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Comment by oidar | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad that got resolved for Paris, but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do. Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution. First he had understand what happened technically, then he needed a public platform to tell people about it, then that writing needed to get reposted by others, than PR needed to get involved. Not something that's going to happen for a normal user.

Apple, Google, and the big players are not a trustworthy place to entrust precious data. Increasingly, Apple and Google aren't very much different as they are both in the advertisement business: the great misaligner of incentives.

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Agreed. A situation similar to this happened to me with Steam over a payment issue with their service. They banned me even though I had thousands of dollars of games and an account since Sept 2003. I had to go to my bank and escalate multiple times to get letters providing the info steam wanted about my account and credit card to prove it was legitimate. Eventually after contacting them enough times they said they would do a "one time good faith" gesture by unbanning me but warned if it ever happens again they cannot help and that my account will be flagged with this. In the end I didn't do anything wrong and the bank didn't do anything wrong, it was all on steam. It was over $10 by the way.

Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors. It's very likely that they have metrics for larger marketplaces about being below a threshold for fraud. Online game stores like steam live, breathe and die by payment processing.

This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned. The payment processors saw a bunch of fraud related to a game called RuneScape and told Jagex if they dont fix this then they will be blacklisted.

> Sadly, the real issue here is with the banks and the payment processors

I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse.

This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it.

Banks are nothing to do with this. You could have your Steam/Google/Apple/etc. account summarily executed for any reason; it doesn't have to be money-related.

> This sort of thing wasn't really possible before the internet age. We need new laws to deal with it.

Yes, it was and it always has been[1]

>I disagree. The issue is these huge platforms can arbitrarily ban people and consumers have no recourse

This is par for course with every single EULA ever. I will say in the case of Steam it's hard pressed to find your account completely disabled and unable to play the games you rightfully purchased. I think the worst-case scenario is that you will be banned from engaging with the steam online community which restricts your ability to play with other users on steam

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Redlining is not really the same as what we're talking about (but should also be illegal).

Redlining is the example that I am giving to show this has long been the behavior of businesses and unless its racist it's not illegal. Also read your EULAs

> This was the reason why free trade was removed from RuneScape back in the day and it wasn't even a Jagex issue. People would go to 3rd party gold selling websites and then pay for gold with stolen credit cards. They could easily keep the money because the trade cannot be reversed without a moderator and what they were doing was against the rules so everyone would just get banned.

Gold farmers were paying for bot memberships using stolen credit cards, which Jagex had to refund along with a chargeback fee.

The blackmail scenario you’re describing wouldn’t make any sense since all of these gold farmers used mule accounts to launder their gold before making the trades. The changes to the trade system were intended to interfere with this laundering so that farming would no longer be profitable.

It wasn't a blackmail scenario specifically Jagex got punished either way because the fraud was enabled by their platform. I don't have the time to check but I believe this was mentioned by the one of the Gower brothers in the runescape documentary. My broader point is that even if they cracked down on fraud which was absolutely not the fault of Jagex because of the poor security options at the time from Credit Card companies, they still had the issue of people buying gold from RunescapeGoldSeller.com and chargebacks

> in the runescape documentary

The RuneScape Documentary - 15 Years of Adventure

https://youtu.be/7RNK0YBdwko?si=sei69KmyL4hb_hj-&t=2944

Discussion begins at 49:04

They've made it clear that you don't own your cloud library, so the only reasonable answer is to never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove (including things that require an online account for functionality you consider important), and treat services like Steam as a temporary convenience to download known good files that you then fix to remove any DRM. If you only treat these services as a download tool, their ban loses all teeth.

I'm not an avid gamer, so maybe this is a naive question, but how do you know these things before you buy the game?

Steam's lawyers would say that one should know by reading the terms of service for the storefront and the purchase. But in the real world, how often does that happen?

This is 90% of the reason I don't bother buying modern computer games. For me, I assume games require phoning home and use some kind of DRM unless it is otherwise advertised.

Assume everything is encrapified with “strong” DRM unless credibly demonstrated otherwise.

"encrapsulated"

You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG, or on Steam, it lists third party DRM, so you can know whether you have the tools to remove it (and whether you have the tools to remove Steam's DRM, or whether the game appears on a web list of games that don't use any DRM). You could also refund it if you can't verify you're able to successfully back it up and run the backup on a computer or user session without Steam installed. For multiplayer, if it's possible, you can find people discussing it on the web (maybe in pirate communities). Otherwise, just don't buy it.

