;&quot;and we ban you for buying or redeeming them&quot;is just top tier comedy honestly.As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you&#x27;re a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there&#x27;s little reason not to.

&gt;It&#x27;s just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. It&#x27;s also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apple&#x2F;comments&#x2F;r8b1lu&#x2F;apple_will_permanently_disable_your_account_for&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;apple&#x2F;comments&#x2F;r8b1lu&#x2F;apple_will_pe...</a>If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy&#x2F;redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.- Don&#x27;t give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You&#x27;re potentially ruining the recipient&#x27;s digital life if they redeem it.- Don&#x27;t buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.If you&#x27;ve been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don&#x27;t buy anything online that&#x27;s tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don&#x27;t buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don&#x27;t do it because Apple&#x27;s over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple&#x27;s store currency is too dangerous to use.

How much free time do you think the average person has to learn and set all this up?“You’re giving these companies your data and then dare to be angry when you lose it? Just get a degree in computer science and host it yourself!!1! I am very smart”

At this point, are we relaying all emails to three or four locations for access to auth codes?

Cryptic hints only work while your memories remain intact, unexpected health issues can render them useless

The list is a bit overkill for the normal person. I would suggest just:- Have a local backup (simple giving the storage prices)- Pay for one email provider (less chance to ignore you)- For important services (bank, etc.) always register also a telephone number &#x2F; second email if possible (there is a low chance that both primary and secondary thing will be blocked at the same time)

Not only local copies but also at least own and use one device where you have your important data that is not on the same OS ecosystem as the other device(s) - also helps with things like 2FA, password manager, etc., if shit has hit the ceiling fan on the other device.In addition, I always suggest people to:- Not use big tech&#x27;s cloud services - ever- But if you must, do not use many cloud services from just one provider (i.e no Google everything, no iCloud everything) i.e stop using &quot;one account gateways&quot;.- Needless to say, it&#x27;s time you had a domain and start paying for mail hosting (at least for critical stuff - you can actually buy a very cheap plan; and use that gmail&#x2F;live-hotmail&#x2F;yahoo&#x2F;iCloud&#x2F;whatever everywhere else) [0]- Keep an offline (but safe) copy of your &quot;most&quot; important data [1] and ways to remember (i.e cryptic hints) for your &quot;most&quot; important passwords- Gain some experience in fighting in consumer courts&#x2F;forums (depending upon your country) - start early, start with e-com companies. A lot many times we don&#x27;t put up a fight because we have never done it before and we give up always because every time it&#x27;s a first time. Apple and Google make a mockery of consumers everywhere because we have allowed them to. In fact sometimes when we talk of lack of accessible support at Google and Apple (yes, Apple) we speak in a disdainful appreciation or awe :)[0] Some might disagree but disabling (or dev&#x2F;nulling in a way) mail@, hi@, contact@, sales@ etc on your domain (esp. if you have catch-all enabled) goes a long way in terms of avoiding spam[1] It&#x27;s also very important to have a tiered approach to data storage and backup strategies. There should be a very, very, very small subset of your personal data, including some of your photos and videos, that is really, really small in storage footprint that you can back up&#x2F;sync to multiple locations and actually pay the full price for it at storage costs via your own setup, preferably using FOSS tools (which are becoming too good these days) out there.

it&#x27;s really hard not to have at least one single point of failure. there&#x27;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&#x27;s just email.There&#x27;s obviously a middle ground and ways to have a strictly better personal data posture than before, but it&#x27;s a multi faceted problem balancing usability, security, and resilience

It genuinely makes me a little anxious whenever I come across people whose entire digital lives are dependent on a google&#x2F;apple account. Just one misstep and it&#x27;s all gone

The real problem is that all these big tech companies have a callcenter in India with agents who cannot do anything to actually fix problems.And some of them don&#x27;t even have that!

