If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.
- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.
If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.
I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.
The "gift card" in general is an anachronism whose time has passed. They have got to go. If companies are going to consider use of gift cards as red flags (as they often are, due to their being key components in money laundering and scams), then society should just abandon them. They are worse in every way than a prepaid credit cards, and in most cases where you want to give someone a gift card, you should probably just give them cash.
The only “use cases” I’ve seen are discount or niche. For example, Target and Bass Pro Shops/Cabelas in the US both offered some kind of 5 or 10 percent back/discount around Black Friday on gift cards. Niche would fall into, generally, some small enough business that these messes aren’t likely to happen, where the point of the gift is specifically later-consumption, like a local coffee place that you know someone loves, or say a specialty herbs and spices place for a cook (where you wouldn’t know exactly what they want from there, but that they WOULD be delighted to get something from the place).
Otherwise? Yeah. Gift / prepaid credit cards are a horrible scam, because they tend to have a percentage or, worse, flat fee to activate. $4 extra on a $50 card as a gift means you just paid 8 percent just to GET the card.
It is a way to extract money from the unlucky unbanked people, like the immigrants making your lunch or cleaning the streets. A part of systematic oppression of the outgroup.
I used to buy a gift card every ~week at a local sandwich place near where I worked and ate at every day. Their deal was a free meal (sandwich, chips, drink) with a $50 gift card purchase. Then I'd just pay with the card until it ran out.
If you buy them in bulk for employees they get progressively cheaper. It also matters how many customers you can serve vs how many you have and what you spend to get one customer into your store. If you spend 500 per day to get 100 customers into your brick and mortar store you can also give/spend 500 in discounts to get 100 more. If only 60% redeems the card the other 40% is profit. ETC
Un-redeemed GC aren’t profit. You can’t book the revenue, rather the balances count as a liability (because you owe all the random cardholders valuable goods/services) and, at least in my state, after a certain period of inactivity, you’re obligated to give that money to the State as unclaimed property. Google “escheatment”
Giving cash also only really makes sense for kids or other asymmetrical relationships where one gives more than the other. If you are just passing cash around then you may as well have everyone not gift anything. If you want to show someone that you appreciate them then spend some time making something yourself or just spend time with that person.
Gift cards are worse in every case though unless they come with a heavy discount - and even then it's a pretty shitty gift.
my sweet summer child, neither rain nor sleet nor cash nor dark of night will stay your postal carrier from zer's appointed rounds, but winter is coming... do you want to still receive your mail?
I'm the author of that Reddit post. I should probably update it to clarify that I didn’t just purchase the gift cards, but also redeemed them. I don’t think it was purchasing them that triggered the lock on my Apple account. I mean, after all, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?
>, how would they know what my Apple account is until they’re redeemed?
To add context, your reddit post also mentioned: >, I purchased eleven Apple Gift cards from [...], and apple.com, and added the amounts to my Apple account.
I'm not saying the following applies to you but one can buy Apple Gift Cards using their Apple ID. After adding gift cards to the ecommerce shopping bag on Apple.com, it offers the option : "Check out with your Apple Account"
So Apple would know the exact AppleID at the time-of-sale instead of waiting until redemption. If for some reason Apple's fraud detection system doesn't like the transaction (e.g. unusual ip address from Mexico instead of USA, or too many high-value cards in a certain time period, or other black-box opaque heuristic) ... then the buyer puts their Apple account at risk.
Fraud prevention heuristics are insanely aggresive these days...
Last week, I bought a Netflix subscription and 5 days later, Netflix cancelled the membership for no apparent reason. I got on a customer support chat with Netflix and the agent said it was cancelled because of the credit-card #. It didn't pass their fraud prevention system and to try using another card. At least Netflix automatically refunded the entire amount back to me -- whereas Apple keeps the gift card balance for itself after locking accounts.
In another incident, I used a Chase credit-card at a physical Apple store to buy 2 iPhones on 2 separate receipts. The first iPhone sale was a success. The 2nd iPhone transaction just 1 minute later was denied and Chase locked the entire account. I had to call Chase customer service and recite the make & model of a car I had 20 years ago to prove my identity for them to re-activate the credit card!
