Corporations play the role of gods in our society.

edit: about the same role as Greek or Roman gods.

Because their TC is $400,000 and they need it to justify their Bay Area mortgage. Come on, folks, follow the money.

Crazy how the industry with the biggest margins has the worst contempt for their customers

The root issue/risk is from cascading service dependencies, and I'm 99% sure this is done unintentionally at Apple et al.

Team builds service. Service depends on first party identity/authentication because it's easier.

... Fast forward 20 years, and no one at platform company even understands the dependency graph from a customer perspective anymore. Especially in the case of rare events like account locks.

Consequently, those customers face a sudden Kafkaesque maze of edge cases that don't line up, as the customer service processes people are funneled through are literally incapable of solving the problem.

Which means the entire "normal" customer support apparatus is unavailable to them. (The same apparatus companies aggressive shove all support through)

This is why there should be regulatory requirements for identity platforms mandating the ability to speak to a human who's empowered to fix your issue + an option for customer-choice decision arbitration + continuous random sample audits with penalties for falling below KPIs (timeliness, correctness, etc).

It should literally be illegal for a company to have their banning system 'oops' and then pretend they don't know you.

Because it's only going to get worse as more AI / probably correct methods infuse account security functions.

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You’re right that nearly all responses are emotional , to maintain internal consistency. Even purchasing large gift cards is a common discounting approach when paying for cloud .

The sad news is when important people get locked out they can call dedicated support . This case was of someone who wasn’t celebrity enough to have that access

Oh I doubt it was his fault. I had something similar happen setting up a phone for a neighbor. Apple decided it was fraudulent after I added her address to the account. It was now dead with no recourse. At least I didn’t spend much on a used phone. Picked up an android and said it’s time to adapt.

I love your comment and I could not just upvote it because it is true with so many things. The technocracy/corpocracy is trying to sell you things that mnake you believe you can have power over everything, even your life. Anyone who "fails" at anything, it is all your fault. I have literally been told my mental illness, and my current homelessness, is my fault because I did not do the right thing. The power and control people think they have over their lives is a paper thin delusion.

Our shared powerlessness should bring us in communion with others, but the technocracy/corpocracy wants to rip that apart and make us dependent on them for profit.

Surprised at the downvotes to your excellent comment.

Good insight - that people dunk on the author as a cope to help the dunker feel less powerless

you're right there's a fine line. I interpreted the tone of most as judgmental / critical.

saying "get a lawyer" or "file a complaint" is constructive. saying " it's your fault for not backing up" or "that's what you get by using cloud" is just judgmental. Neither are practical solutions, regardless. Even with perfect backups it would have happened. And for 99% of social people, it's impossible not to cloud.

Using a separate email address for each site is smart, but creating a separate email account for each site is going to be very tedious, and I imagine Google, Yahoo, etc are going to stop you very quickly after you've opened 20+ accounts with the same phone number.

(Use a catch-all to have different email addresses for different sites, because when one gets hacked, then the damage is limited.)