14 ms·

I'm glad that got resolved for Paris, but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory res

by oidar 10mo ago

I'm glad that got resolved for Paris, but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. First he had understand what happened technically, then he needed a public platform to tell people about it, then that writing needed to get reposted by others, than PR needed to get involved. Not something that's going to happen for a normal user. Apple, Google, and the big players are not a trustworthy place to entrust precious data. Increasingly, Apple and Google aren't very much different as they are both in the advertisement business: the great misaligner of incentives.

sigseg1v 10mo ago
Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they would do a "one time good faith" gesture by unbanning me but warned if it ever happens again they cannot help and that my account will be flagged with this. In the end I didn't do anything wrong and the bank didn't do anything wrong, it was all on steam. It was over $10 by the way.
- vablings 10mo ago
  Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors. It's very likely that they have metrics for larger marketplaces about being below a threshold for fraud. Online game stores like steam live, breathe and die by payment processing. This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. The payment processors saw a bunch of fraud related to a game called RuneScape and told Jagex if they dont fix this then they will be blacklisted.
  - IshKebab 10mo ago
    > Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse. This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it. Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to be money-related.
    - vablings 10mo ago
      > This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it. Yes, it was and it always has been[1] >I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse This is par for course with every single EULA ever. I will say in the case of Steam it's hard pressed to find your account completely disabled and unable to play the games you rightfully purchased. I think the worst-case scenario is that you will be banned from engaging with the steam online community which restricts your ability to play with other users on steam 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
      - IshKebab 10mo ago
        Redlining is not really the same as what we're talking about (but should also be illegal).
        vablings 10mo ago
        Redlining is the example that I am giving to show this has long been the behavior of businesses and unless its racist it's not illegal. Also read your EULAs
  - lurk2 10mo ago
    > This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. Gold farmers were paying for bot memberships using stolen credit cards, which Jagex had to refund along with a chargeback fee. The blackmail scenario you’re describing wouldn’t make any sense since all of these gold farmers used mule accounts to launder their gold before making the trades. The changes to the trade system were intended to interfere with this laundering so that farming would no longer be profitable.
- ndriscoll 10mo ago
  They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, their ban loses all teeth.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    I'm not an avid gamer, so maybe this is a naive question, but how do you know these things before you buy the game?
    - ghjv 10mo ago
      Steam's lawyers would say that one should know by reading the terms of service for the storefront and the purchase. But in the real world, how often does that happen?
    - dfxm12 10mo ago
      This is 90% of the reason I don't bother buying modern computer games. For me, I assume games require phoning home and use some kind of DRM unless it is otherwise advertised.
    - xp84 10mo ago
      Assume everything is encrapified with “strong” DRM unless credibly demonstrated otherwise.
      - lozf 10mo ago
        "encrapsulated"
    - ndriscoll 10mo ago
      You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG, or on Steam, it lists third party DRM, so you can know whether you have the tools to remove it (and whether you have the tools to remove Steam's DRM, or whether the game appears on a web list of games that don't use any DRM). You could also refund it if you can't verify you're able to successfully back it up and run the backup on a computer or user session without Steam installed. For multiplayer, if it's possible, you can find people discussing it on the web (maybe in pirate communities). Otherwise, just don't buy it. Some recent stats indicated most gamers buy at most two games per year, so it's not a ton of work to ensure they have a working archive.
- ferguess_k 10mo ago
  Buy from GoG instead. It's better. At least you can download the install files and don't need to install any 3rd party software to login to play them. I have 200+ games on Steam but I have ceased purchase on Steam.
- kmfrk 10mo ago
  There's also grey areas with Steam like when you buy a Steam key for a game outside of Steam through places like GreenManGaming and get your reviews discounted or otherwise flagged arbitrarily based on an opaque authenticity heuristic. https://www.greenmangaming.com https://www.greenmangaming.com
  - SXX 10mo ago
    Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands. It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.
    - ragazzina 10mo ago
      Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.
      - llbbdd 10mo ago
        Developers can sell those keys outside of Steam and they are redeemable for a copy of the game on your Steam library.
      - the_pwner224 10mo ago
        Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform. If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.