My recommendation is to completely drop the Apple ecosystem, however painful it is. I do use an iPhone but I treat it as just a phone. If Apple locks me out I dgaf.
Comments like this remind me of my distant relatives who proudly live out in the countryside and avoid traveling to big cities for any reason. They see a lot of Fox News headlines about bad things happening in big cities and they've concluded those bad things are happening all the time.
So they constantly congratulate themselves for not going to the nearest city, look down upon people who spend time in cities, warn us that we're at risk of the bad things happening, and never miss an opportunity to talk about how bad cities are in conversations.
Now replace big cities with big tech and that's exactly how a lot of these Hacker News comments read.
Currently having to migrate to Win11 and thinking I spent 3k on new hardware just to be able to run some absolute clusterfuck of an OS.
I regret not spending it on overpriced Apple hardware, at least it runs all my Adobe crap which I'm 100% dependent on. But then I read joyous stuff like this.
Oh but you say, ""just"" run it on a VM in Linux, like all us rural folk, because big tech evil. Yeah thanks pointdexter, like I didn't know that. And oh look it's running like a complete slideshow on my 4k color calibrated monitor because now you apparently need two fucking GPUs. One for the host and one for the guest just to have hardware acceleration and CUDA video encoding. And I only have room for one GPU so I sell my current CPU and buy a CPU with iGPU. And now apparently I have to run these 10 ducktaped together shell scripts and there's like three guides to achieving a clean passthrough and they're all 50 pages and each is completely different and omg I have other shit to do please kill me already.
Death by mutually incompatible walled gardens, welcome to our fully automated high tech utopia.
Huh you got me with this analogy. On the other hand, can't this be said about any bad thing? Few bad things are always bad. A few examples:
* My liberal relatives won't own guns because they keep hearing stories about how guns are deadly, even though I own guns and nobody's died yet
* My friend's kid won't pet puppies because he heard they bite sometimes
* My aunt in Moscow didn't want to vote for Putin because he's "authoritarian", but my life is going great
How do you distinguish between things that are actually bad vs overreactions? Maybe it's just based on individual risk tolerance? I don't see the need to put my digital life in the hands of some unresponsive corporation, but the risk is worth it to you and we just have to agree to disagree?
Bad isn't a binary judgment you can place on something.
Everything has a level of risk and reward associated with it. It's up to everyone to judge the risk versus reward.
The flaw I see a lot in the HN comments trying to get people to abandon Big Tech is that they're coming from people who overestimate the risks while underestimating the benefits to other people.
Abandoning a lot of convenience for fear of some rare outcome might be a perfectly good choice for someone who doesn't use those conveniences (e.g. Linux user who doesn't want cloud storage for photos because they enjoy setting up their own elaborate backup schemes) but it's not a good tradeoff for the average person who just wants their photos backed up and either doesn't want to or doesn't trust themselves to set up a good backup solution.
My model for this is to have one nerd per group of people, who runs digital infra for the community. I'm that nerd for my friends, and run a bunch of self-hosted services that people I personally know use. Some of them even pitch in to help pay for the hosting costs (though not my time).
You are going to have false positives in fraud detection. You are going to have to investigate those or pay in reputation. Fail to fight fraud may also cost rep.
When you run out of reputation people should take their business elsewhere.
> By using a service you also chose to support it.
> This is how one should make the choices.
Well yeah, but there're not the only choices. The full opportunity cost is finding and paying and learning alternatives when you have decades of vendor lock-in to overcome. Maybe "keeping people honest" is a bigger ask than you think while you're busy meeting all kinds of other requirements which take priority.
I’m not trying to be rude, but what is the point of buying and then redeeming gift cards yourself?
I just pay Apple with my credit card when I want to buy something. Is this some kind of weird credit card rewards churning thing? Are you unbanked? I don’t understand why you’d voluntarily add unnecessary extra steps.
A credit card offers far more protections to consumers than a gift card.
