Locked Out Of Your Life

Nick Heer writing about a high-profile Apple account lockout:

Customers need a level of protection from any corporation with which they are required to have an ongoing relationship. This single high-profile incident should raise alarm bells within Apple about its presumably-automatic account security mechanisms and its support procedures.

An Apple account lockout isn't like getting locked out of Twitter or losing access to Netflix. It's losing every photo you've taken in years, every password you own, access to everything else those passwords unlock. An algorithm flags something and suddenly you can't get into your bank, your email, your work systems. Not because those services locked you out, but because Apple did and that's where all your credentials live.

The photos hurt most because they're genuinely irreplaceable. You can reset passwords and rebuild access to other services, painfully, over time. You can't get back photos of your kids that only existed in iCloud. Everyone knows you should back them up locally, but iCloud is supposed to be the backup. That's the entire pitch. Your phone uploads automatically and you never have to think about it. Turns out you do need to think about it, constantly, because trusting the system completely means one algorithm decision away from losing everything.

Nick's right that this needs actual laws. Not Apple promising to do better, not policies they can change next quarter. Legal requirements that say if you're going to lock someone's account, they get a grace period to export their data first. Make it mandatory and enforceable. Right now these companies can hold everything hostage and there's zero recourse because they own the infrastructure and make the rules.

The scale of dependency is what makes this different from older tech problems. Losing your email account twenty years ago was bad. Losing your iCloud account now means losing your photos, your passwords, your ability to access anything else. We've built these single points of failure into our lives and handed them to corporations who can cut us off for reasons they won't explain. That's not a sustainable system.