&gt; what’s the rationaleTheir mega high risk - high value gift cards are effective for laundering stolen&#x2F;fraudulent credit cards. Buy a $500 gift card with a stolen CC and sell it on FB marketplace for $400 - you’re up $400, the buyer saves $100, Apple get paid by the retailer and the CC company are (likely) on the hook.Of course the actual solution here is _don’t sell high value gift cards_, or require the Apple ID email at time of purchase&#x2F;activation of the card

I created a Google developer account with a separate email due to warnings like this. Then Google closed it because I left it idle too long and I didn&#x27;t get the warning email. Sometimes you can&#x27;t win.

I watched an interview with Elon Musk a few years ago (circa 2018?). I&#x27;m no fan of him but he was asked about AGI and he kinda just said matter of factly, AI can view humanity as we view anthills. We don&#x27;t really care about anthills, but if they&#x27;re in the way of us building a neighborhood in an area then goodbye anthill.I&#x27;m not sure if I like that take because of how horrifying it is, but I found it very interesting that harm can be caused so nonchalantly by more powerful entities, since humans already view themselves as the most powerful entity.

&gt; It&#x27;s definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.I&#x27;ve been reading about Lovecraft&#x27;s Old Ones. Apparently they have no ill will towards humans. They just sometimes cause harm without realizing it, while going about their business.

Going through this at the moment. Was it a physical card? What evidence of purchase did they ask you to provide?

I had similar trouble redeeming a gift card on Amazon. Twice. (thankfully they got resolved upon appeal).Enough that I am very wary of buying or redeeming gift cards now, especially more than one in a row.Apparently there&#x27;s some sort of scam with gift cards, which must affect any platform which allows them, and legit uses often get flagged by automated systems.If they are so much trouble for Amazon&#x2F;Apple I wonder why not disallow gift cards, instead of randomly banning users?

I mean it gets triggered every time I download a new app. This has been bugged for years.

At what point in this transaction did Apple have your money to return?

Apple is perfectly happy to take money from criminals though. My grandmother bought some Apple gift cards from a supermarket which turned out to be fake. The cards on display had been replaced&#x2F;modified in a way that upon purchasing them it activated another card held by the criminals. Apple refused to take responsibility and so did the supermarket. Gift cards are loved by scammers as a way to receive and launder money, they should be subject to much more scrutiny and have stronger AML mechanisms.

I spent a long time working in finance one way or another, including as a founder&#x2F;director of a small e-money issuer, and I have at least from this time ASSUMED that gift cards carry a very inflated AML risk.Plus I have no desire to carry scrip when I could have fungible cash or equivalent, so I would not buy a gift card. I have received a few.

Gift cards carry a surprisingly high fraud&#x2F;AML risk.
If a code ends up being part of a stolen-card → resale → redemption chain (which is more common than people think), companies like Apple may actually have to lock the entire account.
So the trigger might not be arbitrary—it may just be a side effect of how risky gift-card-based payments are.

No to excuse Apple but I think anti money laundering laws are at least partially to blame - they vary from country to country but typically impose penalties for not blocking suspicious activity at the same shielding from lawsuits for blocking innocent users. It&#x27;s like lawmakers found a way to throw due process out of the window.

The rationale is that an egregore called Apple, inc. is blindly fumbling ahead, unable to see the lives it is trampling.Note that this has nothing to do with the actual well meaning (mostly - see leadership emails leaks) people forming the egregore.The purpose of the company structure is isolating it from liabilities, and as the regulation which would force it to recognize the damage it did is mostly missing, thus the outcome.See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-big-little-idea-called-legibility&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-big-little-idea-call...</a>

Whatever you’re quoting isn’t about me, the OP in this case…

from the reddit story: &quot;In the past two months, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from Amazon, Target, and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account. The gift card amounts ranged from $25 to $150 each, totalling $905.&quot;This is literally a money laundering patternThe question will be why isn&#x27;t this person just adding the money to their account directly, where is this money coming from, why are they structuring it like this

It&#x27;s just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What&#x27;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 so they&#x27;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&#x27;s definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.

