I would be terrified of doing something like that, I imagine the account could get flagged for spam, and hearing the various tech horror stories, I wouldn’t be surprised if it could end up suspending your iCloud account with everything on it, blacklisting hardware devices linked to it, and who knows what else.
No idea why it happened, but Apple support was able to reset it on a phone call.
My theory is that they'd kept a non-active SIM in their phone for a long time, and the phone had tried to repeatedly verify/link that phone number to their Apple ID (via challenge SMS, I believe), thereby exceeding some rate limit.
Gotta love that such rate limits exist and do occasionally hit legitimate users, but at the same time, there are paid lookup-as-a-service APIs out there as mentioned in TFA...
Google should take note.
That too.
High audio quality, no rush and no signs of them being an underpaid call center operator, always going the extra mile to help me.
Even at the Apple Store, they help with out-of-warranty items all the time. I recently gave away an iPhone 8 and they helped my friend setup.
A nice woman there gave me new rubber-thingies for my AirPods and it's been out of warranty for the longest time. I mean they never checked or anything.
I've been trying to get a paid game the past days for my kids, a game where you try use bolts to remove wooden planks. It only exists with IAP and/or ads. The ads are terrible and not tailored to children. Nor are all the dark patterns. And you can get rid of the ads. By paying you get rid of them!!.. for 24 hours.
I'd rather pay via App Store or Google Play Store or Steam or whatever. Even a subscription for a month would've been better.
The last time there was an issue with an Apple Care payment. I was forwarded to someone who I believe was actually in Apple’s Dutch accounting department (certainly not a help desk drone). They called me back to follow up and even after everything was sorted out to check if everything was looking good on my end.
But past that hurdle, at least my actual problems got resolved satisfactorily.
They don't just block your account in one fell swoop, first indicators and messaging will stop working for a few hours. And you can hit that at least a few times without a ban. After a few times of that it was clear it wouldn't be worth running what I had, so I stopped before any sort of permanent banning.
I understand the op was trying to do a good deed, but if I saw an unexpected message like that I would definitely hit “Delete and Report Junk” instead of just “Delete”.
https://maxread.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-all-those...
Discussion of above - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31949731
But I also expect them to know the sender/receiver, and I imagine if I click “Delete and Report Junk” button, that I would probably submit the unencrypted contents of that whole conversation to Apple. And they should have also have metrics of total sends vs reported sends.
This is documented (not the 99% figure, but the situation) by Apple in knowledge base articles on the apple.com website.
The e2ee in iMessage is effectively irrelevant, as for most people, most of the time, it functions just like Telegram (which is not e2ee).
Personally, a few months ago I enabled Advanced Data Protection (ADP) which afaik does make iCloud backups (including messages), Photos, iCloud Drive and few other things inaccessible to Apple.
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 - https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-prote...
Whether you trust that Apple actually did throw away their keys after enabling the feature is a different story, but it’s good enough for me.
When enabling ADP there’s multiple warnings about how you’ll end up completely locked out if you lose all your devices / lose recovery keys / lose all hardware authenticators. Iirc I was also forced to register at least 2 yubikeys. For anyone tech savvy you should enable ADP.