Given the amount of false positives, Apple should have an appeal process for innocent users to regain access to their accounts. It would be nice if this applied to all big tech companies, losing an email address can make other accounts difficult or impossible to access.
I always buy Apple gift cards when there's a deal on them. A few weeks ago you could buy an Apple gift card and get $10-15 of Amazon credit, so I bought the gift card and loaded it into my account.
I do this all the time and I've done it for years.
I once bought thousands of dollars of Apple gift cards, $500 at a time, by redeeming credit card reward points that could be spent like cash at a couple of select retail stores for 2X their points value.
It's a common practice. The edge cases are scary when you see them reported on Reddit, but they really are rare and generally get resolved after follow up (however inconvenient).
Some people go to extremes to do things like buy Apple gift cards at stores that give them a small discount on gas purchases or something. I'm not nearly extreme enough to do that entire process, though. Having the money loaded on to a Gift Card is inherently risky and I need some significant upside before I'll do it.
Lots of stores offer deals on gift cards, essentially giving g you a discount at the cards’ store. $100 Apple gift card for $80 means you can buy something at Apple for $20 off if it is less than $100.
If you want to trade in an old phone without doing it at the time you purchase a new one, the only way to receive the trade in value is via an Apple gift card.
I was looking forward to getting $160 gift card for my old iPhone 11 but after reading all this I think I’ll just leave it in a drawer.
Not so. I just traded in/upgraded (on a Verizon contract, but AT the Apple Store; maybe that affects this… but still paying Apple directly) and they handed me the new phone and had FedEx send a trade-in mailer that I had a while to send back with my trade-in.
Ah but you told them at the time of purchase that you were going to do the trade-in. As I said. It’s different if you want to do the trade in later, which at that point looks more like “sell an old random phone back to Apple for some credits”
This is a problem with modern life in general. Computing and the internet have exploded the complexity of society. Regular people have so much on their plate as it is (school, work, family, mortgage, etc) that they simply cannot keep up with all of the privacy and security risks of a digital life. They also can't keep up with the complexity of politics and civic life, but that's another discussion entirely!
‘Member States shall ensure that, in the cases referred to in paragraph 4 …, after taking its decision, the credit institution immediately informs the consumer of the refusal and of the specific reason for that refusal, in writing and free of charge, unless such disclosure would be contrary to objectives of national security, public policy or Directive [2005/60]. […]’
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.
Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.
These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.
To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.
> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.
This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well.
First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.
Second, eating M&Ms is a silly analogy because it's so easy to dismiss. Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. Using a mainstream service keeps your overall conversion rate higher and prevents losing customers who don't want to sign up for something new.
Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.
Finally, this is the key point that everyone misses when they say "Just don't use any Apple products" and other dismissive comments:
> It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.
It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational. I know it brings some people comfort to feel like they've avoided some risk they saw in headlines, but claiming that nothing is given up or that it's easier to choose an alternative is blatantly false.
> First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.
If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death. This happens with enough regularity that I know multiple people that this has happened to, and the risk is enough for me to never rely on PayPal or its partners for my income.
You seem to understand this with the following:
> Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid.
--
> Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.
I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.
> It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational.
I've lived my entire life without relying on an Apple account, and the few instances that I used one, I hit that risk myself[1] and now have an expensive paper weight instead of a tablet, and a bunch of app purchases I can never use again.
This isn't some hypothetical, it's something that's literally happened to me and people I know. The lesson I learned is not to rely on Apple or PayPal, and believe it or not, that's really, really easy to do.
To my knowledge, PayPal does not hold funds “forever”. They penalise the account holder by locking it away for 180 days. At that point, they can withdraw the balance to a bank account. I have multiple friends and clients who had this happen to them, but in all cases, they were exposed to higher risk by accepting payments through donation forms, or a marketplace where they sell directly to customers. (Despite what feels like an anecdotal high failure rate, somehow I’ve never had an issue running my own marketplace for the past decade.)
> If you're a business, yes, PayPal locking your account and freezing your funds forever, which is what they do, is tantamount to legal grievous injury or death.
Losing business funds is not equivalent to death, no.
