It's almost like having a single point of failure, putting your entire digital life and livelihood into the hands of a single uncaring corporation, is a bad idea or something. wild!

Time for !linuxphones@lemmy.ca

The begging is sad too. "I'm special! I'm on your side! I'm one of youuuuuu!"

The beast eats friend and foe alike.

Lest Android users (like myself) think we're immune, Google has been known to nuke accounts too, leading to a similar outcome.

I've been trying my best to get out of a "one account for all" mentality - photo backups are probably the #1 problem for me right now.

I've got the local storage, but I'm not sure about exposing immich to the Internet for photos access when I'm not at home.

Privacy should be guarded like gold, the royal jewels, priceless works of art, and democracy. Never give permission to others for control of it.

Lawyer Up

At this point doesn't he have grounds to sue? I know there was something in the license agreement, but that amount of money might be worth a round checking it out.

Lol. Digital life.

In my experience, the best way to get Apple to listen is to get legal involved. I spent hours on the phone trying to resolve a laptop that was damaged by a certified service provider. Apple support was rude, they lied to me, they bounced me between departments. So I wrote one email requesting all the recordings for the calls with support. Immediately someone from legal contacts me, apologizes, and 2 weeks later I have a brand new laptop 2 generations newer in hand.

I feel bad for them and hope they get their access back. Besides losing data that could have been backed up elsewhere, to some degree, having your hardware made useless and losing access to your digital purchases is expensive as heck.

Something like this shouldn’t happen. Period.

It is worth highlighting that this sort of thing is not just an Apple issue. It happens frequently to peoples Google accounts, and probably Microsoft accounts, as well.

The only sane advice to anyone is always have another copy of the data. Preferably locally, but in another cloud provider at least.

If it only exists in one place you might as well be using the recycling bin to store you important data.

Escalation to their buddies inside the company failed, that’s the wild bit in a huge way.

Most interesting speculation was probably someone saying something about anti-money laundering laws more or less including gag order-style provisions. So if the gift card thing tripped a filter, then maybe no one at the company would be able to help, and at that point, I suppose they’d need to take it to the courts(?)

Food for thought:

Always room for disagreement

I can imagine a world where big tech is proud of being so enticing, so invaluable, that a country codifies a right to use their kinds of services into law. - My two cents there on a different HN comment talking about regulating some service providers like utilities.

After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer

This is why loyalty to companies is stupid and weird.

Cause they don't give a fuck about you. They don't give a fuck about what you spent. You are a meaningless blip to them.

Stop putting your eggs in one basket, and tying your entire on and offline life to a single corporate ID/Username/Account/Whatever.

This is the price you pay for your laziness and "convenience"

Look this must really suck for them but god this is some peak leopard-on-face-action. Like yeah, this is the issue with the apple ecosystem; you're completely at the mercy of one uncaring amoral megacorp. It happening to someone who's shilled so hard for them, for so long, is a perfect demonstration of this concern.

Alternate headlines:

“I put all my data in the cloud without creating a local backup, then complained when something went wrong.”

“I could have emailed Tim Cook to possibly get this fixed, but wrote a blog post instead.”

“I claim to be a programmer and Apple expert but for some reason don’t know how to create a local backup of my photos or important data.”

I use cloud services but I also have everything vital backed up in 3 places. It would suck to get locked out but I won’t lose everything because I don’t trust anyone that much.

Dumbshit

6 years ago, I had a friend get his Apple ID compromised by an ex-.. He was effectively locked out of his laptop which he'd used his Apple ID to set up and sign in to. No recourse, so it meant that I had to do a full wipe and reinstall, and thankfully his music and photo projects were always religiously backed up to a pocket drive, so he lost nothing. At the point when he went to set up the newly installed OS, I insisted he use a password and NOT his Apple ID to secure the machine.

From then on, I've made it a point to have family and friends NOT use their Apple ID for their computer login credentials. This guy's story only enforces my belief of the foolishness and danger of relegating one's data to a third party's cloud.

If the guy in the linked blog had stored his shit locally - it's not like pocket drives are expensive - he wouldn't have gotten into such a nightmare.

I learned the HARD lesson myself back in 2004 when an iTunes update went sideways and lost my entire music library. poof! into the void it went and I spent the better part of a week re-importing my CD collection to an external drive. Never again.

Sucks for people that fall into these kinds of fiascos with cloud storage. Take my advice: Don't rely on it w/o having local backups.