Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
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My question was why one can't back up one's data though, not what this product is. I'm even more confused now that I know it's Pages/Keynote/etc. since those have always been file-based so far as I've seen from classmates who used it
If they’re shared, surely someone else can still access them?
Concerning all those 'bricked' devices it would be really nice to get some more details concerning the 'block'.
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?
While I agree that entering a dark alley shouldn't result in ill effects, if I'll effects happen in said dark alley it is still worth the discussion to remind people to stay out of dark alleys in today's day and age (or until the root problem, whatever it is, is improved).
Pretending that it is OK to enter dark alleys and forcing blame elsewhere will continue to have people unwittingly enter dark alleys.
This is not a dark alley. It's the main street. It's the world we live in. iPhone has more than half the market share in the US and well over a billion users worldwide. Moreover, Apple, Google, and Microsoft collectively monopolize consumer operating systems on both mobile and desktop. Try going into a retail store and buying a computing device that is not running iOS, Android, macOS, or Windows. That's the reality for most people.
The dark alleys are the non-mainstream options that hardly anyone knows about.
I don't know why some people have made "convenience" into a dirty word. Almost everything we do is for convenience. You could live in a remote log cabin with no electricity and grow/hunt your own food, separating yourself from most of society, but that wouldn't be convenient or pleasant.
Individual consumers have very little power over the market. There's a collective action problem, which is why governments and regulation exist... or should exist. The way I see it, the root problem is a massive failure by (corrupt) governments to protect consumer rights.
Perhaps the root problem is that we've blown too far past Dunbar's number to be able to deal with the societies we live in. All of these systems we've contrived to mitigate the trust problem are full of holes.
I think the US government did start that way. Maybe not "corrupt" as such, but the United States was founded by plutocrats and was clearly designed to protect the minority of plutocrats against mass democracy.
> Even the log cabin has downsides compared to the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Yes, but I'd say the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle has even greater downsides, and our current state of convenience is in many ways a vast improvement over the precarious existence of our distant ancestors.
The real solution is to have a neutral, efficient and formal process under supervision of regulators to have such case escalated and handled.
I already see all the tech-bros coming: “you see it was not an issue, they reinstated the account after you posted” while ignoring there are silent victims.
A trillion dollar company with premium hardware and software that has more than 50% smartphone share in US and is used by 1.5 billion people worldwide is not "know to be a thief".
Your rant is essentially a crazy hobo stashing cash under his mattress and calling anyone using a bank idiot.
Most people don’t save enough to handle an emergency, even if they have the cash flow for it. Most people don’t do basic, cheap preparation for a natural or manmade disaster. Most people don’t do at least minimal planning to make life easier for their families and loved ones if they are incapacitated or die, until very late in life. Most people are indeed idiots.
Not only does no one read it but it seems like they are intentionally designed to be difficult to read.
They are written by lawyers for lawyers, not for common people to read.
Of course, that doesn't help in the US with its vicious Supreme Court endorsing the most blatant abuses under cover of binding aritration.
There should be laws to protect people, instead of blaming victims.
This leaves you with just about zero cloud storage solutions that you can use.
Yes, yes, you can rsync your files to your NAS. Now explain that to your non tech-savvy neighbors.
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't hesitate to sue them. In almost all cases this causes them to "wake up" 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.
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's like watching someone on a rail track arguing not knowing what is about to hit them.
It's my understanding that banks really don't want your money once they've closed an account, they want you to take it back.
Bigger banks, at least in the US, usually do this.
Convenience is a hell of a drug.
iCloud literally encourages users to opt for storing originals only in the cloud. It'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.
To me this is the biggest problem. Just like a bank can decide to close your account at any time, it's reasonable that Apple (or any business) could do the same. But they can't keep your stuff.
You can say "don't be naive and assume your cloud data is safe", but in today's world that's like saying "don't keep your money in a bank". The reason I pay for iCloud storage is because it's supposed to be safe (safer than my local HDD going bust or getting lost).
We really need laws for this sort of thing. They should have included it in the DMA for gatekeepers.