> I used a variable X so you could make it sufficiently large enough that you don't have to rely on the multiplier to understand the analogy.
I was commenting on the "in 1000" part, not the X part.
Sorry, I just can't engage with this level of hyperbole and exaggeration. This isn't a life or death thing.
Utterly perplexing you've backed off with a scathing 'Sorry, I can't engage' after literally contracting yourself plain as day a few comments up.
I think you can't understand his analogy no? Without taking it literally to the point of making it your entire life's purpose to counter the point?
How about this: You have a 1 in 100,000 chance of eating an M&M which literally drains your bank account and you have to eat hundreds or possibly thousands of M&M's per day.
(some of your dreaded hyperbole for transactions)
Would you dig in to that bowl? There's shouldn't be a miniscule percentage chance of your entire livelyhood being ripped away and locked forever without recourse simply by using a certain payment platform. Is that fair? Or are you still intent on stepping on the cosmic merrigoround of potential ruin without a care in the world?
I remember when Cory would let you download any of his books for free and even said you were allowed to email him and call him a sucker for doing this.
The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100 bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of people who do it like this. The only thing lost is convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.
Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.
There are a good number of freelancers of various sorts that get paid via PayPal and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee, or even prefer to spend much of it straight from PayPal to avoid the percent fee. People also use it to send money between family members in different countries because it's often cheaper than an international wire.
It's quite easy to build up a few hundred or thousand USD worth. It feels just enough like a bank account that you think you're safe. Then...well, the internet is full of PayPal horror stories, I won't bore you with my own.
Last time I had to deal with that was 8-ish years ago and there was definitely a fee. Can't check now because they blocked my account due to a failed Spotify payment and I don't care enough to deal with their phone support again to get it unblocked
That you don't keep a PayPal balance and i don't buy Apple gift cards is irrelevant to the people that do keep a PayPal balance and do use Apple gift cards
I would go even further and say for most PayPal users there never was anything to mitigate because they didn't keep a significant balance there in the first place. Which is a perfectly valid reply to someone not understanding why so many people would keep using PayPal.
For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.
I think it's a combination of money laundering and phone scams where people are told they owe money to the IRS or something and are tricked into buying a bunch of gift cards.
That said, if buying and redeeming gift cards are such an indicator of fraud that people are legitimately afraid of getting their accounts permanently locked, why doesn't Apple just stop selling them?
> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
If you are trying to be a bad person you could weaponize that approach. You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o
> You do not like person x, send them some Apple gift cards... :o
99.999% chance they happily redeem them and go about their lives.
These stories, while frustrating, are clearly edge cases. Yes I know you can find more if you search social media, but I don’t think a lot of these HN commenters realize the volume of gift cards Apple sells and redeems without problem every day.
Maybe that hypothetical, bad person needs to find out what is triggering the account locking, first. Many small sums per gift card? A sum over a certain threshold? The point is, in reality it will not be up to pure chance.
In this case buy the gift card from some shady retailer with a one-time-use virtual card, and give this shady code to your friend. Or buy a physical card from aliexpress, the cheapest one with bad reviews.
It seems you haven't learned the whole lesson. You're close, though. If you're going to be skittish, there's a better and easier set of rules. Don't use anything that involves an Apple ID.
The newer iPhones have such great cameras, I have have been considering an iPhone for my next phone. The only thing holding me back is the lack of built-in stylus.
Does the iPhone require an Apple ID? I don't even log into my Google account with my Android device. If the phone requires an Apple ID, then obviously I'm not buying one.
No, it doesn’t require one… but you won’t be downloading anything from their App Store without one, leaving your only option for getting software onto it “Xcode after you build it yourself” since there’s no side loading. Xcode’s ability to do that may require an Apple ID or developer account; I’m unsure.
In the EU, the requirement to support alternative app stores would probably mostly fix that, but those of you in the US are kinda…
I skimmed some of the comments from that giant Reddit thread. A lot of people responded that they’ve been buying even more Apple gift cards without problem.
One commonality among the stories in that thread from people who had problems was either switching their App Store country or using their App Store account primarily from a different country than the setting.
