I can understand that Apple has to deal with a lot of fraud and so they need to proactively flag and ban accounts. But all these accounts are still mutable electronic records. If he moves, changes his email, or changes his name (e.g. marriage) they can update the account to the new reality just fine. So there's nothing preventing Apple from renaming his old account to get it out of the way, then creating a new account with the same data, then re-associating his previous app and music purchases to that new account. Will that involve costly manual work? Probably. But is it possible? Definitely.
What they effectively did here is they screwed up (that part is OK) and now they are trying to weasel out of the consequences (that part is bad) while simultaneously insulting their customer's intelligence by pretending that "expensive to them" equals "impossible" (that part is evil).
Imagine if you walk into an Apple Store, accidentally drop one of their $1000 laptops on the floor so it breaks, and then pretend that it's Apple's fault and refuse to pay for the damage. They'll sue the sh-t out of you. This is kinda the same situation in reverse. They are probably hoping that he won't lawyer up because he's a fanboy. But he should. Corporations need legally binding feedback or else his once favorite company will gradually rot from its core until he can eventually not enjoy using them anymore.
I imagine, "Nobody at Apple can unblock your account" simply means that they don't have a standart procedure or person with privilege to unlock the account.
If that was a small company, you surely can have an engineer to change a record in a database to sort things out but in large companies you usually don't have raw access to data and instead you have procedures that were designed in coordination with multiple departments within the organisation. I.E., if you change something directly on a database, things can get messy at legal, fraud prevention, billing, compliance, security and who knows where else because it's possible that they have a system in place where all these different departments are kept in sync through actions taken through higher level interfaces and if data is accessed directly corruption happens.
I don't know anything specific about Apple but in my experience big organisations have huge bureaucracy in form of management software build by Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc.
It tends not to be a simple MySQL table where you have the accounts, maybe they will need to remove flags for the account activity on multiple departments so that the systems won't lock the account again and simply they don't have a procedure in place for that.
But, escalate it high enough, and the person who writes procedures can make it happen. Or to put it another way, this isn't a problem that's going to happen to Tim Cook's best friend since high school, for instance.
Of course I have no idea how it is in reality for Apple but if it happens that they don't have a procedure in place to fix this already, it could easily mean that someone has to get a budget and hire consultants that specialise in the ERP they use, who will design a solution, implement it, test it and release it and charge 1500$/day per consultant. Tim Cook's best friend can get it, random Joe can't unless stirs up enough media attention.
My gut feeling is that we should just make such systems legally mandatory. The need for the reversal procedure is a side-effect of Apple's fraud prevention approach and they were the ones to cause the problem. It's only a matter of time until they lose in court and have to reverse such a ban, so why not require the ability to reverse bad decisions in the first place.
Facebook pretended that deleting user data was impossible for a long time. But since GDPR made it mandatory they discovered a cheap way to do it. Some laws work like magic ;)
> Imagine if you walk into an Apple Store, accidentally drop one of their $1000 laptops on the floor so it breaks, and then pretend that it's Apple's fault and refuse to pay for the damage. They'll sue the sh-t out of you
I don't know. Apple seems fine revoking access to $1000 in DRM content and then refusing to clean up their mess. What's the legal difference between $1000 lost by laptop and $1000 lost by DRM?
=> You're a-holes.
I can understand that Apple has to deal with a lot of fraud and so they need to proactively flag and ban accounts. But all these accounts are still mutable electronic records. If he moves, changes his email, or changes his name (e.g. marriage) they can update the account to the new reality just fine. So there's nothing preventing Apple from renaming his old account to get it out of the way, then creating a new account with the same data, then re-associating his previous app and music purchases to that new account. Will that involve costly manual work? Probably. But is it possible? Definitely.
What they effectively did here is they screwed up (that part is OK) and now they are trying to weasel out of the consequences (that part is bad) while simultaneously insulting their customer's intelligence by pretending that "expensive to them" equals "impossible" (that part is evil).
Imagine if you walk into an Apple Store, accidentally drop one of their $1000 laptops on the floor so it breaks, and then pretend that it's Apple's fault and refuse to pay for the damage. They'll sue the sh-t out of you. This is kinda the same situation in reverse. They are probably hoping that he won't lawyer up because he's a fanboy. But he should. Corporations need legally binding feedback or else his once favorite company will gradually rot from its core until he can eventually not enjoy using them anymore.