Some recent stats indicated most gamers buy at most two games per year, so it's not a ton of work to ensure they have a working archive.

Why do you think it's different with GOG?

Both GOG and Steam allow you to use local copies of games, and both would deny you access to your account to download more games once banned. Steam allows you to install games without DRM from their platform.

Unless they've changed recently, I thought GOG's platform itself does not have DRM? Steam does provide DRM and doesn't tell you if a game uses it, though as far as I know there are generic tools to bypass it.

GOG also specifically advertises games that don't have DRM, e.g. [0]. Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

[0] https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim_anniv...

> Steam versions of the same game (e.g. Skyrim) often require Steam to be running and enforce mandatory updates that aren't always desirable with no rollback ability.

Yeah, but that's a developer choice. Steam doesn't force anyone to use their API for things like that. If that's a concern for someone as a gamer, they should probably support the companies that don't do it no matter the platform, not blame Steam for it.

The original question was "how do you know these things before you buy the game?" My answer was "You could buy from a provider that advertises non-use of DRM like GOG." Whether it's a developer choice is irrelevant. GOG tells you the information you need for your purchasing decision, so if you want to know what you're buying, buy from somewhere like GOG. Also, don't assume that because it's DRM-free on GOG, it is also DRM-free elsewhere like Steam.

Buying a DRM-free copy on GOG seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do even if a company has DRM on Steam; it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale. Since marginal cost of digital "goods" is ~0 and it's likely trivial to disable DRM in your build, it would be dumb not to cater to them and take your free money.

I see, thank you. That explains it better. I would imagine that's still possible to do it for steam games also with a simple internet search. :)

> it provides an economic signal that there's some segment of customers that requires no DRM as a condition of sale

Do you just assume that's the reason someone uses GOG vs Steam? People could be using GOG for other reasons, and the lack of DRM is just bonus. So how does that signal really get interpreted correctly?

What other reasons?

Steam is its own DRM on top of whatever else a developer chooses to do. I found this out one year when I spent months without internet access. At a certain point steam would refuse to run any of the locally installed single player games I had paid for through their platform until my computer phoned home to their servers. I'd already configured everything for working offline and they did successfully for a long time until one day they just wouldn't anymore.

If you don't want lose access to every game you fully paid for on Steam you'd better pirate a copy of everything you bought because on a whim they can take it all from you at any time.

There are some games on GOG that still include DRM. The one I can remember offhand is Cult of the Lamb where the game would only run until a certain milestone at which the copy protection determined the GOG version was pirated and would gate the player from advancing. There were forum posts from the developer confirming this was intended.

I'm honestly pretty disappointed that GOG is still selling the game. If they are going to sell it at all they should have massive warnings all over the page that the game is broken. https://www.gog.com/en/game/cult_of_the_lamb

Slightly off-topic, thanks for the reminder that I wanted to try Skyrim someday, seems like a good time to get prepped for it.

With GOG you can download the games's installer, vy backing up those you can still install your games even if you get banned

For purposes of backup I don't see that large of a difference between a single installer executable and a zipped folder that you'd get after installing a non DRMed game from Steam.

GOG has allowed third party backup software like https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader to exist. I have a full offline mirror of my GOG library that I update monthly that will never happen with my Steam library.

The non-DRMed steam game will stop working after a while if you haven't logged into steam after a very long time. If steam ever went under, your locally installed single player games that work offline will stop working. Ask me how I know.

I've taken to getting a cracked copy of every steam game in my library so that steam can't screw me over again in the future.

>I've taken to getting a cracked copy of every steam game in my library so that steam can't screw me over again in the future.

you can trivially crack any steam DRM game yourself within minutes.

Yup, and you can find open source "cracks" if you don't trust using a binary for it. It's barely DRM.

Another issue is, how do you get your games when you're banned? Most people don't have all their games installed at any given time.

With GOG, there is at least an unofficial, supported way to get an offline installer for each of your games. With Steam, there's no officially supported way to do this, so it's likely to be a bigger PITA to archive all your games ahead of time.

In reality, though, almost nobody is thinking ahead so that they have all their games archived, and, given the size of games and collections, it's a difficult thing to do on the cheap.

How is something unofficial yet supported? Is there just no "download installer" button on the site, but can be done as long as you know how to obtain the URL?

It was supposed to be "official, supported". Oops.

When banned on steam, I believe you are still about to download and play your (offline) games.