That includes the original poster!
"could have been because I purchased gift cards from the US (online) and added them to my account while I was in Mexico, or I was using a VPN while adding gift cards"
One of the other people was someone who
"purchased $2k in apple gift cards from target during Black Friday deals... There was a limit of 1 but if you went in store and were friendly to the cashier a lot of people (myself included) had luck getting them to ring them up as separate transactions".
Pretty sure if the latter person had given those out as separate cards to other people it would have been fine but going from "limit of 1" to "all redeemed by same account" is unsurprising when it triggers a fraud flag.
The big problem in this story as in the past one is the apparent lack of sensible escalation.
I've heard horror stories from Google devs that it's even worse - such a situation follows you for life even if you try to setup new accounts.
As soon as I heard the first one of these stories about a guy getting google broad-spectrum banned because a junkbot AI thought his completely normal youtube comment was a nazi rant or whatever else it hallucinated - I bailed on the whole shebang. Hosting your own stuff is, if you're a reader of this site, easy enough and cheap enough there's little reason not to.
And in fact, a prohibition is never a solution, it is a reduction in solution options
And this advice takes into account exactly zero aspects of the particular problems a given person may have to solve, besides “problems with Apple”, in a world where most people have “problems with X” for each of the few large ecosystems.
Freedom of choice would mean for N choices, being able to make, well, N indepointed choices. N may be a very large number given how many things people do.
For an ideal world of compatible modular technologies, N choices is easy.
But our technology world is highly non-modular, centralized at many levels, and full of incompatibilities and dependencies of various kinds and costs. Including important dependencies involving the choices of other people we interact with, or very specific tools or resources.
So no, “Don’t buy Apple” is not better advice, it is just bad random generic advice, without knowing a lot more about any particular situation.
But it is a solution. Apple being a poor stuard of their customers is indicative that people buying their hardware and software are not their priority. Apple support used to be stellar, they used to care about customers, they no longer do.
Apple's ToS should be readily indicative of anyone using any of their products that Apple's perspective is that you don't own anything and they can do whatever they want with anything you do with their products. As the author points out you clearly don't own free access to what you've purchased.
The last thing I'll say is that it is fantastic advice to not purchase Apple in 2025. You can only be certain that this won't happen if you avoid them. I actually own a MPB, with receipts from purchase, that I had to purchase a bypass for when the device was enrolled in MDM by a family member that Apple has MDM locked and refuses to remove from iCloud.
Avoid Apple, that's the best advice. If you can't avoid Apple, minimize your footprint and make sure you're a good boy or girl else Tim Cook will steal from you and hide behind some bullshit first line support tar pit and an army of lawyers if you do happen to decide to threaten them.
But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement. You can use an Android device with GrapheneOS and have the phone entirely de-Googled, yet still use Android apps.
If the implication was that there's no other option outside of Apple and Google then that is unfortunate.
> But, at least with Google you can use hardware without the binding software requirement.
For now, but they are tightening things up.
And at least with Apple they provide convenient end-to-end cloud syncing. Google doesn't.
(And this back and forth can go on for a long time...)
You are just picking what is important to you and then ignoring other issues. That isn't how to craft advice that helps people you don't personally know, with needs you are completely unaware of, in a complex domain.
Ok so now we’re not only boycotting Apple, we’re boycotting banks as well! Seriously, Apple can and should fix this issue without having to retort to misery for everyone.
Apple could release a statement reassuring people that no one will be locked out of their account for redeeming any gift card going forward. We have collectively forgotten that companies have stopped talking this way. That’s what we need to change.
I mean, yes, absolutely. I don't have a count limit on my boycott list. I won't be holding my breath for empty promises from corporate. We need to build systems that assert user sovereignty and prevent abuse, not wait around for evil people to do good things.
LOL it’s not some sisyphean task to not use big tech products, its slightly inconvenient and takes some time to adjust, don’t talk about it as though it were something that only the great men of the ancient times could do, take your iPhone and throw it as hard as you can against the concrete, you will be fine.
Great advice if you don’t need a smartphone. Many do, they are now an identity tool.