Unfortunately I still don't know a service I can use that will allow me to sync my current MP3s / what I have in Apple Music, and export it if I need it. There's really an issue of owning data and being able to take it elsewhere :/
I'm relatively happy with Tidal, but there are definitely a number of moments with it that make me sigh and internally say "see, this is why Spotify is winning". so much of it would be easy to change too, they just don't do it.
I've got Spotify as a native app in my 2024 ev and it's strange in that it starts songs like 1 second in, all the time. very unclear how that happens other than a software bug.
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.
youremail+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.
Re: "mac.com isn't doing email anymore", all the original mac.com email addresses still work fine. Apple has played around with various domains (mac.com/me.com/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, ""security"" 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're easy to forget defeating the purpose. It'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's dead and can'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.
On a device: Settings > (iCloud user) > Sign-in & Security -> (+) {{name}}@gmail.com
If that doesn't work, then use the dot trick.. y.ourname@gmail.com
PS: My plan is to wait for Apple to release a folding iPhone to move back!
https://account.apple.com/account/manage/section/subscriptio...
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.
Apple Pty Ltd, PO Box A2629, Sydney South NSW 1235
In many legal jurisdictions, a 'demand letter' 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's $100 to file.
The goal is to force a fix, at threat of legal consequences.
I am sending an email.
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'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.
Sure, but if it's a corporation, who is going to represent the corporation besides a lawyer? In the US, some states explicitly do not allow a lawyer and require a different officer of the company represent them, but plenty do allow lawyers.
If Paris is taking Apple to the tribunal, there's no single human equivalent to Paris on Apple's side. This seems like the exact sort of situation where a lawyer is approved to represent somebody else.
Under common law, lawyers (in the US sense) are not required on either side in the case of handling a dispute or a small claim.
Specifically in Australia, the company would have a complaint department, and the case would be dealt with by a complaint officer, not a lawyer.
If the scope of the case exceeds the tribunal's authority, the case is handled in state's district court or in a federal court for cross-jurisdictional matters. The official title of the person representing the defendant (e.g. a company) in a courtroom is the barrister, but the case documentation and legal advice are provided by a solicitor.
Only certain NCAT case types give an automatic right to representation, so a company can have a «lawyer» appear without seeking leave. NCAT’s own guidance[1] lists these as:
Administrative review and regulation
Professional discipline
Retail leases
Since I do not know the nature and specifics of your Australian organisation, I have nothing else of significance to contribute on that particular topic.
To sum it up, the most common dispute scenarios involve the following sequence of events: consumer ↝ complaint department ↝ state/federal level regulator, e.g. Department of Fair Trading (NSW), ACCC (federal) or similar ↝ ombudsman or xCAT or a court. The regulatorory step can sometimes be skipped.
[0] https://ncat.nsw.gov.au/how-ncat-works/prepare-for-your-hear...
[1] https://ncat.nsw.gov.au/how-ncat-works/prepare-for-your-hear...
Stripe terms allow them to hold the funds until 'investigation' is concluded but while held, they have the right to invest the funds and keep the profit.
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.
</rant>
Gift cards are the best proof against the existence of the homo economicus, that's for sure.
We should probably normalize Chinese Red envelopes because honestly I'd take a nice envelope with a hand written note and some crisp bills over the annoying gift cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_envelope)
Even if you like their services, who knows what they'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.
In fact, it is far worse than paying with a credit card directly in terms of risk. At least, when something goes wrong (which rarely ever happens), the bank has your back. On the other hand, I have seen too many cases where people find their gift card codes invalid.
Not really helpful when your account is the important thing though, you can't do a chargeback without your account getting banned.
Regulatory agencies can forward complaints to other authorities and act based on them even if they can't resolve the particular issue for the complainant.
And I promise he will not revise the stance after this experience because of ideological capture.
I just want to keep using my stuff, and getting on with the fun things I get to work on. I don't have a strong attachment to Apple, I have a strong attachment to the familiar productivity I normally have.
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'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.
OP has reached out to Apple employees internally, they're aware of the issue. A false-positive should get remediated quickly, the only way this can persist is by neglecting customer support. This thread is flooded with similar horror stories from the ecosystem and I'm sure Apple employees themselves have dealt with this problem. It's Apple's bureaucratic dysfunction that allows this to happen, and people have been warning about the dangers of vertical integration for years. Yet Apple's executives ignore their warnings, and Apple's customers follow suit.
