https://hey.paris/posts/appleid
And this is Apple by the way where support told them an escalation of ECR (executive customer relations) wouldn’t change the outcome. That is seriously messed up by the way. I’ve written before about being leery of Apple’s cloud services (because of how often they’ve made decisions to abandon services they created that people relied on; one example in the past was MobileMe’s gallery). MobileMe (previously .Mac and iTools before that) was eventually rebranded to iCloud.
BTW, I wrote that over a decade ago and companies have gotten worse including Apple themselves. In short, relying on ANY “walled garden” ecosystem is a bad idea. Yes, I use Apple products including iPhones/iPads that rely on an Apple Account for various functions, but don’t keep a lot of my data stored on iCloud (I take care of that myself the old fashion way). Similarly, I’ve long steered away from Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive (I’ll only use them for transitionary purposes and expendable files).
Backing up a bit with executive customer relations, in the past, I had to deal with Amazon customer service a number of times after their entire ease of returns/replacements or dealing with missing items/shipments was thrown out because of abuse by fraudsters. The problem is Amazon’s lower tier CS being naturally outsourced (and some of those call centers have some pretty dumb policies that their supervisors are required to follow because of management). The one “good” thing though is IF you know their ECR contact methods AND have all of your documentation in order in a well written message, you can bypass the lower levels of support (once you’ve tried that route and have been given the various runarounds to run out the clock on your ticket) and get a high level manager to work directly with you (this is for customer service issues… there’s another for actual executive relations for “other things”).
If something similar happens with Amazon for AWS, Google (for most anything) or Microsoft, the end result is going to be worse than this issue with Apple ID (now known as Apple Account). If you have nearly zero reach/megaphone, good luck. Many of Microsoft’s recent moves have similar ulterior motives to lock users data into the cloud (if one doesn’t have a local account established) where they can hold that data hostage. It’s why I DO NOT rely solely on cloud storage (I may have some stuff there, but I also have them on my own drives).
I literally have over 100TB of storage (including my own offsite backup) because I damn well do not trust big tech companies anymore. It’s why I migrated away from Blogger. It’s why I removed myself from most social media platforms (also for reasons with how they farm you for your personal info). It’s why am evaluating how much longer I will remain on platforms like Discord, Twitch, and YouTube. It’s why I’m doing what I did before by running my own media portal/hub, self-hosting my blogs like this, and effectively running my own data center. Trusting any company with the keys to your digital data/life is like a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up in your face.
Most every single company that offers a product/service that has large amounts of data associated with it, wants to lock users in to storing more of their data on their cloud services because they then (in the future) will have methods to lock your data in and hold you hostage. Look at the BS Adobe customers had to deal with in just trying to cancel their Creative Cloud subscriptions. And this confluence of events with this users Apple ID reveals just how bad it can get with Apple (once known for having some of the best customer service globally), when your entire digital life is effectively locked up by one seemingly compromised code on an Apple Gift Card this user had purchased at a large brick and mortar store (this store even said it might have been compromised and would work to get them a new code; the issue is the use of that now previously fraudulent code ended up freezing that Apple Account with little in the way of recourse with Apple Support).
Is there a possibility we aren’t hearing the entire story? Sure. But the credentials of this individual makes that less likely (why would they ruin their reputation in that way?). Thus I will be blunt (to the point where dropping an f-bomb is the justified)… this is fucked up levels of BS considering the runaround being given to getting a higher level human to review this entire situation. I’d suggest this person e-mail Tim Cook directly since the CEO address is usually monitored by executive staff members who normally will forward customer facing issues that are well documented, to ECR. But they mentioned they e-mailed that account a few days ago (and seemingly haven’t gotten any response which IMHO, is pretty bad). During Jobs days, you would get a response back fairly quickly from an executive assistant. Trying to work with customer service managers will be hit/miss to get any form of escalation for various reasons. But if going above everyones head in that manner doesn’t get something like this escalated, the actions of the company will speak volumes (and if they haven’t gotten at least a followup after e-mailing Tim Cook’s e-mail address, the company is showing they are losing the plot).
None of this has any impact on my divestment plans from Apple (AAPL) since those decisions were made years ago. What is constantly influx is the amount of shares I am will to continue to keep on hand. When I read things like this, the amount of shares I am willing to hold on continues to shrink (and now that I know about this incident, may change these two outstanding orders I have this coming week by just “rounding” that up to 5K shares each and dropping the limit sell order to $280. As far as market returns (on investments) go, I am way beyond giving two shits about lost ROI when companies and their executives are proving themselves to be two-faced douchebags.
As someone who previously worked for this company, I’ve tended to taken pride that at least back then, we tried to do things the right way. Now though, problems like this is signaling that lot of that soul is really dying out (not surprising as time goes on where those actual connections get lost). And no, Google and Microsoft are way worse and even less trustworthy to rely on. Apple is just joining them if they do not fix this. I am hoping this individual gets this resolved (that higher level leadership at the company does the right thing and get a team to actually review this issue). If they don’t, then the lack of action speaks louder than all of their marketing portrays. Regardless, people really need to start taking self-hosting their own stuff seriously again.
