Comment by iamnothere
2 months ago
This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when they close your account. Regardless, never assume cloud data is in safe hands.
> this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.)
I once had to help a relative sue a bank who had closed his account after he refused to answer their very intrusive questions (they wanted to know details about distant relatives living in another country). They also refused to return his money (tens of thousands) and refused to explain why. No amount of complaining or escalating made any difference, although we did manage to get a nice recording of an employee saying that he thought the bank was in the wrong.
It took me issuing court proceedings, plus several more months of negotiating with their lawyer, before they finally settled out of court. Even then they tried to not pay the court fee, and they tried to get us to sign an NDA (I refused to budge on both). Altogether, it took 6 months to get the money.
Similar to how people in this thread are talking about mitigating reliance on cloud providers (e.g. with offline backups), I now do not trust any bank. I avoid being in a position where any one bank can ruin my life. That means having multiple accounts and spreading my money around.
Luckily for me I have a legal background so when a corp (big or small) does this sort of thing to me I don't hesitate to sue them. In almost all cases this causes them to "wake up" and start taking your issue seriously, in a way that the front line customer support reps never do. I recommend this to the author of the original post.
I'm curious how big the bank was and what country this is in?
It's my understanding that banks really don't want your money once they've closed an account, they want you to take it back.
Bigger banks, at least in the US, usually do this.
I am guessing it's not that they wanted the money. They thought there was something illegal happening and seized the money. I.e. not for themselves but for whatever law enforcement agency they thought might come looking for it.
If they thought you were money laundering, maybe giving it back would be a liability.
> I now do not trust any bank.
It baffles me how much this community is opposed to Bitcoin (and fails to delimit it from the rest of the crypto-scams on going) when, for me, it is existential. When you go through 1-2 experiences of bank-freezing and you realize your life is literally at stake here, the abstract debates about energy consumption or speculative bubbles feel like they come from completely misinformed individuals.
It's like watching someone on a rail track arguing not knowing what is about to hit them.
Self custody of cryptocurrency, for the vast majority of people, is riskier than putting their money in the bank. Most people lack the technical competence to keep their crypto secure, and the downside of losing access is much more significant. Notice that the stories regarding banks go "I had to sue them to get it back". With cryptocurrency, in the vast majority of cases, it would instead be "the money was gone for good".
Which bank?
all banks. Any bank that can indefinitely freeze your money and get away with it will do it. And now that everyone is doing it, the reputation damage is minimized.
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> It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment
iCloud literally encourages users to opt for storing originals only in the cloud. It's marketed as such, it nags you about this every now and then, and iCloud is the preinstalled default cloud storage on every iPhone. Consider non-techies dealing with this too.
> which shows some questionable judgment
Convenience is a hell of a drug.
When you are an Apple Developer, as the poster states - it goes deeper and more destructive.
I do have backups of most data, including photos, but there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents, and things like that. I can rebuild from it, but it's still a shitshow and my very expensive devices are bricked.
What a nightmare - hope everything will end well.
Concerning all those 'bricked' devices it would be really nice to get some more details concerning the 'block'.
Can you use your iPhone to call someone, can you use your MacBook overall? Login, use Apple Passwords(!), looking at photos within photos app and so on...
Or are all those devices completely locked?
> there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents
If they’re shared, surely someone else can still access them?
Apple (via Executive Relations) says they won't do anything. Guess I'm stuffed.
What's an iWord and why can't it be backed up?
Nobody said iWord.
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> this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.)
To me this is the biggest problem. Just like a bank can decide to close your account at any time, it's reasonable that Apple (or any business) could do the same. But they can't keep your stuff.
You can say "don't be naive and assume your cloud data is safe", but in today's world that's like saying "don't keep your money in a bank". The reason I pay for iCloud storage is because it's supposed to be safe (safer than my local HDD going bust or getting lost).
Great victim blaming there buddy.
To what extent is the victim their own perpetrator? They allow the status quo to succeed by endorsing it. They voted for this with $30,000 of their own money, and they will likely vote again.
So taking a wrong turn should result in you being mugged, raped and subsequently killed because apparently there was some "safe", but less convenient, passage? You're not helping OSS by making claims like these.
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Victim blaming is simply a way to feel comfortable that it won’t happen to you. The takeaway should be that it CAN happen to you.
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read the TOS before agreeing
Let’s be real, the number of people who read it approaches zero.
Not only does no one read it but it seems like they are intentionally designed to be difficult to read.
They are written by lawyers for lawyers, not for common people to read.
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And then what? Go to Google, Samsung, any other Android vendor and read the same TOS?
There should be laws to protect people, instead of blaming victims.
Every single cloud storage provider has a generic cop-out clause in their TOS that allows them to lock you out of your account for no reason at all, with no legal obligation to provide any proper justification.
This leaves you with just about zero cloud storage solutions that you can use.
Yes, yes, you can rsync your files to your NAS. Now explain that to your non tech-savvy neighbors.
You can probably use a GDPR personal information request to get photos and data at least. Doesn't help with other stuff you've paid for though.
We really need laws for this sort of thing. They should have included it in the DMA for gatekeepers.