A few months back, the Macalope was locked out of iMessage.
Yeah! “The nerve” is right!
It was annoying, of course, but far from the worst thing that could happen to someone, but it highlighted a frustrating blind spot in Apple’s vaunted user experience story, on which someone else has now run afoul of, with far worse consequences.
For reasons the Macalope never did learn, his iMessage account was locked by Apple. In order to be reinstated to a club he’s been an upstanding member of for 14 years, he had to submit a request and wait 24 to 48 hours (it was closer to 48). For secret reasons. Apparently.
All this despite the fact that the Macalope has conducted very little fraud using the iMessage protocol. Shockingly little, honestly, considering how many other people are apparently out there using it for fraud. The Macalope is starting to think he’s missing out on his fair share of that sweet fraud money.
Joking aside (note to self: look into fraud, W slash R slash T getting into), it is a shame that a confluence of scale, reliance on complicated server infrastructure, and the need to account for bad actors means that Apple, the company that famously cares so much about user experience, lets some people just fall through the cracks.
This brings us to the honestly pretty terrifying story of Dr. Paris Butterfield-Addison, an author of books on Objective-C and Swift, who was, through no fault of his own, pushed into a bottomless one of these cracks. Which he details in a post: 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple.
Too long, can’t read because I was raised by a pack of weasels living under the O’Malleys’ barn, and only discovered when I wandered out looking for opportunity and love in the big city (Wetumpka, Alabama), Butterfield-Addison appears to have purchased a $500 Apple gift card that was tampered with. When activated, it failed (possibly sending the funds to other parties), the retailer issued a new code, and then Butterfield-Addison was locked out of his iCloud account. All of it.
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Foundry
It happens? Again, apparently.
As in the Macalope’s case, no one could or would tell him why he was locked out. Unlike the Macalope’s case, Butterfield-Addison was given no recourse (not that the Macalope’s recourse of filling out a form to get back a staple service of Apple platforms was all that reassuring). He was locked out. Apple’s response (summarized by meat-based intelligence on Sarcastic mode): “Sucks to be you, Dr. Paris Butterfield-Addison, author of numerous books on programming for our own platforms.”
While Apple has famously told developers that running to the press never helps, it turns out that A) sometimes that’s all you can do, and B) actually, it often really does help, thank you very much. As Butterfield-Addison notes in his post, his story is now getting some attention, has now been taken to Executive Relations, and his situation may end up getting resolved.
But it makes the Macalope wonder how many people this has happened to who haven’t written programming books and don’t have their own blogs. You shouldn’t have to be a noted member of the Apple community who also happens to be articulate and have a positive online presence to get this fixed. It shouldn’t have to get escalated to Tim freaking Apple.
Despite our rose-colored hindsight glasses, Apple’s systems have never worked perfectly. (They didn’t always hold so much of our critical data: photos, entertainment, credit cards, and now even identification.) The way Apple gets its rep, though, is by making things that work so well when they work that you forgive the times when they don’t.
It’s hard to forgive them, though, when they stop working for good.
The good news is, this is not a technical problem; it’s a process problem. Sure, Apple may have an exploit in its gift card process that it needs to fix, but locking out victims is not, in any way, part of a viable solution. The company just has to care enough about the people who are getting shoved into these cracks to create a procedure that gets them back in. It remains to be seen if it does or if it prefers to continue to help those who can make a real fuss about it.
