posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?
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Your best bet might be to get a major newspaper involved. Bad publicity can sometimes work wonders. You have the advantage of being involved in Apple development over a long period of time, so your story would have more impact than the average hapless victim. If I were a journalist interested in tech matters, it would snag my attention.
@parisba My wife and I each had an iPod. I liked using mine for travel on a plane for music and my noise-cancelling headphones. But they changed the music system and we lost access. I've never been able to reestablish access to it and thus the iPods became bricks.
Sorry for your massive loss. I cannot imagine. This was annoying enough to lose access to a few hundred dollars worth of tech, but your loss is massive.
@parisba This happened to me a few years ago. I posted about it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220731072922/https://twitter.com/com/status/1466928315562958850
The combo that got it resolved, I think, was: 1) posting the shit out of it on social media (I had a large‑ish Twitter account at the time + Reddit + HN + Apple Discussion forum), followed by 2), emailing tcook@apple.com. I got a reply from his executive team a few days after emailing. Good luck!
@parisba did you really trust Apple so much? I mean, it is terrible, I cannot help in any way, I just feel your pain – and it shows that trusting BigTech companies is a big mistake 😕 fingers crossed… it is also terribly wrong that one cannot reach to human support who could actually help; everything is automated and AI-ed to the level when the support is literally nonexistent
What this teaches me is never to accept an apple gift card. From anyone. Apple store or not. Friend or not.
Return it unused, for the full value, asap.
Edit: if they let you even do that. It is possible they are fully aware of the tampering problem (because they cheaped out) and will refuse any returns for this very reason. So the real safe way is to never buy any apple gift card, ever.
@parisba damn, this is one of my worst nightmares. Kind of a wake up call for me.
This is what happens when fraud analysts are replaced with GenAI
@parisba This is horrible. The blank lack of anything other than "system says no" is apalling. There should *always* be fallback human contact to address situations like this. Good luck 🤞✊
What a nightmare!
@parisba Something very like this happened to my 9 year old son's Apple ID when I got him his first MacBook: I registered an Apple ID for him, added it to my Family Sharing and then tried to log into his new MacBook Air with it. The account was immediately hellbanned, less than an hour after being registered, with no way to reverse, reactivate, appeal, or even delete the account. He'd never even touched the account or the computer. Months of support calls later, resolution was: email Tim Cook.
@parisba You need this published, in real media outlets, not just shared on amateur media.
![int%rmitt]nt sig^al. ...~!...)](https://files.mastodon.social/accounts/avatars/109/499/796/936/566/862/original/8eb5f8cb811a079a.png "int%rmitt]nt sig^al. ...~!...)")
@parisba
Why my last Apple product of any kind was a IIe.
Walled gardens and doggy entrapment tactics were early red flags.
@parisba Why I throw apple away? It is not mine and no matter how many times I pay for it, it never will be. I don't like giving my money to mega corporations that think they own ME.
I don't like hosting parasites.
@parisba They are protecting their business, not yours. Hope you can recover your data and break free from Apple.
Mildly related: https://www.techspot.com/news/95729-google-refuses-reinstate-account-man-after-flagged-medical.html
@parisba I would be getting my lawyer to write their lawyer a friendly note. If you haven't already, do attempt to stoke a media furore on Twitter. Nobody reads Mastodon, and nobody cares what happens here, which is what makes it pleasant, but not particularly useful for applying social pressure.
Good luck. Terrible situation. Keep us all posted.
@parisba That's why I'm looking for open source alternatives to corporate software (which, unfortunately, is often more convenient and better).
It is a mistake to depend on the ecosystem
@parisba let’s keep all the data about entire life on proprietary, American, corporate software!! It can’t go wrong, right? Right???
Btw, I think it would be beneficial to move all government data (especially European) to some American, proprietary software like this. The scale would save us so much money!!!
Oh wait, we have no access anymore? And some AI gives our secrets to others?? Can’t be 🫨
@parisba let’s keep all the data about entire life on proprietary, American, corporate software!! It can’t go wrong, right? Right???
Btw, I think it would be beneficial to move all government data (especially European) to some American, proprietary software like this. The scale would save us so much money!!!
Oh wait, we have no access anymore? And some AI gives our secrets to others?? Can’t be 🫨
@parisba Sorry to hear that. Apple are treating you terribly.
If anything good comes of this, it would be that people stop supporting 🇺🇸 Big Tech oligarchies.
We should abandon Apple, Alphabet, Meta, X, etc.