The alternative to Apple is…Google? How is that in any way better other than not being Apple? Sure, there are de-Googlefied versions of Android and today they work . But Google is actively working on ending the ability of those alternative operating systems to work.
In my country we have a large religious population that eschews smartphones. Thanks to this, all services - bank, government, etc - are available without requiring apps or even internet access.
The US has just proposed making the ESTA application process mobile-only.
As an example of one.
Banks requiring device attestation may be a pain in the ass, but it’s not a “requirement”; they (for now) still have websites and, usually, a physical branch.
Banks 2FA are not SMS anymore, so no banking, and because no 2FA no online card payments and no limit adjustment.
Some banks are even app-only.
IRL events where you have to open the app at the gate.
Probably no charging for your EV.
No bus tickets. No Uber. No scooters. No food delivery.
More tedious flying / immigration. No Tinder (requires live face verification on your phone)
Some modern cars you are going to have troubles.
Impossible to setup a lot of smart appliances (like home WiFi routers).
Many examples.
It’s like: can you live without a bank card ? Probably but not everywhere and you will not be able to go to all shops.
Essentially it’s great if you plan to stay at home. Becomes a great problem once you want to interact with anyone further than 1 meter from you.
None of those require smartphones if you live in a free country (1) (2).
(1) Unbanked population in Uganda or india don't have options. Funnily, it's become the same with everyone, banked or unbanked, in the USA. The USA a third world dictatorship now, so expect that and more. Please vote for the orange buffoon a third time! He will most surely try to get on a third term.
(2) No bank in the EU requires a smartphone; it's banned by law (you know, law that protects people, the type you lost). "Banks" that are app-only are not banks but financial casinos. No bus driver in the EU can refuse small coins. In some countries they cannot refuse that you get on the bus without paying. No shop in the EU can refuse cash. No EV charging requires any app; you can pay right at the charging station with a credit card. Uber is not a universal right but a trinket. Same with tinder/food delivery and all the impoverishing tech for the disowned.
Sounds like we don't live in the same EU.
Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication, and they consider apps to be safer alternative than SMS.
Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks, like any bank in the EU.
In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver.
Shops can refuse cash.
https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
etc
In Northern Europe it's very common not to have cash at all or to have it rejected.
In Estonia, you can choose to login to services using... your mobile phone OR (if you are lucky and this is supported) a physical ID card reader, so realistically you want to have a mobile phone. Some services don't even have alternative.
It's more like a German / Swiss thing to have cash everywhere.
>Banks are required to use Strong Customer Authentication
Not impressed by the pseudotechnical bullshit. The law provides several ways to authenticate. I tell my bank that I don't have a smartphone and they have to send me (at 0 extra cost) a code card: a piece of plastic with numbers on it that no one is ever going to hack. I routinely transfer tens of thousands of Eur between my accounts at real banks within the EU without a problem with my plastic card. When I have used up all the numbers on it they send me another one. I don't know in which EU you live in either.
>Revolut, N26 and co, are real banks
They are collectively known as "neobanks" for a reason. The official name is "e-money institution". Those are financial casinos, not real banks, operating with non-full banking licenses, peddling all the tech-bro bullshit: trading on memecoins, pulling out of countries when the regulations that real banks have to follow irks them, with a horrible track record of IT security: customer data leaks in the millions, horrible track record of staff abuse, unpaid hours, null customer support: exclusively in-app, where your customer support is "other customers that answer to your in-app post"; the staff shows up once in every 200 messages to write a one-liner and go into hiding again. I do not do business with bullshit "lean" business that operate at cost. Look at their wikipedia pages sometime.
>In many countries, you cannot pay with small coins the bus driver
Simply not true, not gonna argue this one.
>Shops can refuse cash
No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it. There are exceptions like you cannot buy a car with a truckload of coins, or give a 5000 Euro note to a taxi cab but those fall under "unreasonable" and it's a very high bar. Also, there is a long tradition of countries delaying implementing EU directives for many years, and then getting it wrong several times. The EU is very lenient, but accepting cash everywhere is EU policy. The fact that some wise-ass members drag their feet for decades is not news and doesn't prove your point. If you push back at the dentist, for example, they will send you an invoice with a surcharge, and you can pay that invoice with cash at your bank.