"deserve" is an unnecessarily harsh word, but I'd be lying if I said you weren't courting fate. The day iCloud is revealed to be a FVEY racket, I won't feel pity for the users. Especially not the technical folks who should know better.
It really makes me angry that people just decide to allow corporations to take away their freedoms. This makes the world a harder place to live in because people that allow there freedoms to be taken away furthers the surveillance capitalism we all are harmed by.
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 imagine it could be helpful to other people in the same situation.
Obviously someone either at Apple's gift card printing contractor or at UPS snatched it.
Apple's suggested "solution" was for me to issue a chargeback on my credit card -- yes, the vendor suggesting a chargeback. I refused, because the credit card in question was my Apple Card, and I have read elsewhere that doing something like this can lead to your Apple account getting locked.
The exec escalation was the only way I got it resolved. It was Kafkaesque.
I think one major lesson to take from this (and other physical gift card vulnerabilities, like people that go and peek at the numbers on unredeemed cards in stores and then wait for them to be loaded) is: don't use physical gift cards anymore.
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..
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.
yeah that'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's some decent, reasonably priced apps to handle this like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parachute-backup/id6748614170?... (no affiliation)
I wonder if it can calculate (estimate) how big of an external disk I'll need. My wife and I each have 40-50k photos and a few thousand videos in iCloud Photos.
Even doing this yearly can save the immense sadness of lost memories. And of course, this works for emails, and everything else.
If you encrypt it, make sure you use a method not tied to any external service, or the machine you're on. I don't use Apple, yet I suspect that an encrypted external backup might be tied to your Apple ID, or some such, because that's how the world flies today.
I wouldn't bother to encrypt, it's just family photos and I wouldn't want to complicate restores. Especially if it was my wife who eventually needed to use it.
Weirdly, that number is different than Immich’s estimate of my photo library (95 GB vs 150 GB), but perhaps good enough to get you in the ballpark.
:)
I’m being dismissed by I run a rather large homelab and I still want my photos iCloud like, where end devices decrypt and run ML. Immich is a Google Photos clone where you give it everything and some server does all the magic.
You could even set it up so that it could only backup over tailscale or wireguard through a tunneled connection so ALL of your traffic is e2e.
seems pretty high touch. A lot of hoop-jumping if you don't have a mac in the middle
How do we know using such a tool won’t trigger an account lockout? How ironic would that be.
Been running it for a couple years without issue. But yes your milage may vary.
I do have a Mac so it didn’t seem difficult to me, but I accept it will be for those that don’t.
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.
The reason is simple: photos require much more processing and focus on performance. In addition, photos take up much more space, so while my Nextcloud instance runs on an SSD, the photos reside on an HDD, mostly in sleep mode.
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….
Wasabi is much cheaper than AWS as well.
Finally the best solution for backing up your iCloud Photos is definitely Immich. Set it up on your own NAS or a VPS, back up to that, and then back up that server to an S3 storage using rsync or restic. I’ll note that I still backup to Backblaze because its so dang cheap.
I spent months trying to find the best setup a few months ago and this is by far the cheapest.
But still, this shouldn’t be required for normal people. They should get what they pay for.
It’s actually more nuanced. It will back up files on a USB attached drive. If it doesn’t see the drive attached for 30 days, it will erase the backup.
If you have your computer off for more than 30 days and you bring your computer back on and the USB drive isn’t attached when it connects to BackBlaze, it will erase it.
Yeah I’m not going to trust my storage to Wasabi.
AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive is $1 a month.
Only if you’re backing up nothing and using non-encrypted files and making sure you don’t delete anything (rsync with delete turned off). I tested this not even three months ago. I hit $30 with only 3 tb of data with deep archive while wasabi AND backblaze cost less than that. No need to even trust a single provider. If you’re never changing your files AND you don’t care about encrypting them then yes GDA is fine and pretty cheap. Otherwise wasabi and backblaze get more done for less cost.
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