      - SXX 10mo ago
        How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible. Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  Which goes to show, being the nice Linux guys doesn't change they are a corporation like all others, and will behave exactly the same.
  - the_pwner224 10mo ago
    Afaik if your account is banned Valve still lets you log in to Steam and access your existing library of purchased games. You just lose access to all the other platform features. Obviously that's their policy that they can change anytime... but in this case, it's not inconsistent to their "nice Linux guys" persona.
csomar 10mo ago
> but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not store their data in their iPhones. Period. I only store temporary data and photos I wouldn't care about.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Well, not only in their iPhones. And not in the same cloud storage provided by the phone. The only backups you really control are the ones in your possession, so you must keep offline local backups of anything really important to you. The big marketing point of cloud storage was that you would not need to worry about owning and maintaining local storage, but they conveniently downplayed the fact that they could lock you out of your own files at their whim.
  - csomar 10mo ago
    Actually in this case, the danger is in the cloud storage not the phone's. The user still can access/use his phone, just not the cloud-connected functionalities.
    - SoftTalker 10mo ago
      Only because Apple didn't remotely lock the phone as well, which they surely have the technical capability to do.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  The data in his iPhone was not impacted. His Apple cloud account was locked until the account representative unlocked it. The physical device was not locked, bricked, or wiped. The situation was bad, but let’s stick to the facts
  - hamdingers 10mo ago
    His iPhone could not sync, update, install new software, or send messages, nor could he sign out and use a new apple ID with it to restore that functionality. For a phone, this is effectively bricked. Paris uses the term "bricked" in the original post: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/
ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
> as they are both in the advertisement business Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money (lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware. Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way it is, now. I get the feeling that a lot of folks on HN are having difficulty understanding businesses that make a profit by doing stuff other than harvesting and selling PiD, but that's not what has made Apple a 4 trillion-dollar company. They make that money the old-fashioned way; but with a modern twist. That said, this situation is unforgivable, and I hope that Apple leads by example, by preventing this all-too-common type of dumpster fire from happening in the future.
- SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Apple makes money on hardware and a 30% tax on developers. They might have some goodwill but are not making any money on privacy.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
    Yup. But not on advertising. I wasn't defending Apple. I was merely pointing out that one of these, is not like the other. Like I said, it seems that we have a hard time understanding business models other than "Harvest and sell data." Posts like the GP, seem to reinforce this appearance. Upton Sinclair is known for a quote, referencing this kind of thing.
    - oidar 10mo ago
      There are ways to abuse advertising other than harvesting and selling user data - which is a big one. Which apple has already done (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-data-1849950163 https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...)For example, the app store places unadvertised apps further down the list on searches or doesn't even show them at all.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
browningstreet 10mo ago
We expect RCAs when tech companies have major outages, this situation deserves a public one from Apple, too. I'm sure we won't get one though.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
qingcharles 10mo ago
I mean, the situation is the same for a lot of things now. You must have large social media presence to get any sort of working customer service.
rconti 10mo ago
They covered this a lot on the Accidental Tech Podcast last night. I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards-- at least, not if they can't be redeemed safely. I'm sure people would run other kinds of scams with AppleIDs without the existence of gift cards, but gift card redemption scams have gotta be 99% of the reason people create fake accounts. The support burden would evaporate almost overnight if they just exited this stupid market.
- inanepenguin 10mo ago
  > I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards If they're anything like Starbucks then they get the benefit of utilizing the unredeemed balances as temporary capital for investments. It's an interest free loan at their scale. Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem.
  - pmahoney 10mo ago
    > Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem I'm not an expert here, but this is not generally true. See "giftcard escheatment laws". I think these vary by state, but see e.g. https://legalclarity.org/when-do-gift-cards-become-subject-to-escheat/ https://legalclarity.org/when-do-gift-cards-become-subject-t... The value of abandoned cards goes to the state.
    - al_borland 10mo ago