My thought. There should be a mandate to allow downloading all data on account closure from any service.

Shouldn&#x27;t these huge platform guys be mandated to offer data transfer-out service?

oh, no, they will do a lot to make you pay taxes

Why would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn&#x27;t headquartered or listed where I live?My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want.None of that applies to a multinational corporation.

with this same logic, you don&#x27;t want to know how much your government and your country cares about you. odds are even a lot lower for them.

&gt; This is why I don&#x27;t use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality.macOS doesn&#x27;t require this. My Apple account has a handful of apps purchased over the years, and that&#x27;s it. I could&#x27;ve bought them directly from the vendors, but the store makes it easier to update.

I don’t think it is stupid but the golden rule is multiple backups. I personally believe 3 backups is the minimum. A physical one and 2 others. Either another physical copy stored at another location to protect against things like fire or 2 cloud backups to prevent situations like this. But I have only ever met one person who did this. His house burned to the ground and lost all data at his house but had back ups at his brother and on some cloud service and lost nothing. I was impressed as most people I know have zero back ups.

This is why I don&#x27;t use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. It&#x27;s really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this to store data.

This happened to me[1] a decade ago, now. Left Apple hardware on shelf for a year or two, Apple in the mean time did their iCloud migration or something, and my login account could no longer unlock the device. It&#x27;s been effectively bricked since.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26482635">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26482635</a>

Not sure if the Chinese have figured out a way for the newer ARM-based ones yet (I realise it&#x27;s already been several years since the M1 was released...) but I believe most of the older x86 ones have been cracked.I&#x27;ve unlocked some old Thinkpads that were similarly left locked with a BIOS password by departed employees, officially not possible, but actually possible if you reflash the BIOS and EC ROMs.

This is what most corporations want, esp for remote employees. I had a work supplied laptop and I couldn’t access via my machine account password. I could login via MFA but I couldn’t reset my local password. They made me initiate the account recovery, wait 8 days, and then I could change the password. I suspect my employer’s account synchronization tools mangled my password or changed it to a password in flux.In that light, they are fulfilling a use case with greater market value than your conundrum. Is it annoying? Sure. Is it a problem? Debatable. You didn’t recover the passwords on the machine when your employee left. Maybe it’s your problem? Will you get in? Likely and eventually.

I think we must have passed peak Apple this week or something…I’ve had Clone Hero running badly on an ancient MacBook for my drums, so I decided to swap it out for an M1 Mini that was collecting dust on a shelf. I did a full erase, but I couldn’t get past its activation lock. At all.This is a piece of hardware I purchased on my credit card, for my company, (luckily) linked to a phone number I control and an email address on a domain I can control, but Apple in their infinite wisdom are still locking me out of my own hardware because I don’t know the password the last employee used on the computer! I don’t want any data off it, thats gone, I just want the computer I spent money on to actually be usable!I initiated a “recovery” process to unlock it (at Apples discretion?) and they’ve sent me an automated email saying the initial checks are passed and they will contact me again in 7 calendar days. Kafka-esque doesnt even begin to describe it. So for the next week I have to whistle Dixie!I’ve been a massive Apple fanboy since I swore off Windows a couple of decades ago, giving them a decent high 6 figure spend over that time and influencing countless others to buy Apple devices. Well that very much ended this week &amp; going forwards without Apple will be painful, but the message they sent me couldn’t have been any louder &amp; clearer. The writing has been slowly creeping on to the wall for the last few years, between buckling to UK government pressure, the CSAM photo scanning nonsense, the absolute UI abomination of this new glass crap, this was my final straw.I’m also going to be relaying their “message” very clearly and loudly now to any friend or family member considering another Apple device.

Probably they tried a real operating system.

The gradual decline of quality, and increasing hostility towards the user once they went from software to services.

&gt; I&#x27;ve heard others say this (and was a &quot;loyal advocate&quot; 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.What changed your outlook? Did you get burned by Microsoft?