My understanding is that your account is effectively made read-only (blocked from purchasing, community, etc) and not removed entirely. Steam's help article on restricted accounts[1] seems to agree with this, given the text description of account suspension implying that it's temporary or for legal reasons (because the account has been used for illegal activity, or to prevent the account's use until it can be restored to its owner in cases where a lock might not suffice)

Admittedly, I have no personal experience with this, nor do I even know anyone who does, but I've never heard of anyone complaining about being unable to play their existing library when banned; complaints about steam tend to be about accounts being stolen and VAC/community bans, with the occasional complaint from someone I know that lost access to an account when they lost their email address and forgot the password (this was before steam had account limitations and steamguard, and they had never bought anything).

[1]: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...

The best thing you can do is ask the distributor or publisher. It shows them this is wanted and gets you answers.

> never pay for something with DRM you cannot remove

I take this to mean to sail the seas but I have apprehension over running modified binaries from random people. Is there anything that can be done to alleviate this worry?

the same way you should run _all_ proprietary binaries. restricted inside a sandbox. linux makes that easy with flatpaks.

That only goes so far though. A lot of games need internet access, so essentially you are running potentially modified binaries running on your hardware/network, that gets access to the outside. Sure, blast radius becomes somewhat limited, but you still have a potential problem.

The only games that need a network connection are online games. With those you can use a application firewall (which you should anyways) like opensnitch to only allow connections to sites that make sense and block anything else e.g. internal connection.

Unless you get your cracks from google.com it will be fine.

Flatpaks would make it easy, if they ever worked when you needed them to.

Sounds like a issue with your system. I have used hundreds of them on all kinds of systems.

I'm glad it works on your machine.

It's not a great solution, but you can vote with your wallet and simply not partake in that form of entertainment. I can't say it's fun to be not up on current games, or to find indie/non-drm games to play. But piracy is just an end-around a terribly policy of non-ownership that manages to both not remunerate the folks who do the work and make no impact on the actual problem which is that we don't like the non-ownership clause in modern games.

So yeah, TLDR, vote with your wallet and give up the entertainment this time.

Buy from GoG instead. It's better. At least you can download the install files and don't need to install any 3rd party software to login to play them. I have 200+ games on Steam but I have ceased purchase on Steam.

There's also grey areas with Steam like when you buy a Steam key for a game outside of Steam through places like GreenManGaming and get your reviews discounted or otherwise flagged arbitrarily based on an opaque authenticity heuristic.

https://www.greenmangaming.com

Valve get no fees from non-Steam key sales and developers can really request any reasonable amount of keys so tens and hundreds of thousands.

It make a lot of sense to discount all these reviews to avoid abuse. A lot of developers would abuse reviews hard otherwise.

Why are hundreds of thousands keys a reasonable amount for a developer? I am not in the video game business so I fail to see the use case.

Developers can sell those keys outside of Steam and they are redeemable for a copy of the game on your Steam library.

Yeah, you need a much smaller number for e.g. giving access to journalists/media pre-release. But the key mechanism is also used for any legitimate sales or giveaways that happen outside the Steam platform.

If you buy a Humble Bundle, you get a set of Steam keys for the games in the bundle. If Intel/AMD/Nvidia are doing a promotion for a free game with a purchase of their product, they give you Steam keys. Etc.

How keys are used explained in other answers already. Number of keys you can request would obviously depend on how successful is your hame on Steam. E.g I doubt Valve would generate 100,000 keys for a game with zero sales, but likely under 10,000 is possible.

Other than selling keys they can also be used for marketing. If you for instance have a game with multiplayer, lots of DLCs or IAP then giving away keys for base game make a lot of sense: even if only 1% of people who grab the key gonna play it they can still eventually buy other copy for a friend, etc.

Which goes to show, being the nice Linux guys doesn't change they are a corporation like all others, and will behave exactly the same.

Afaik if your account is banned Valve still lets you log in to Steam and access your existing library of purchased games. You just lose access to all the other platform features. Obviously that's their policy that they can change anytime... but in this case, it's not inconsistent to their "nice Linux guys" persona.

They covered this a lot on the Accidental Tech Podcast last night.

I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards-- at least, not if they can't be redeemed safely.

I'm sure people would run other kinds of scams with AppleIDs without the existence of gift cards, but gift card redemption scams have gotta be 99% of the reason people create fake accounts. The support burden would evaporate almost overnight if they just exited this stupid market.

> I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards

If they're anything like Starbucks then they get the benefit of utilizing the unredeemed balances as temporary capital for investments. It's an interest free loan at their scale. Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem.

> Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem

I'm not an expert here, but this is not generally true. See "giftcard escheatment laws". I think these vary by state, but see e.g. https://legalclarity.org/when-do-gift-cards-become-subject-t... The value of abandoned cards goes to the state.

Some states have laws that gift cards never expire, like California. A lot of companies will just go with the most strict rule, rather than micromanaging state by state. The side effect of this is the company "keeps" the money that isn't spent. It may be earmarked at gift card money, but it will never be spent.

I am terrible at spending gift cards. I have some that are from 2007, 18 years old. Two years ago I decided I should check them all and actually spend them. Of the dozen or so cards (several of them for Apple), only 2 of them had an issue, all the others were still active with the original balance.

One of the issues was easily solved, it was a Visa gift card that had an expiration date... I reached out to the company and they issued a new card with an extended date. The other seemed to be so old that the underlying company was sold and pivoted, and changed systems (I assume multiple times) along the way. What was a card for a local restaurant chain now seemed dedicated to Dick's Sporting Goods... at least that's where the phone number went. I haven't yet tried going to the actual restaurant to see what happens.

This reminded me I did an awful job of actually spending them. I guess I need to try again.

Cash trumps gift cards every time.

> I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards

I think gift card or not isn't really relevant, fraudulent activity can happen in a lot of ways like iCloud being paid by a stolen credit card, or TV shows being rented with hacked PayPal account.

The real issue is simply that there's no proper support avenue for serious issues that at this point affect your whole life, a family or a whole company. There's also no real avenue for a user to get the authorities to do anything to help with their case.

The solution should be obvious to everyone: Just go back to 2008 and start running a large Apple developer conference in your country. If you do that, it should only take a week or two to get your problem resolved.

I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly, but if the card itself was tampered with (stolen, opened, scraped and code retrieved, re-covered with generically available scratch-off material, re-sealed, returned to the display) there's nothing keeping that from happening in Apple stores as well.

There is a technical measure that gift card providers could put in place to reduce this, specifically they could block activation of any cards with codes for which they've already started receiving activation/balance checks. There'd still be some risk (thieves would need to wait before testing cards and would have to hope for cards that were purchased but not yet redeemed) but it could be reduced somewhat.

> I'd say also that you should never purchase Apple gift cards from anyone except Apple directly

This would be a good measure assuming we’ve fully discovered all the reasons Apple might ban you for, and only reason happens to be gift cards.

Since we don’t know what other seemingly trivial actions may provoke Apple to wipe an account, I think starting a developer conference is the only way to be safe.

We expect RCAs when tech companies have major outages, this situation deserves a public one from Apple, too. I'm sure we won't get one though.

This article alone is grounds for me to never, ever use Apple gift cards -- just by virtue of all the personal photos, etc that I've entrusted to iCloud.

Honestly you'll be safer if you don't use any major cloud provider for anything valuable. They've proven over and over again that they are very unreliable.

The real wisdom to take away from this is that you need to keep copies of everything you've ever entrusted to iCloud because iCloud cannot be trusted. This was one instance where a giftcard seems to have caused someone to lose access to their stuff, but there's nothing stopping some other random thing fully outside of your control from causing Apple to kick you out of the things you've given them to keep for you.

Everything in the cloud is at risk of being taken from you. Companies like Apple are not your friend. They explicitly make no promises and insist that they are not accountable/liable. Stop trusting them.

I agree with this but I am not sure the personal risk of loss is very high with Apple. It is real but is it even on the same order of magnitude of losing your family photos in a house fire 30yrs ago? I used to keep a disk in a safe deposit box with my pics but got lazy. Is that good practice or paranoia?

Seems like good practice to me to keep digital backups in your safe deposit box. Probably a good idea to check/refresh them every couple years too. When it comes to things like house fires and getting screwed by cloud providers everybody thinks that it can never happen to them even when examples of it happening to others exist. The important thing to make sure that you're covered in the event that the rare but catastrophic event does occur. Especially when the cost of doing so is so low. For back ups it amounts to little more than a thumb drive and a visit to your bank every couple years.

I mean, the situation is the same for a lot of things now. You must have large social media presence to get any sort of working customer service.

> as they are both in the advertisement business

Apple isn't. Just sayin'. They are trying to do it, but they aren't really anywhere near the scale of Google and Facebook. They make money (lots of money) by selling high-margin hardware, and, to some extent, digital media, on that hardware.

