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.
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.