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I imagine, "Nobody at Apple can unblock your account" simply means that they don't have a standart procedure or person with privilege to unlock the account. If

by mrtksn 5y ago

I imagine, "Nobody at Apple can unblock your account" simply means that they don't have a standart procedure or person with privilege to unlock the account. If that was a small company, you surely can have an engineer to change a record in a database to sort things out but in large companies you usually don't have raw access to data and instead you have procedures that were designed in coordination with multiple departments within the organisation. I.E., if you change something directly on a database, things can get messy at legal, fraud prevention, billing, compliance, security and who knows where else because it's possible that they have a system in place where all these different departments are kept in sync through actions taken through higher level interfaces and if data is accessed directly corruption happens. I don't know anything specific about Apple but in my experience big organisations have huge bureaucracy in form of management software build by Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc. It tends not to be a simple MySQL table where you have the accounts, maybe they will need to remove flags for the account activity on multiple departments so that the systems won't lock the account again and simply they don't have a procedure in place for that.

fragmede 5y ago
But, escalate it high enough, and the person who writes procedures can make it happen. Or to put it another way, this isn't a problem that's going to happen to Tim Cook's best friend since high school, for instance.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  Of course I have no idea how it is in reality for Apple but if it happens that they don't have a procedure in place to fix this already, it could easily mean that someone has to get a budget and hire consultants that specialise in the ERP they use, who will design a solution, implement it, test it and release it and charge 1500$/day per consultant. Tim Cook's best friend can get it, random Joe can't unless stirs up enough media attention.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    My gut feeling is that we should just make such systems legally mandatory. The need for the reversal procedure is a side-effect of Apple's fraud prevention approach and they were the ones to cause the problem. It's only a matter of time until they lose in court and have to reverse such a ban, so why not require the ability to reverse bad decisions in the first place. Facebook pretended that deleting user data was impossible for a long time. But since GDPR made it mandatory they discovered a cheap way to do it. Some laws work like magic ;)

by mrtksn 5y ago

fragmede 5y ago

But, escalate it high enough, and the person who writes procedures can make it happen. Or to put it another way, this isn't a problem that's going to happen to Tim Cook's best friend since high school, for instance.

mrtksn 5y ago
Of course I have no idea how it is in reality for Apple but if it happens that they don't have a procedure in place to fix this already, it could easily mean that someone has to get a budget and hire consultants that specialise in the ERP they use, who will design a solution, implement it, test it and release it and charge 1500$/day per consultant. Tim Cook's best friend can get it, random Joe can't unless stirs up enough media attention.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  My gut feeling is that we should just make such systems legally mandatory. The need for the reversal procedure is a side-effect of Apple's fraud prevention approach and they were the ones to cause the problem. It's only a matter of time until they lose in court and have to reverse such a ban, so why not require the ability to reverse bad decisions in the first place. Facebook pretended that deleting user data was impossible for a long time. But since GDPR made it mandatory they discovered a cheap way to do it. Some laws work like magic ;)