Thread

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"After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse."
hey.paris
20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectivel...

Replies (36)

Wild. Cant trust these tech companies. I was auto-banned from X twice AFTEE MUSK TOOK OVER (maybe a legacy thing leftover at the time, it was early on). Nothing I did violated the terms, and since then Musk himself has posted things that are the same things I said. In the effort to scale, I guess things have to be automated? In any case that was just an X account. I can’t imagine having my work depend on it and all my photos. Imo this falls in the category of a crime by Apple.
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↩ replying to The Fishcake (nostr.build)
I would say you're right, that generally speaking, there is more to the story in many of these situations. But we do also know that these companies algos are too aggressive too, so it is entirely possible that this was just a failure and once it gets enough eyeballs, it gets resolved. But the thing here is that not everyone has the capability to do this. That's what makes this so bad. He should not have to fight so hard to get this life back. They have too much control.
↩ replying to The Fishcake (nostr.build)
Of course you want to present your best case to get back a valuable account. There's nothing surprising here. The problem is when people start accepting bullshit harmful narratives like "There's no smoke without fire" or "He really shouldn't have pissed them off now he ruffled too many feathers". ... and get back to business as usual. Stories like this point to important truths about the current reality: We are controlled and this could happen to anyone, REGARDLESS of what he did.
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↩ replying to The Fishcake (nostr.build)
He updated the post, his account was restored.
hey.paris
20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectivel...
 Be careful redeeming gift cards I guess, lest your digital life be summarily taken from you.
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Same happened to me on Amazon. Gift card, and then they just banned my whole account. The only way to access support is from the web interface of the banned account. No audible books, no Kindle books I've purchased, even my gift card balance disappeared. But it allowed me to discover libro.fm as an alternative to audible.
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At my last job we had an iPhone & 2 iPads tied to the same apple account. We used the phone to text customers. Apple decided we were spamming people. Account locked. Couldn't log out of the devices, get updates, install new apps etc. The device became paperweights basically, no way to recover them, even through DFU mode.
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↩ replying to dot GNT
It's not perfect but over the past decadeor two it's gotten incredibly easier year after year. I've been self-hosting much of my stuff since 2008. Since then, our technology stack has drastically improved. Home internet speed and reliability has improved. Networking products has improved to allow this to be easier. Compute power has increased to where you don't need to have a server rack in your house. If you don't want to, you can literally use a computer that's the size of your hand. And most importantly, the software stack has gotten so incredibly easy that you can self-host with the click of a button.