      Some states have laws that gift cards never expire, like California. A lot of companies will just go with the most strict rule, rather than micromanaging state by state. The side effect of this is the company "keeps" the money that isn't spent. It may be earmarked at gift card money, but it will never be spent. I am terrible at spending gift cards. I have some that are from 2007, 18 years old. Two years ago I decided I should check them all and actually spend them. Of the dozen or so cards (several of them for Apple), only 2 of them had an issue, all the others were still active with the original balance. One of the issues was easily solved, it was a Visa gift card that had an expiration date... I reached out to the company and they issued a new card with an extended date. The other seemed to be so old that the underlying company was sold and pivoted, and changed systems (I assume multiple times) along the way. What was a card for a local restaurant chain now seemed dedicated to Dick's Sporting Goods... at least that's where the phone number went. I haven't yet tried going to the actual restaurant to see what happens. This reminded me I did an awful job of actually spending them. I guess I need to try again.
charcircuit 10mo ago
>Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. You can contact an employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation
- lynndotpy 10mo ago
  This is not a known fact about the world and would not be a solution even if it were.
  - charcircuit 10mo ago
    It doesn't have to be a fact. But it does point out that in practice you are not that many connections away from a human can fix the problem.
- integralid 10mo ago
  They contacted multiple employees and insiders and nobody was able to help before his blog post was featured oh HN. He was deep in Apple ecosystem and personally knew many people there, from what I understand.
- bookofjoe 10mo ago
  >You can contact an employee Off topic pretty much: In 2013 I was one of the 8,000 people in the U.S. selected by Google to be able to buy Google Glass ($1,500 [$2,000 in today's money]) in its first release to the public. One thing I will never get over is the customer service offered to us Glassholes: not a toll-free number, no automated voice mail tree: I'd call for any reason AT ANY TIME NIGHT OR DAY OR WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY and a Glass specialist would answer within a couple rings and spend as much time on the phone with me as I needed to resolve my issue.
TuringNYC 10mo ago
This article alone is grounds for me to never, ever use Apple gift cards -- just by virtue of all the personal photos, etc that I've entrusted to iCloud.
- shaky-carrousel 10mo ago
  Honestly you'll be safer if you don't use any major cloud provider for anything valuable. They've proven over and over again that they are very unreliable.
- autoexec 10mo ago
  The real wisdom to take away from this is that you need to keep copies of everything you've ever entrusted to iCloud because iCloud cannot be trusted. This was one instance where a giftcard seems to have caused someone to lose access to their stuff, but there's nothing stopping some other random thing fully outside of your control from causing Apple to kick you out of the things you've given them to keep for you. Everything in the cloud is at risk of being taken from you. Companies like Apple are not your friend. They explicitly make no promises and insist that they are not accountable/liable. Stop trusting them.
  - cogogo 10mo ago
    I agree with this but I am not sure the personal risk of loss is very high with Apple. It is real but is it even on the same order of magnitude of losing your family photos in a house fire 30yrs ago? I used to keep a disk in a safe deposit box with my pics but got lazy. Is that good practice or paranoia?
    - autoexec 10mo ago
      Seems like good practice to me to keep digital backups in your safe deposit box. Probably a good idea to check/refresh them every couple years too. When it comes to things like house fires and getting screwed by cloud providers everybody thinks that it can never happen to them even when examples of it happening to others exist. The important thing to make sure that you're covered in the event that the rare but catastrophic event does occur. Especially when the cost of doing so is so low. For back ups it amounts to little more than a thumb drive and a visit to your bank every couple years.
fencepost 10mo ago
The solution should be obvious to everyone: Just go back to 2008 and start running a large Apple developer conference in your country. If you do that, it should only take a week or two to get your problem resolved. I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly, but if the card itself was tampered with (stolen, opened, scraped and code retrieved, re-covered with generically available scratch-off material, re-sealed, returned to the display) there's nothing keeping that from happening in Apple stores as well. There is a technical measure that gift card providers could put in place to reduce this, specifically they could block activation of any cards with codes for which they've already started receiving activation/balance checks. There'd still be some risk (thieves would need to wait before testing cards and would have to hope for cards that were purchased but not yet redeemed) but it could be reduced somewhat.
- aranelsurion 10mo ago
  > I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly This would be a good measure assuming we’ve fully discovered all the reasons Apple might ban you for, and only reason happens to be gift cards. Since we don’t know what other seemingly trivial actions may provoke Apple to wipe an account, I think starting a developer conference is the only way to be safe.