I’ve talked to apple support reps in the past. It’s absolutely not surprising to hear that there’s confusion. ISTR some aren’t actually direct Apple employees, so they don’t have access to certain information.

&gt; It’s almost certainly notAIs are RLHF&#x27;d to have a corporate-pleasing interface w.r.t. metrics.

&gt; That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a humanIt’s almost certainly not, it’s just humans being human and going off script. I worked in a place where we dealt with an enormous number of customer service requests, and one of our measured support metrics was “how often do the agents deviate from what they’re allowed to offer”.

To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech.After nearly 30 years as a loyal customerI&#x27;ve heard others say this (and was a &quot;loyal advocate&quot; 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 thingsThat almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But if I were in your situation I&#x27;d be inclined to print out that response as evidence, and then actually go there physically to see what happens.

Seems like we need to popularise proper guides on how to convert our iCloud storage using self-hosted solutions. It&#x27;s a shame though.

At what point during the process was the issue raised? Was it received well?

Last time I had this problem, I got it fixed after applying for and accepting a job at Apple.

&gt; 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.This is why I suggested to have a dual model. Leveraging the cloud and services is really a good choice as long as you have backup systems running independently as well. Your backups may not be as powerful and full fledged as the main provider but in case of emergencies like these, you still own your data and hardware and don’t panic.In this example a weekly backup of iCloud to a drive connected to a pi with rsync could be a simple solution. 6tb is not even that much given that 500$ gift cards are being used by the author. The backup is not great but it is easy to see why it’s also necessary to own your data.

I actually really like the idea of a Digital Services Provider Ombudsman, who you can go to if you feel like you&#x27;ve been wronged by a big tech corp. They have a &quot;way in&quot; that consumers potentially don&#x27;t, and they have the capacity to levy fines in certain circumstances. I love this! What&#x27;s preventing this from happening, other than no governmental pressure to make it happen? I might write to my MP...

&gt; Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter&#x2F;battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.Bad analogy. A better one would be having a torch in case of power cuts (done that) having some extra food in the house in case the grocery delivery fails, having some basic medical supplies in the house, having mobile internet connection in case your broadband fails etc.Having backups of your stuff is an emergency fallback

&gt; Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter&#x2F;battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.I’m feeling attacked. Here I was thinking my lifelong work of self sufficiency for my family was completely reasonable until you came along. Thanks a lot!

I think this argument conflates “what’s possible” with “what’s reasonable”.In a complex modern society, we can’t all be expected to have backup plans to the Nth degree.Is it possible to bore for my own water supply, install solar+inverter&#x2F;battery backup for electricity, get a medical degree to treat my own wounds? Sure but most would say it’s not reasonable.It’s why we have regulations and ombudsmans for healthcare, transport, finance, water provider, electricity providers, communications providers etc.Oddly missing from that list is critical technical infrastructure providers like Microsoft, Apple and Google.

It’s also possible this person does have some personal or external backups of stuff like the photos, but they’re not going to mention it here as the existence of those doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been extremely wronged. It also won’t help with their developer account etc.

My 2 cents: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 &#x2F; 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.

Yeah literally the exact same thing can happen on android and windows. The solution is regulation, not ridiculous solutions like telling billions of people to back up their own stuff.

I expect them to learn that it&#x27;s better not to be an apple user.

Apple has over a billion users. Do you expect every single one of them to learn how to do backups, protect their purchase on iOS, etc.?

Has it been 12 months again already? That&#x27;s about how often one of these stories come up. I guess some people don&#x27;t learn.

This comment should be among the top voted contributions to this submission for everyone to see.WWDR stands for World-Wide Developer Relations and SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering.

Mr. Fart warned us about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@blakeross&#x2F;mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177a406c775" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@blakeross&#x2F;mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...</a>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&#x27;s bad customer support.This bodes poorly indeed.

I&#x27;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: &quot;I have escalated this through my many friends in WWDR and SRE at Apple, with no success.&quot;This doesn&#x27;t bode well.