Currently, Apple is genuinely serious about preserving user privacy. I realize that can change, in the future, but it's the way it is, now. I get the feeling that a lot of folks on HN are having difficulty understanding businesses that make a profit by doing stuff other than harvesting and selling PiD, but that's not what has made Apple a 4 trillion-dollar company. They make that money the old-fashioned way; but with a modern twist.

That said, this situation is unforgivable, and I hope that Apple leads by example, by preventing this all-too-common type of dumpster fire from happening in the future.

Apple makes money on hardware and a 30% tax on developers. They might have some goodwill but are not making any money on privacy.

Yup. But not on advertising.

I wasn't defending Apple. I was merely pointing out that one of these, is not like the other.

Like I said, it seems that we have a hard time understanding business models other than "Harvest and sell data." Posts like the GP, seem to reinforce this appearance.

Upton Sinclair is known for a quote, referencing this kind of thing.

There are ways to abuse advertising other than harvesting and selling user data - which is a big one. Which apple has already done (https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-france-ads-fine-illegal-dat...)For example, the app store places unadvertised apps further down the list on searches or doesn't even show them at all.

Still a different thing.

Hating on Apple is quite popular amongst tecchies. I understand. I've probably been more pissed off at Apple, than many folks, here.

But it does bother me, that people don't seem to understand the classic business model of making things, selling things, and supporting things. That's thousands of years old, and still very much relevant. Quite a few folks, here, do that. I spent most of my career, at companies that did it.

I don't hate apple; I only use apple computers and phones. They are mostly better than any other alternative. But you have to concede that being in the advertising business at any level doesn't do them any favors re: privacy commitments. I only criticize because I want to keep what's good from becoming bad.

Fair point.

But they are nowhere near the scale of other companies.

I feel as if Silicon Valley has really forgotten its hardware roots, though, and that's sad.

Making things is really difficult, and extremely risky. Playing with data is really easy, and quite profitable.

They only get 2.5% of their revenue from app store transactions.

I don't think this is correct. Analysts believe Apple made more than $27.39 billion in commissions globally last year (https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/appfigures-apple-made-over...). That's around 7% of global revenue, and we should expect this ratio to be higher this year and next.

My search of 2024 numbers stated. $10bn from App Store out of approx $400bn revenue. Which seem to be what is stated in the first tables in that link.

I’m not sure who is right, Apple or these analysts, but either way: 2.5% or 7%, that revenue source isn’t large enough to be a corrupting incentive on Apple’s behavior.

Maximizing digital service revenue at the cost of user trust which drives their high margin hardware sales would be killing the golden goose.

Apple has created an entire programming language (Swift) as part of their "marketing toolbox".

> genuinely serious about preserving user privacy

Nope, not anymore. That ship has sailed and more revenue is to be made by harvesting user data

> That ship has sailed and more revenue is to be made by harvesting user data

That does seem to call for supporting evidence. I write Apple apps, and they make it very difficult to access user data. I would need to know how they get it, and how they make money from it.

Put an iPhone on your Wi-Fi and log how often it calls out to some Apple web service. You might be shocked, or does it make it okay when Apple themselves are the ones it's impossible to have privacy from?

Huh?

We started off talking about Apple isn't in the advertising business, and now we're at standard telemetry.

Upton Sinclair really knew what he was talking about.

"Harvesting user data" doesn't make money. The reason people think this is that on HN people have main character syndrome that makes them think their personal data is interesting, plus an assumption that making money is evil therefore anything you can think of that is evil would make money.

(Google and Facebook don't make money by "harvesting" or "selling" user data, they make webpages you spend a lot of time on then put ads on them.)

No, I think the reason people on HN think this is because Apple, Google and Microsoft have all been caught harvesting user data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

That is a government using a court order to get access to something?

The data that Google and Meta harvest are your interactions on other websites and apps that are loading a Google or Meta JavaScript, or have a back-end data integration with them.

I don’t know if Apple has client-side ad scripts like those, but in decades of building websites I’ve never been asked to implement one.

If it isn't worth anything then why do they want it?

Pretty much nobody's personal info is valuable by itself, but it's EXTREMELY valuable in aggregate, because it lets you target advertisement. Like, so valuable it's on the order of tens of billions.

Indeed, and the entire concept of smarter Siri, chatGPT integration as well as apple's ever-increasing Ad surfaces ... is powered by aggegading more and more usage analytics from users. There are so many that come on by default when you install macOS/iOS.

No, you don't need usage analytics for Siri.

(You need it for music to fulfill your contracts with the artists though.)