by oidar 10mo ago

sigseg1v 10mo ago

Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they would do a "one time good faith" gesture by unbanning me but warned if it ever happens again they cannot help and that my account will be flagged with this. In the end I didn't do anything wrong and the bank didn't do anything wrong, it was all on steam. It was over $10 by the way.

vablings 10mo ago
Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors. It's very likely that they have metrics for larger marketplaces about being below a threshold for fraud. Online game stores like steam live, breathe and die by payment processing. This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. The payment processors saw a bunch of fraud related to a game called RuneScape and told Jagex if they dont fix this then they will be blacklisted.
- IshKebab 10mo ago
  > Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse. This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it. Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to be money-related.
  - vablings 10mo ago
    > This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it. Yes, it was and it always has been[1] >I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse This is par for course with every single EULA ever. I will say in the case of Steam it's hard pressed to find your account completely disabled and unable to play the games you rightfully purchased. I think the worst-case scenario is that you will be banned from engaging with the steam online community which restricts your ability to play with other users on steam 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
    - IshKebab 10mo ago
      Redlining is not really the same as what we're talking about (but should also be illegal).
      - vablings 10mo ago
        Redlining is the example that I am giving to show this has long been the behavior of businesses and unless its racist it's not illegal. Also read your EULAs
- lurk2 10mo ago
  > This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. Gold farmers were paying for bot memberships using stolen credit cards, which Jagex had to refund along with a chargeback fee. The blackmail scenario you’re describing wouldn’t make any sense since all of these gold farmers used mule accounts to launder their gold before making the trades. The changes to the trade system were intended to interfere with this laundering so that farming would no longer be profitable.
ndriscoll 10mo ago
They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, their ban loses all teeth.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  I'm not an avid gamer, so maybe this is a naive question, but how do you know these things before you buy the game?
  - ghjv 10mo ago
    Steam's lawyers would say that one should know by reading the terms of service for the storefront and the purchase. But in the real world, how often does that happen?
  - dfxm12 10mo ago
    This is 90% of the reason I don't bother buying modern computer games. For me, I assume games require phoning home and use some kind of DRM unless it is otherwise advertised.
  - xp84 10mo ago
    Assume everything is encrapified with “strong” DRM unless credibly demonstrated otherwise.
    - lozf 10mo ago
      "encrapsulated"
  - ndriscoll 10mo ago
    You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG, or on Steam, it lists third party DRM, so you can know whether you have the tools to remove it (and whether you have the tools to remove Steam's DRM, or whether the game appears on a web list of games that don't use any DRM). You could also refund it if you can't verify you're able to successfully back it up and run the backup on a computer or user session without Steam installed. For multiplayer, if it's possible, you can find people discussing it on the web (maybe in pirate communities). Otherwise, just don't buy it. Some recent stats indicated most gamers buy at most two games per year, so it's not a ton of work to ensure they have a working archive.
ferguess_k 10mo ago
Buy from GoG instead. It's better. At least you can download the install files and don't need to install any 3rd party software to login to play them. I have 200+ games on Steam but I have ceased purchase on Steam.
kmfrk 10mo ago
There's also grey areas with Steam like when you buy a Steam key for a game outside of Steam through places like GreenManGaming and get your reviews discounted or otherwise flagged arbitrarily based on an opaque authenticity heuristic. https://www.greenmangaming.com https://www.greenmangaming.com
- SXX 10mo ago
  Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands. It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.
  - ragazzina 10mo ago
    Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.
    - llbbdd 10mo ago
      Developers can sell those keys outside of Steam and they are redeemable for a copy of the game on your Steam library.
    - the_pwner224 10mo ago
      Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform. If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.
    - SXX 10mo ago
      How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible. Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.
pjmlp 10mo ago
Which goes to show, being the nice Linux guys doesn't change they are a corporation like all others, and will behave exactly the same.
- the_pwner224 10mo ago
  Afaik if your account is banned Valve still lets you log in to Steam and access your existing library of purchased games. You just lose access to all the other platform features. Obviously that's their policy that they can change anytime... but in this case, it's not inconsistent to their "nice Linux guys" persona.

csomar 10mo ago

> but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not store their data in their iPhones. Period. I only store temporary data and photos I wouldn't care about.

