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.
I’m not blaming the guy, but he seems smart enough that he should have known better. Data isn’t secure if it’s in a single location, he gave up control and the inevitable happened.
I do not trust anyone with my data, the more important, the more sure I am that I have copies in several locations, including ones that are entirely in my control. My photos exist on multiple devices, cloud, my selfhosted immich server and my offline backup. Same with documents and other important data. My ripped movie collection is not backed up since I have the physical media.
Do not give up control, the systems are all setup to give you the illusion of security, but then this kind of thing happens. Maybe I’m extra paranoid since I’ve been the victim of identity theft but I’m comfortable with my level of paranoia.
i think it’s easy to make comments like this from the peanut gallery, with the benefit of hindsight and a self-selected group of users who will agree. but Apple should be legally obligated to address this. the solution can’t be “this idiot didn’t spend his nights and weekends doing 3-tier backups and high availability infrastructure diversity!”; that’s not scalable. if we just accept that companies can do this, they will continue to. but this has been on the front page of HackerNews. it’ll probably make it to Tim Apple’s desk eventually, so we’ll see what shakes out.
Apple should have to address this but backups are ALWAYS the solution.
If he only saved on his hard drive and lost access we’d say it.
If he only saved on an external drive and lost access we’d say it.
If he only saved on a thumb drive and lost access we’d say it.
But for some reason he only saved on Apple’s servers and all of a sudden we aren’t supposed to say it?
No. Always make backups of important data. Always.
Hopefully Apple gives him access back but let this be another reminder to everyone to never allow for one point of failure for your irreplacable data even if it’s a big corporation.
i guess in these situations i think of my aunt, who is in her 80s. she has an iPhone. should she buy a NAS and host Immich? i don’t think “make backups” is the simple advice it appears to be for the vast majority of people
Yeah, it’s better to take Apple to the grand jury. That will fly for sure.
sure, there’s reason to be cynical, but i don’t think handing society to fascists out of bleak pessimism is the way i want to live my life.
You’re right. It is easy to make these comments but it’s also a cautionary tale. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to use something within a “walled garden” but also retain ownership/access of it yourself.
Just having an external HDD for a backup goes a long way.
Same here.
I self host photo storage, which leaves originals untouched. It’s got a parity drive. There’s a hot spare. Every night it gets backed to up two different cloud providers that both host their own hardware, on two different continents (OVH, Germany and Backblaze, US East). The entire thing gets written to two offline disks every six months, for worm protection. I run recovery exercises a couple of times a year.
It would take a dinosaur killer asteroid for me to lose access to this data.
Imagine giving all that to Apple?!