A full 20% of their profit comes directly from Google Ads, then there's their own ads strewn throughout apps and the App Store on top so their total profit from ads is probably close to a quarter of all their profit.

They still aren't really in the advertising business, though. Google does the advertising, and 20% seems like a pretty big number.

They make, sell, and support physical devices.

That's what's called "classic manufacturing."

Nobody would say they aren't in the PC, tablet or audio business, yet they make more off ads than they do off Macs, iPads, headphones, speakers... everything but iPhone.

I'm skeptical of that. I think I'd need to see some hard data on it.

I spent most of my career in the hardware business. It's really odd to see so many folks unable to understand business models that make money, besides "sell data."

It really seems as if folks can't grok that companies that make money, can do so without necessarily selling data.

The $20ish billion was revealed through Google's antitrust. That by itself accounts for a fifth of their total annual profit, ignoring all the App Store ads, News ads etc.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...

Apple became infected with the same thirst for "engagement" as any advertising-driven company. That's why even first-party apps like Maps or Music now waste your time with bullshit notifications. Same for every OS update trying to con you into enabling Apple "Intelligence".

Whether the advertising is ultimately successful does not matter to those people, what matters is if they can convince the person paying them (the manager paying their salary, the ad agency, etc) that they are effective.

Apple's ad business is estimated to be at $6.5 billion annually as of 2024[0]. Since then, they've decided to bring ads to Apple Maps. And of course there was the infamous ad for some movie on Apple TV injected into Apple Wallet earlier this year.

Just because they're not Google's size doesn't mean they don't have people making product decisions that will eventually sacrifice privacy for profits.

[0] https://digiday.com/marketing/when-it-comes-to-ads-apple-isn...

It hurts my brain that people still parrot the fact that "Apple doesnt do ads". As you rightly point out, Ads for Apple is a multi-billion dollar business, bigger than many other ad networks, and ad exchanges.

The reality distortion field is strong, even with some HNers.

It's not that. Be as insulting as you wish, but this conversation shows that a significant number of folks simply can't understand any way to make money, except by harvesting and selling PiD.

Making and selling hardware is difficult. Really difficult, but some companies have been doing it successfully, throughout recorded history.

It's really strange to see it being dismissed as "impossible," nowadays.

Here are the facts -

Apple makes tons (read: billions of dollars) from ads. Hence, Apple is in the business of ads, have sales people working with advertisers to make targeting, personalization work.

I take no side in "ads are bad" argument, but you have to accept that Apple is in the ads business, whether you like ads or not.

> but what the hell is a normal person supposed to do.

Not store their data in their iPhones. Period. I only store temporary data and photos I wouldn't care about.

Well, not only in their iPhones. And not in the same cloud storage provided by the phone. The only backups you really control are the ones in your possession, so you must keep offline local backups of anything really important to you.

The big marketing point of cloud storage was that you would not need to worry about owning and maintaining local storage, but they conveniently downplayed the fact that they could lock you out of your own files at their whim.

Actually in this case, the danger is in the cloud storage not the phone's. The user still can access/use his phone, just not the cloud-connected functionalities.

Only because Apple didn't remotely lock the phone as well, which they surely have the technical capability to do.

The data in his iPhone was not impacted.

His Apple cloud account was locked until the account representative unlocked it.

The physical device was not locked, bricked, or wiped. The situation was bad, but let’s stick to the facts

His iPhone could not sync, update, install new software, or send messages, nor could he sign out and use a new apple ID with it to restore that functionality. For a phone, this is effectively bricked.

Paris uses the term "bricked" in the original post: https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/

>Not every one has that kind of public reach to get a satisfactory resolution.

You can contact an employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation

This is not a known fact about the world and would not be a solution even if it were.

It doesn't have to be a fact. But it does point out that in practice you are not that many connections away from a human can fix the problem.

They contacted multiple employees and insiders and nobody was able to help before his blog post was featured oh HN. He was deep in Apple ecosystem and personally knew many people there, from what I understand.

>You can contact an employee

Off topic pretty much: In 2013 I was one of the 8,000 people in the U.S. selected by Google to be able to buy Google Glass ($1,500 [$2,000 in today's money]) in its first release to the public. One thing I will never get over is the customer service offered to us Glassholes: not a toll-free number, no automated voice mail tree: I'd call for any reason AT ANY TIME NIGHT OR DAY OR WEEKEND OR HOLIDAY and a Glass specialist would answer within a couple rings and spend as much time on the phone with me as I needed to resolve my issue.

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