SoftTalker 10mo ago
Well, not only in their iPhones. And not in the same cloud storage provided by the phone. The only backups you really control are the ones in your possession, so you must keep offline local backups of anything really important to you. The big marketing point of cloud storage was that you would not need to worry about owning and maintaining local storage, but they conveniently downplayed the fact that they could lock you out of your own files at their whim.
- csomar 10mo ago
  Actually in this case, the danger is in the cloud storage not the phone's. The user still can access/use his phone, just not the cloud-connected functionalities.
  - SoftTalker 10mo ago
    Only because Apple didn't remotely lock the phone as well, which they surely have the technical capability to do.
Aurornis 10mo ago
The data in his iPhone was not impacted. His Apple cloud account was locked until the account representative unlocked it. The physical device was not locked, bricked, or wiped. The situation was bad, but let’s stick to the facts
- hamdingers 10mo ago
  His iPhone could not sync, update, install new software, or send messages, nor could he sign out and use a new apple ID with it to restore that functionality. For a phone, this is effectively bricked. Paris uses the term "bricked" in the original post: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/ https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago

> as they are both in the advertisement business Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money (lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware. Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way it is, now. I get the feeling that a lot of folks on HN are having difficulty understanding businesses that make a profit by doing stuff other than harvesting and selling PiD, but that's not what has made Apple a 4 trillion-dollar company. They make that money the old-fashioned way; but with a modern twist. That said, this situation is unforgivable, and I hope that Apple leads by example, by preventing this all-too-common type of dumpster fire from happening in the future.

SoftTalker 10mo ago
Apple makes money on hardware and a 30% tax on developers. They might have some goodwill but are not making any money on privacy.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  Yup. But not on advertising. I wasn't defending Apple. I was merely pointing out that one of these, is not like the other. Like I said, it seems that we have a hard time understanding business models other than "Harvest and sell data." Posts like the GP, seem to reinforce this appearance. Upton Sinclair is known for a quote, referencing this kind of thing.
  - oidar 10mo ago
    There are ways to abuse advertising other than harvesting and selling user data - which is a big one. Which apple has already done (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-data-1849950163 https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...)For example, the app store places unadvertised apps further down the list on searches or doesn't even show them at all.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

browningstreet 10mo ago

We expect RCAs when tech companies have major outages, this situation deserves a public one from Apple, too. I'm sure we won't get one though.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

qingcharles 10mo ago

I mean, the situation is the same for a lot of things now. You must have large social media presence to get any sort of working customer service.

rconti 10mo ago

They covered this a lot on the Accidental Tech Podcast last night. I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards-- at least, not if they can't be redeemed safely. I'm sure people would run other kinds of scams with AppleIDs without the existence of gift cards, but gift card redemption scams have gotta be 99% of the reason people create fake accounts. The support burden would evaporate almost overnight if they just exited this stupid market.

inanepenguin 10mo ago
> I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards If they're anything like Starbucks then they get the benefit of utilizing the unredeemed balances as temporary capital for investments. It's an interest free loan at their scale. Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem.
- pmahoney 10mo ago
  > Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem I'm not an expert here, but this is not generally true. See "giftcard escheatment laws". I think these vary by state, but see e.g. https://legalclarity.org/when-do-gift-cards-become-subject-to-escheat/ https://legalclarity.org/when-do-gift-cards-become-subject-t... The value of abandoned cards goes to the state.
  - al_borland 10mo ago
    Some states have laws that gift cards never expire, like California. A lot of companies will just go with the most strict rule, rather than micromanaging state by state. The side effect of this is the company "keeps" the money that isn't spent. It may be earmarked at gift card money, but it will never be spent. I am terrible at spending gift cards. I have some that are from 2007, 18 years old. Two years ago I decided I should check them all and actually spend them. Of the dozen or so cards (several of them for Apple), only 2 of them had an issue, all the others were still active with the original balance. One of the issues was easily solved, it was a Visa gift card that had an expiration date... I reached out to the company and they issued a new card with an extended date. The other seemed to be so old that the underlying company was sold and pivoted, and changed systems (I assume multiple times) along the way. What was a card for a local restaurant chain now seemed dedicated to Dick's Sporting Goods... at least that's where the phone number went. I haven't yet tried going to the actual restaurant to see what happens. This reminded me I did an awful job of actually spending them. I guess I need to try again.

