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.
Their first party account is an interesting read and available on their blog here:
https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/The post was updated yesterday with the following:
Update 14 December 2025: Someone from Executive Relations at Apple says they’re looking into it. I hope this is true. They say they’ll call me back tomorrow, on 15 December 2025. In the mean time, it’s been covered by Daring Fireball, Apple Insider, Michael Tsai, and others, thanks folks! I’ve received 100s of emails of support, and will reply to you all in time, thank you. Finger’s crossed Apple calls back.
Second Update 14 December 2025: No luck so far, and not looking good. Anyone got a good lawyer to send them a letter and/or help me sue them? paris AT paris.id.au
Even if they get back and correct all this, I hope the author learns a lesson and begins exporting his digital footprint to other services.
It’s pretty clear he’ll go right back to Apple like a dog to vomit.
Uh … yeah, it’s his livelihood. He writes books on programming with Apple machines. Of course he’s still going to do the things he’s been doing his whole life.
I dunno. If I had made my livelihood working in someone else’s walled garden for years and years, and they unceremoniously kicked me out one day with zero warning, I might begin to question things a little bit??
You don’t need to host your “digital life” with Apple for that. Nor do you need to host it in a single place either.
help me sue them
Yeah - this really confused me. Why did they make a second update on the 14th when the first update said they’d hear back on the 15th?
He’s in Australia. It was already the 15th there when he posted that, but the person you’re responding to isn’t in Australia and the blog they copied and pasted from probably compensated for time zones.
Edit: Or it’s a typo from a stressed and frantic person.
Friendly advice: never put your entire life in the hands of a corporation!
Also, the migration from local storage to the “cloud” was never a good thing for us, and the small gain in convenience wasn’t worth it, but most people don’t seem to realize that.
Cloud storage allows normal people to better realize a proper 3-2-1 backup strategy though, since it facilitates offsite storage.
That being said, my very important stuff is backed up to more than one cloud provider, just in case.
That being said, my very important stuff is backed up to more than one cloud provider, just in case.
The way things develop, you can’t be sure that you are not banned on all accounts at the same time for political reasons.
Which is the reason for the local backup on my NAS - which is also in a RAID 5 configuration and can survive one drive failure with no loss of data, as well as the copies stored on the original devices. There would need to be a series of unfortunate events for me to lose everything.
Cloud storage is fine for your offsite copy as long as you encrypt your data before uploading it. The problem is that a lot of people are using it as their only copy.
Absolutely, then people go and delete the other copies leaving just the cloud, and think that it’s somehow fine.
then
peopleMicrosoft go and delete the other copies leaving just the cloud,Line Microsoft Onedrive repeatedly forcefully and silently enabling on-demand constantly, then occasionally fucking up and deleting unsynced files
Personally I don’t think the tradeoff is worth while. I put nothing remotely personal on other peoples computers. I’d rather lose everything. But it is not actually that big a problem, my brother has a backup that I update once a month in his safe in his house, and I have his. Should be good enough.
That still fulfils the offsite requirement of 3-2-1, so you’re still good there. If you both have a NAS, then you can be each other’s “cloud provider” as well.
How many cases like this aren’t making the news? There are probably thousands of people who depend on Apple or Google or Dropbox and are suddenly locked out with no options.
I’ve seen a handful of stories about Apple and Google locking people out of their entire digital lives. I think the reason people seem not to care is that most people don’t have the mental bandwidth to go against the grain and move their entire lives off of Apple and Google services, especially when they bought into these devices with the hope of making their lives easier.
Truly, most people don’t realize how dependent they are on megacorps. I’ve been finding that out repeatedly over the last year. I thought I was good because I don’t pay for streaming services, buy video games, or order Amazon delivery… then I took inventory and realized how much I actually relied on YouTube, Twitch, Google Drive, and GitHub.
