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.
“I wouldn’t like to be caught without a second backup.” – Miles Edward O’Brian, Chief of Operations, Deep Space Nine. (“The O’Brian Principle”).
“<insert every good piece of Free Software advocacy reasoning>” – Every free software advocate who has been on about this during the entire past 20 years and up to twice that, warning us about these kind of things.
Either the user controls the…
or, OP article story.
Part of me is glad the liabilities of trusting these companies with the history of your life are validated. If you don’t control access, you don’t own it.
Imagine having all your important data in just one place.
You either 1) have a backup or 2) will have a backup next time.
That’s what I keep telling myself.
I’ll sort out my backup system, tomorrow.
And tomorrow never comes.
[Genuinely did tell myself that last night… this morning…: [2025-12-16 02:40:20] <Digit> rts do backups script… for tmro’s early hard thing. just make a start. it can grow later. rsync to BOTH bb6/bkps/ and ovhtoo:/home/digit/bkps/.]
Spent the productive part of the day writing more precious things, inadequately backed up.
[Edit: But, at least it’s of my own choosing. Not a corporation doing it to me, with future-faking promises to be faithful to my needs, and so on.]
Some people, yes. 1 hit is what they need to start backing up. Others thay just know. Then there’s the others, who Wil suffer again, and again, and… you get the idea 😞
How many cases like this aren’t making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.
Oh man, my Dropbox situation was so fucked… unintentionally deleted directories, the Dropbox sync kicked in! Needless to say, never again did I trust a Cloud service. At least not in the way to be 100% dependent on it.
I have managed to get to locked out of my own Nextcloud. It was encrypted, and I didn’t know that I had to keep a backup of the keys in its config files. I only had a RAID1 for the user data.
You do this once, but again when the pain wears off. Then encrypted back up keys stored in multiple locations becomes a religion.
I’ve seen a handful of stories about Apple and Google locking people out of their entire digital lives. I think the reason people seem not to care is that most people don’t have the mental bandwidth to go against the grain and move their entire lives off of Apple and Google services, especially when they bought into these devices with the hope of making their lives easier.
Truly, most people don’t realize how dependent they are on megacorps. I’ve been finding that out repeatedly over the last year. I thought I was good because I don’t pay for streaming services, buy video games, or order Amazon delivery… then I took inventory and realized how much I actually relied on YouTube, Twitch, Google Drive, and GitHub.
I also think it’s hard to imagine that something that bad would happen to someone if they didn’t really do something wrong. It seems like an online death penalty punishment, and you’d think that for that they’d really have to have proof that you were doing something horrible. It’s hard to believe that they just make mistakes, and that having a human being review these cases costs them a few dollars, so they just let people’s lives get ruined to increase their profits by 0.000001%
Indeed. No one ever thinks that something like this would happen to them, until it does.
This article needs to be shared and reshared as much as possible so people understand the dangers of putting your faith in a large corporation like that.
I personally know somebody whose online Microsoft account got banned with no explanation.
Friendly advice: never put your entire life in the hands of a corporation!
Also, the migration from local storage to the “cloud” was never a good thing for us, and the small gain in convenience wasn’t worth it, but most people don’t seem to realize that.
Cloud storage allows normal people to better realize a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy though, since it facilitates offsite storage.
That being said, my very important stuff is backed up to more than one cloud provider, just in case.
Cloud storage is fine for your offsite copy as long as you encrypt your data before uploading it. The problem is that a lot of people are using it as their only copy.
I consider it insane to not retain a local backup of anything that is important.
Absolutely, then people go and delete the other copies leaving just the cloud, and think that it’s somehow fine.
then
peopleMicrosoft go and delete the other copies leaving just the cloud,Line Microsoft Onedrive repeatedly forcefully and silently enabling on-demand constantly, then occasionally fucking up and deleting unsynced files
Yeah stuff like that, but also the locally synced copy I would not trust no matter what as really any sync software can suddenly delete or corrupt files. Best to have at least 2 actual backups in place that are versioned and done daily or every few hours.
Personally I don’t think the tradeoff is worth while. I put nothing remotely personal on other peoples computers. I’d rather lose everything. But it is not actually that big a problem, my brother has a backup that I update once a month in his safe in his house, and I have his. Should be good enough.
That still fulfils the offsite requirement of 3-2-1, so you’re still good there. If you both have a NAS, then you can be each other’s “cloud provider” as well.