For the people saying why use gift cards that big, you can cash out credit card rewards for gift cards and Apple is a popular choice. Paid for most of a MacBook Pro with 3 $500 gift cards, though I’d be nervous to do it now!
@parisba Find My is probably the reason you can't logout from your devices. Ironically you can even enable Find My while your account is locked (I did at some point, it's just a switch), but then you can't disable it (because for turning the switch off it requires your password, thus a login, and you're locked out of that). Fortunately in my case it was a simple lock due to probably too many invalid password errors and I was able to unlock it by email, but it's a terrible trap nonetheless.
@parisba Hi Paris, this is awful! I am back with my previous employer and have access to an Enterprise Support Account which has plenty of headroom to put in a ticket on your behalf. Hit me up on Monday?
@parisba it's why i moved out of apple it work wonder when it work, but when it don't you are screwd
@parisba as a human beeing: sorry to hear
as an open source, self host fanatic: i have no sympathy for this issue
Relying on commercial big tech for all your digital data can almost not be avoided. We should steer away from it… the cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
Go open source whenever possible…
Clear and enforceable rules and regulations are needed to protect the users against these murky unpredictable and in-transparant monopolies that can simply ban without reasoning.
@parisba I'm really sorry for your loss, but it's never a good idea to have all eggs in one basket, especially photos and such w/o a backup.
Also gift cards, key codes or anything designed for a middle man is always a massive risk in my book, so many people have lost their Steam accounts for redeeming a code that'd been purchased with a stolen CC.
@parisba Corporations do not deserve our loyalty, version 10,000,000,0000.
@parisba Well you are dealing with a big-"tech"-company. What made you think thy care about you? What made you think that, unlike all other big-"tech"-companies, they would not be your enemy?
@parisba So sorry to hear what's happened, it sounds like the worst nightmare imaginable. This part particularly made me roll my eyes:
"I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell."
FFS. That is terrible API design...
@parisba Off topic, but I took the opportunity to block all the accounts who blamed you for not being FOSS-enough.
@parisba I’ve sent your blog post to Tim Cook and Joz on twitter asking them to escalate ASAP
@parisba you don't have a backup of your data? Lesson learned I guess, hope that's the first thing you do when/if you regain access!
@parisba This is honestly nightmarish, I really hope you’ll be able to solve this somehow
@parisba
Microsoft did similar to me with changing their login stuff to one only, and caused me to be unable to access all my art and photos and more for years that was uploaded to their cloud storage but couldn’t now access & there was no one I could reach out to, to fix it. So much work, my life, lost.
Apple also makes it hard to download your work from the cloud and put it on any other hardware.
@parisba Sad story. I hope you get somewhere. Try writing to CNN or other big media, see if you can get some traction with the story.
But the lesson is - never trust your data or your life in any way to big corps. They are all uncaring and corrupt to some level or other. They do not give a flying fuck about customers, full stop, unless you are a billionaire or own a media company, or are an orange dictator.
@parisba I’ll see what if anything #aapl shareowners can do. I am terrified of this too as a personal and small business user (try to keep your spending on each separated to satisfy tax authorities, and not have all eggs in one fragile basket). So many things #aapl seemed to get right and see from the u/x. If this is how they use #ai,or just write code poorly for fraud alerts, it is not good.
@parisba have you made a complaint through apples complaint procedure (probably?). I don’t know if it will help but I learnt that complaints are handled separate to support escalation. After I was repeatedly told there was no one higher to escalate an issue too by chance instead of saying “escalate” I said i wanted to make a complaint and suddenly the support person who said there was no way to escalate further gave me a written contact address for complaints.
@parisba two things:
- Get professional data recovery for your laptops. Alternatively, boot them in target disk mode and have another mac user copy them to a NAS for you. Always have a local copy of the stuff you care about!
- Find a lawyer to write them a letter. Letters from lawyers go to the legal department, which is instant escalation. If that doesn’t work, consider further legal action.
@parisba that’s a very sad to see this type of action from a big corp. To be honest this should be a a wake up call for all of us to learn about self hosting, privacy and ownership of devices and services.
@parisba shared but you should ask yourself why you have made yourself so dependent. If you have been working and programming intensively for 20 years, it shouldm't be a problem to run your own Nextcloud, which works wonderfully with Apple Devices.
@parisba
But you had backups of all content?
@parisba sadly, your best bet is to hire a lawyer that is specialized in these cases.
Friend of mine had a similar thing happening with their professional account on one of the big social media platforms. Nothing helped except this.
I hope you get your account back.