I also think it’s hard to imagine that something that bad would happen to someone if they didn’t really do something wrong. It seems like an online death penalty punishment, and you’d think that for that they’d really have to have proof that you were doing something horrible. It’s hard to believe that they just make mistakes, and that having a human being review these cases costs them a few dollars, so they just let people’s lives get ruined to increase their profits by 0.000001%
I have managed to get to locked out of my own Nextcloud. It was encrypted, and I didn’t know that I had to keep a backup of the keys in its config files. I only had a RAID1 for the user data.
You do this once, but again when the pain wears off. Then encrypted back up keys stored in multiple locations becomes a religion.
If it’s not in your hands in an open format it’s not yours.
The Terraria dev who had his Google account locked out because of whatever bullshit.
Don’t ever put anything secure/critical in places that aren’t yours.
“I wouldn’t like to be caught without a second backup.” – Miles Edward O’Brian, Chief of Operations, Deep Space Nine. (“The O’Brian Principle”).
“<insert every good piece of Free Software advocacy reasoning>” – Every free software advocate who has been on about this during the entire past 20 years and up to twice that, warning us about these kind of things.
Either the user controls the…
or, OP article story.
Imagine having all your important data in just one place.
You either 1) have a backup or 2) will have a backup next time.
I’ve been an Apple customer for 35 years. Had an Apple account as long as Apple has had such things. A few years ago (specifically, when Apple started retiring 32-bit apps from the App Store) I saw where Apple was going and created a dedicated account for my Apple ID that’s separate from the one I use for my contact for Apple services.
If Apple locked me out of my account today, I’d lose access to 14 years of app purchases on that account. That’s about it? And at some point I started using an alternative ID for some of my purchases, so I’d only lose access to some of them. And of course, I now keep copies of everything backed up, since they could vanish from Apple’s servers at any time.
You seem a bit dependent on a single provider. Maybe not putting your eggs in one basket might be better… Or two baskets, as it were, with eggs from the same chicken.
Apple is the only provider of Apple IDs.
Other yhan that, I’m not sure what gave you the impression I’m dependent on a single provider?
I’ve been an Apple customer for 35 years. Had an Apple account as long as Apple has had such things.
If Apple locked me out of my account today, I’d lose access to 14 years of app purchases on that account. That’s about it?
No reason.
That means they are only depending on apple for the one thing only apple provides, which is app purchases on the Apple platform. Everything else they have locally or backed up somewhere else. It’s literally their point that they’re independent despite having used the platform for so long.
Not the apps that came with it or the infrastructure that supports providing those apps to devices or the devices upon which those apps or services run?
I’m still missing your point.
I’ve got all my apps I’ve downloaded backed up, at least for macOS. iOS… easier to grab the older ones off a pirate repository once Apple stops listing them.
Are you trying to say that everyone should be running Debian Stable without non-free on commodity x86 or RISC-V hardware with only open source hardware gerbers and no proprietary chips?
Nope. At this point, I see that nothing I say will matter. The die has been cast and it’s no longer worth trying.
Enjoy your Apple ecosystem.
Not an “apple fan”, an apple-focuse software dev deeply embedded in their dev community.
Which I suppose goes a long way to explain them being multiple terabytes in the hole inside Apple’s ecosystem, and also why even having a separate backup would definitely not fix their problem in the first place.
I think the root issue is still real, regardless of how much koolaid this person drank.
- Person buys a gift card from a brick-and-mortar store
- Apple says its fraud
- Locks account and refuses to elaborate
Still doesn’t explain why he didn’t have local backups of his important data. If you’ve had computers that long, and are a developer — you should know better.
He doesn’t say he doesn’t, so I assume he does.
The problem is the way he got banned also blocks him from his shared auth, which in turn blocks him from purchases and device functionality:
The Damage: I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly. I have lost access to thousands of dollars in purchased software and media. Apple representatives claim that only the “Media and Services” side of my account is blocked, but now my devices have signed me out of iMessage (and I can’t sign back in), and I can’t even sign out of the blocked iCloud account because… it’s barred from the sign-out API, as far as I can tell.
Seriously, it’s like a one page blog. You could have read it in the time it took you to make me read it for you.
