The safety of buying Apple gift cards from anywhere other than the company itself has been called into question after a frankly terrifying story of a well-known developer and author getting locked out of his account.
Organizer of the /dev/world conference Paris Buttfield-Addison described what happened after he attempted to redeem an Apple gift card purchased from a well-known bricks-and-mortar retailer …
Paris Buttfield-Addison’s experience
He told the story on his blog.
After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of dollars on devices, apps, conferences, and services, I have been locked out of my personal and professional digital life with no explanation and no recourse.
My Apple ID, which I have held for around 25 years (it was originally a username, before they had to be email addresses; it’s from the iTools era), has been permanently disabled. This isn’t just an email address; it is my core digital identity. It holds terabytes of family photos, my entire message history, and is the key to syncing my work across the ecosystem.
The developer was faced with the prospect of not being able to work, as well as losing an incredible amount of precious personal data.
The reason appeared to be that despite buying the card from a legitimate source, someone had previously compromised the security features and redeemed it. His own attempt to redeem it was apparently flagged as a fraudulent transaction.
It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that.
Buttfield-Addison contacted Apple Support and was initially told that absolutely nothing could be done and it wasn’t possible to escalate the issue. Fortunately, media attention subsequently saw it passed to Apple Executive Relations, and it has now been resolved.
We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed.
Highlights a vulnerability with the Apple ecosystem
While this issue was eventually resolved, the ease with which this can apparently happen – and the lack of any established process to solve such problems – does highlight how vulnerable we are when all our personal data is locked into the Apple ecosystem.
Essentially, Apple can act as judge, jury, and data executioner if it believes any Apple account holder has been guilty of wrongdoing.
As a minimum, the incident calls into question the safety of buying Apple gift cards from anywhere other than directly from the company’s own retail stores. It’s not uncommon for unwanted gift cards to be privately resold at a discount, and I think most of us understand that there is a risk involved in this, but no one would have any reason to suspect any danger in buying from a well-known retailer.
How do you protect your data?
The incident led to a discussion with my colleagues on how we protect our data.
Top comment by Oblyvion
Very concerning that Apple would permanently shut down your account for something that’s completely out of your control, and with no recourse. I don’t even get the rationale for shutting it down.
Personally, I have my photos automatically uploaded to Google Photos so that I have an additional cloud copy. Another colleague uses a Mac app to manually export photos at the end of every year to store locally and on another cloud service. Yet another uses Apple’s privacy export tool a couple of times a year to download photos to store on external drives.
However, it made me very conscious just how much other data I also have locked into Apple’s ecosystem. This includes hundreds of Apple Notes, Pages and Numbers documents, all of my calendar appointments, and all of my contacts. I’ve just requested a copy of all that data.
Do you have systems in place to protect data stored in Apple’s systems? If so, please share in the comments.
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