charcircuit 10mo ago

>Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. You can contact an employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

lynndotpy 10mo ago
This is not a known fact about the world and would not be a solution even if it were.
- charcircuit 10mo ago
  It doesn't have to be a fact. But it does point out that in practice you are not that many connections away from a human can fix the problem.
integralid 10mo ago
They contacted multiple employees and insiders and nobody was able to help before his blog post was featured oh HN. He was deep in Apple ecosystem and personally knew many people there, from what I understand.
bookofjoe 10mo ago
>You can contact an employee Off topic pretty much: In 2013 I was one of the 8,000 people in the U.S. selected by Google to be able to buy Google Glass ($1,500 [$2,000 in today's money]) in its first release to the public. One thing I will never get over is the customer service offered to us Glassholes: not a toll-free number, no automated voice mail tree: I'd call for any reason AT ANY TIME NIGHT OR DAY OR WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY and a Glass specialist would answer within a couple rings and spend as much time on the phone with me as I needed to resolve my issue.

TuringNYC 10mo ago

This article alone is grounds for me to never, ever use Apple gift cards -- just by virtue of all the personal photos, etc that I've entrusted to iCloud.

shaky-carrousel 10mo ago
Honestly you'll be safer if you don't use any major cloud provider for anything valuable. They've proven over and over again that they are very unreliable.
autoexec 10mo ago
The real wisdom to take away from this is that you need to keep copies of everything you've ever entrusted to iCloud because iCloud cannot be trusted. This was one instance where a giftcard seems to have caused someone to lose access to their stuff, but there's nothing stopping some other random thing fully outside of your control from causing Apple to kick you out of the things you've given them to keep for you. Everything in the cloud is at risk of being taken from you. Companies like Apple are not your friend. They explicitly make no promises and insist that they are not accountable/liable. Stop trusting them.
- cogogo 10mo ago
  I agree with this but I am not sure the personal risk of loss is very high with Apple. It is real but is it even on the same order of magnitude of losing your family photos in a house fire 30yrs ago? I used to keep a disk in a safe deposit box with my pics but got lazy. Is that good practice or paranoia?
  - autoexec 10mo ago
    Seems like good practice to me to keep digital backups in your safe deposit box. Probably a good idea to check/refresh them every couple years too. When it comes to things like house fires and getting screwed by cloud providers everybody thinks that it can never happen to them even when examples of it happening to others exist. The important thing to make sure that you're covered in the event that the rare but catastrophic event does occur. Especially when the cost of doing so is so low. For back ups it amounts to little more than a thumb drive and a visit to your bank every couple years.

fencepost 10mo ago

The solution should be obvious to everyone: Just go back to 2008 and start running a large Apple developer conference in your country. If you do that, it should only take a week or two to get your problem resolved. I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly, but if the card itself was tampered with (stolen, opened, scraped and code retrieved, re-covered with generically available scratch-off material, re-sealed, returned to the display) there's nothing keeping that from happening in Apple stores as well. There is a technical measure that gift card providers could put in place to reduce this, specifically they could block activation of any cards with codes for which they've already started receiving activation/balance checks. There'd still be some risk (thieves would need to wait before testing cards and would have to hope for cards that were purchased but not yet redeemed) but it could be reduced somewhat.

aranelsurion 10mo ago
> I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly This would be a good measure assuming we’ve fully discovered all the reasons Apple might ban you for, and only reason happens to be gift cards. Since we don’t know what other seemingly trivial actions may provoke Apple to wipe an account, I think starting a developer conference is the only way to be safe.