Rui Carmo
This is absolutely fracking insane, and one of the things that terrifies me the most about the way Apple (or Google) handle account blockages and support. The complete blanket blocking of all services, the lack of any meaningful support, and the complete absence of any recourse or appeal process (including the Kafkaesque “you can only contact us from a device signed in to your account” requirement) is a recipe for utter disaster.
The worst part is that it is completely impractical to have “backup” accounts for all the services you use–or even self-service ways to retrieve your data in alternate ways if this happens. And $DIVNITY help you if you’re the head of a family account, or a business account, or if you have any kind of shared services.
Apple can do much better than this. They must do much better than this. Because the current situation is untenable, and without human contact points or sane checkpoints it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to do this at scale to purposefully lock other people out of their accounts. I bet that having a few Apple execs go through this process themselves would be a real eye-opener for them.