That being said, my very important stuff is backed up to more than one cloud provider, just in case.
The way things develop, you can’t be sure that you are not banned on all accounts at the same time for political reasons.
Which is the reason for the local backup on my NAS - which is also in a RAID 5 configuration and can survive one drive failure with no loss of data, as well as the copies stored on the original devices. There would need to be a series of unfortunate events for me to lose everything.
But in that case, it’s not a migration to cloud, but just an addition of the cloud as a resource
I’m sure I’m stating the obvious, but you can do both. I backup my important self-hosted data to the cloud (B2, in my case). I also have a colo that I backup to.
How long before an AI company buys all the hard drive supplies and foces us to use cloud storage?
Cloud storage? Oh, that’s the wrong mindset. With the “agi”, you won’t ever need to store data, because everything you need can be generated on-demand /j
gpt, play doom for me
In the general public’s eye: convenience is literally everything
Cloud storage is a good thing. Dependency on it is bad, and doubly so when it’s large corpos
The day “my personal cloud” stopped exclusively referring to my farts was a very good day for me.
Now I will be careful if someone wants to show me their personal cloud
…never put your entire life in the hands of a corporation!
Tesla fans: have you lost your fucking mind
I’m kind of confused why someone would try to pay for an ongoing cloud subscription by buying a $500 gift card.
sometimes stores have sales that includes gift cards so you can get $500 of apple credit for 20% off
Without reading the article, my guess would be a Christmas/birthday gift to them.
You try reading articles before commenting on them. Because as the person you’re commenting to stated, the article says they purchased the gift card themselves.
Maybe recruiter referral reward. They sometimes pay in gift cards.
Their first party account is an interesting read and available on their blog here:
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/The post was updated yesterday with the following:
Update 14 December 2025: Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow, on 15 December 2025. In the mean time, it’s been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai, and others, thanks folks! I’ve received 100s of emails of support, and will reply to you all in time, thank you. Finger’s crossed Apple calls back.
Even if this works, everyone cannot go through this process. Every Apple Fanboy be like, “this is why you have to buy two of every Apple product so if you get locked out of one half you still have your backup”
Second Update 14 December 2025: No luck so far, and not looking good. Anyone got a good lawyer to send them a letter and/or help me sue them? paris AT paris.id.au
Even if they get back and correct all this, I hope the author learns a lesson and begins exporting his digital footprint to other services.
It’s pretty clear he’ll go right back to Apple like a dog to vomit.
Uh … yeah, it’s his livelihood. He writes books on programming with Apple machines. Of course he’s still going to do the things he’s been doing his whole life.
I dunno. If I had made my livelihood working in someone else’s walled garden for years and years, and they unceremoniously kicked me out one day with zero warning, I might begin to question things a little bit??
You don’t need to host your “digital life” with Apple for that. Nor do you need to host it in a single place either.
of course …
help me sue them
Yeah - this really confused me. Why did they make a second update on the 14th when the first update said they’d hear back on the 15th?
He’s in Australia. It was already the 15th there when he posted that, but the person you’re responding to isn’t in Australia and the blog they copied and pasted from probably compensated for time zones.
Edit: Or it’s a typo from a stressed and frantic person.
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.
- Person buys a gift card from a brick-and-mortar store
- Apple says its fraud
- Locks account and refuses to elaborate
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.
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:
The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and 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.
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.
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.
If it’s not in your hands in an open format it’s not yours.
The Terraria dev who had his Google account locked out because of whatever bullshit.
Don’t ever put anything secure/critical in places that aren’t yours.
Pretty much, I’ve been working on reducing my dependence on big tech companies by self hosting or using open source where possible. While impossible to do fully, at least if I lose an account things are either backed up or I’m only losing a small amount of my data.
/c/Selfhosted
Nice name
Thank you. Still getting used to this Lemmy World business.
I’ve been an Apple customer for 35 years. Had an Apple account as long as Apple has had such things. A few years ago (specifically, when Apple started retiring 32-bit apps from the App Store) I saw where Apple was going and created a dedicated account for my Apple ID that’s separate from the one I use for my contact for Apple services.
If Apple locked me out of my account today, I’d lose access to 14 years of app purchases on that account. That’s about it? And at some point I started using an alternative ID for some of my purchases, so I’d only lose access to some of them. And of course, I now keep copies of everything backed up, since they could vanish from Apple’s servers at any time.
