An Apple fan who has spent “nearly 30 years as a loyal customer” says they’ve been “permanently” locked out of their Apple Account due to what might be the overzealous actions of Apple’s automated anti-fraud system. It’s left them locked out of “20 years of digital life,” and it all started with the seemingly straightforward purchase of an Apple gift card.
Not an “apple fan”, an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.
Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple’s ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.
I think the root issue is still real, regardless of how much koolaid this person drank.
Agreed 100%. I think it’s understandable to feel schadenfreude on someone this deeply embedded being bit by the arbitrary business practices of big corpo in a worst case scenario type of situation.
But the problem is the business practices, not the person being affected. The guy’s job feeding Apples gargantuan content engine doesn’t make this alright.
It’s their fault for being born into a world where antitrust laws stopped being enforced a quarter of a century ago. They should do better.
Still doesn’t explain why he didn’t have local backups of his important data. If you’ve had computers that long, and are a developer — you should know better.
Apple, like Microsoft, Google, and others has a real web of dependencies for all its software. Even if he did back up all his important data, unless it was in an open format with open metadata it probably still requires an Apple program to open, which will require his Apple ID to be working. And every one of these big monopolists makes it really hard to fully export your data and metadata in a useful, unencumbered format because keeping people locked into their ecosystem is part of their business plan.
We’re all doing the best we can to live in unregulatedcapitalismland while staying sane, keeping our data backed up, eating healthily, getting enough sleep, getting exercise, spending enough time with friends and family, and so on. Things eventually slip.
You’d be amazed how many people are competent developers but have very little knowledge outside of what their job requires. I have friends in hiring positions and they see it all the time. Inflexible workflows and the complete inability to work if part of that workflow ceases to function are unfortunately common.
He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.
The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:
Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.
Yeah, his photos and other content he generated may be retrievable via personal backups, but if he bought media or apps from Apple, those are unavailable if he’s not authenticated via Appleid, and if his devices can’t authenticate he is basically unable to use them for anything.