Are you not able to use them at all without an apple id? I have some older apple devices which I guess predate that

Have no apple hardware. If you need apple hardware for work use a work email and account and never use it for anything else other than work. Always pay apple with a work credit card.

How do you that with Apple hardware that requires an AppleID to operate?Is your advise to avoid all Apple hardware?Or buy backup hardware none of which will run MacOS &#x2F; iOS, so you still couldn&#x27;t access things like your Apple Developer account, or any shared documents?

parisidau, I hope you get your account back.you can in the meantime, and for the future, try compartmentalizing services you use. the old saying of &quot;all eggs in one basket&quot; applies here as well.VPS, hard drives, etc. are cheap and keep you more in control of your own data than you&#x27;re with big tech.

Far too late, but the solution was to change the identifier on your Apple ID from a username to an email address.Mine was the same, and that&#x27;s all it took. Nothing was lost, as the account itself remained the same.

This happened to me really early on when my original Apple ID had an invalid format, as it was an ID made prior to the current version of Apple ID everyone uses, and Apple refused to port what I owned to the ID that I was forced to generate to sign into my newer device. My old ID had software no longer available in App Store, so this wasn’t just a matter of needing to repurchase apps- they were taking away my ability to use applications I bought from them. Since then, I’ve been incredibly wary of losing my Apple ID. I have a lot of respect for Apple, but I would bet that it’s easier to deal with ID related problems for someone with Q level clearance in the U.S. government or even a non-existent Men In Black ID problem than to resolve a problem with an Apple ID. They probably would tell the almighty to get a new ID.

It&#x27;s Saturday. Executives might get phone calls to make it happen on a Sunday, but I wouldn&#x27;t bet on it.

Now that this is on the Hacker News front page, surely Apple will be escalating this and provide a general solution, no?

If Apple doesn&#x27;t have the sense to reply to this in a sensible manner then that company is in far worse shape than I thought.

Take it to your state or territory tribunal ASAP. You might be able to take it to the courts and get temporary injunctive relief.

This kind of thing happens more often than people think. You trade convenience for blind trust and sometimes that trust gets revoked without warning. Whether it&#x27;s Apple, Google or whoever’s &quot;ecosystem&quot; you live in if you don’t own your keys and data, you’re just a tenant who forgot the landlord doesn’t take calls.

It&#x27;s a defence mechanism against account hijacking if someone has access to your phone number, linked to your account. Went through the same procedure to recover an account I haven&#x27;t been using for a few years.

I went back to an MacBook pro M5, after being away from Apple for a year or 5 (Lenovo etc). 
I tried to re-enable my apple account but I had to wait 5(!) days to change the password. I ended up making another account.

Not wanting centralization under one company does not equal advocating for &quot;trustless society&quot;.All the things you mentioned (registrars, ISPs, registries, etc) have multiple alternative providers you can choose from. Get cut off from GCP, move to AWS. Get banned in Germany, VPS in Sweden. Domain registration revoked, get another domain.Lose your Apple ID, and you&#x27;re locked out of the entire Apple ecosystem, permanently, period.Even if a US federal court ordered that you could never again legally access the internet, that would only be valid within the US, and you could legally and freely access it by going to any other country.So in fact, rather than everything being equivalent to Apple&#x27;s singular control, almost nothing is equivalent (really, only another company with a similarly closed ecosystem).

And that website is hosted somewhere, you’re using several layers of network providers, the registrar has control over your domain, the copper in the ground most likely has an easement controlling access to it so your internet provider literally can just cut off access to you whenever they want, if you publish your apps to a registry the registry controls your apps as well.There are so many companies that control access to every part of your life. Your argument is meaningless because it applies to _everything_.A trustless society is not one that anyone should want to be a part of. Regulations exist for a reason.

As someone using Linux to build web applications, I wonder what about the Apple ecosystem could make it worth to have such a Damocles’ sword hanging over me my whole life.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?

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