You seem a bit dependent on a single provider. Maybe not putting your eggs in one basket might be better… Or two baskets, as it were, with eggs from the same chicken.
Apple is the only provider of Apple IDs.
Other yhan that, I’m not sure what gave you the impression I’m dependent on a single provider?
I’ve been an Apple customer for 35 years. Had an Apple account as long as Apple has had such things.
If Apple locked me out of my account today, I’d lose access to 14 years of app purchases on that account. That’s about it?
No reason.
“I’ve been buying all my oranges from the orange store for 35 years.”
“Boy you don’t eat turkey, do you?”
???
That means they are only depending on apple for the one thing only apple provides, which is app purchases on the Apple platform. Everything else they have locally or backed up somewhere else. It’s literally their point that they’re independent despite having used the platform for so long.
Not the apps that came with it or the infrastructure that supports providing those apps to devices or the devices upon which those apps or services run?
I’m still missing your point.
I’ve got all my apps I’ve downloaded backed up, at least for macOS. iOS… easier to grab the older ones off a pirate repository once Apple stops listing them.
Are you trying to say that everyone should be running Debian Stable without non-free on commodity x86 or RISC-V hardware with only open source hardware gerbers and no proprietary chips?
Nope. At this point, I see that nothing I say will matter. The die has been cast and it’s no longer worth trying.
Enjoy your Apple ecosystem.
Lol seriously…
Stupid people do stupid things. Like putting all apples in one basket.
Sometimes the lesson that needs to be learned in order to appreciate backups is hard…
They have backups, that’s not the point. https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
It’s not a backup if they don’t have at least one rotation in physical possession.
If you do store your data, like me, in iCloud and Apple Photos then you should still take a backup.
The easiest way to do this to request a data export of all your Apple data. It’s then prepared into zip files you can download onto a local storage device.
I do it about once a year, which for me is a reasonable balance between risk and impact.
Here’s a guide: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/get-a-copy-of-your-apple-account-data/
You’re not wrong about anything you’re saying, but I’m learning that a LOT of people are either / or with phones and computers; I know fewer and fewer people who have both. Making a local backup is ideal, but many can’t or don’t have that option.
but I’m learning that a LOT of people are either / or with phones and computers;
My knee jerk reaction was to say something smart ass like “well they should get a computer” but you’re absolutely right.
The customer service woman I talked to was surprised I could talk to her and browse the internet (on a laptop). She told me most people use their phone for everything. I met college kids who were typing their papers on their phones. My mom never owned a computer until I gave her one, and she leaves it in the corner “for emergencies”.
I have no answer. People will continue uploading their lives into Google photos, Facebook galleries, whatever - with no backup, and hope those companies store their data. I think the average person is fucked.
My mom do bussiness and manage financial assets on a smartphone…
Phone literally old, laggy, half-dying, charging port is filled with dust… and also no backups…
lmfao
Of course, actual word documents and stuff and printing were done by me or my older brother
Agreed, but if the data is important, you need to pay another third party for backups. If something is important and you only have it stored once, that’s on you, no tech is infallable.
Everyone always learns the hard way, just the same as I did - one copy is usually as good as no copies at all.
For data you can’t afford to lose, the 3-2-1 rule is king. Original, cold local, and remote.
Nothing said he didn’t have backups of data
His blog post says he does have backups of the data
Edit: Changed basically the whole comment, as you’re right. I looked at the Blog, and it does state in his FAQ that he had a backup. Which frankly makes a significant part of the article completely BS - as it makes multiple heavy implications that he didn’t have any backup.
This apparently happened with “no explanation and no recourse,” putting “terabytes of family photos” and their entire message history out of reach, as well as preventing the ability to sync work across devices.
He has copies elsewhere, so why would he be worried about losing access to this data.
Also, the end of the article discusses not storing all your data in one place…
If you store your photos and files in a single place, it’s a good idea to back them up to multiple locations to protect against something going wrong. But with how integrated devices are these days, it’s hard to avoid having all your apps, purchases and media within a single ecosystem. In cases like that, there’s not a lot you can do.
So it wouldn’t be wrong of most people to walk away from this article with the assumption that he didn’t have a proper backup strategy.
If that’s true, then the title is misleading and clickbait-y.
Did you only read the title…?