>If you want to use the Tesla supercharger
Lol no I don't finance retarded imbeciles - incidentally, all the other charging networks allow you to pay right there without subscription, smartphone or app. It's called "drop-in" payment, and it is there because the law says it must be an option.
>In Northern Europe...
No, you confuse the EU policy of allowing cash in transactions with money-laundering directives. Those prevent you from buying a house in cash, but you can buy anything, say, under 10000 Eur or equivalent NOK/SEK
>No, they cannot. Many businesses don't want to handle cash and they will make it hard and send you an invoice with a surcharge but they must accept any form of legal tender, no way around it.
Not true in the UK. The House of Commons Treasury Select Committee has been considering this issue (Apr 25): BBC News - Shops could be forced to accept cash in future,
They may not require one, but good luck getting transactions done without one. My EU bank branches are now only open 3 hours a day, and to approve an online transaction without the app means phoning the bank during business hours…
you mean like I do all the time with my high-tech plastic code card? At any time of day or night, workday or weekend? I must be lucky because I have been doing it for decades.
Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.
> Your mistake was telling them you agree to use their app in your insecure smartphone. You were not obligated to do so.
Must be nice to have such choice. In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area, and unless you want to drive an hour to the city to do your banking, them's the breaks
>In rural areas you generally only have one bank in the local area
I agree to that but I don't follow. Are you a resident of a EU country? If yes, any bank operating in that country is obligated to let you open an account with them. Notice I say "resident", wich is a lower bar than "national". Banks operating in the boondocks and banks operating in the most expensive high street of the capital city, all must give you an account if you ask, so I don't follow unless they make you do banking in person only at one office, which I don't think is the case.
In phones you have a choice of iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). Sure, maybe some people can go back to flip phones, but I can’t without finding a new job.
This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.
>> This is the first I’ve heard of Apple locking someone out of their account for no reason. Google does it all the time. So, yeah, can’t leave Apple over this.
The thing is, you don't need to avoid buying Apple completely, you just need to avoid giving Apple all of your life: your photos, documents, emails, backups, passwords, bills, ... basically you should avoid doing what the person in the OP did.
People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the many private companies which gate access to their goods and services behind apps on proprietary devices.
To say nothing of the fact that well-adjusted humans need to communicate with friends and family, and many times that also practically requires being on these platforms as well.
You don't have to obey, but not doing so I think definitely puts you into most people's "not well-adjusted" camp... whether you think that's a good thing or not is a different issue I suppose. Lots of people in history who ended up being right were treated similarly...
And I really meant to write "not seen as well-adjusted" above... wasn't trying to say that anyone actually is or not.
I know you think it's rude, my apologies and I wasn't trying to be... just pointing out that people are still going to think it's weird and "not normal" to go to such "extremes" that most people don't, no matter how right they are.
Someone has to be the stick in the mud, right? I personally enjoy being that guy that doesn’t have a smartphone and causing problems in every government office / institution that assumes everyone has a smartphone, it’s like I’m a pioneer on the frontier :)
E-stim addicts will rationalize their slavery to a small rock in their pocket and sing grand songs about how it’s a curse but they need it. Like all addicts, they are not capable of rationally assessing the utility of the dependence object, and they’ll start carting out all sorts of silly things and gesturing vaguely “See this washing machine? Yep, it needs the rock, that’s why I keep my rock on me and charged at all times”
Reality is that you are the one paying the price, you will spend 45 minutes extra at the office when you could have spent it with your family or friends or playing soccer.
Time is the most precious thing in life, you’ll never be able to buy it back so you may want to reconsider long-term.
This also applies to protesting, activism, politics... It's not that you're wrong, it is in fact time that you could've spent playing soccer. But if everyone just turned their back and played soccer, the world would be a much darker place
Pretty sure I'm getting >10x returns on my time for the minor inconveniences I suffer, most people sacrifice a double digit percent of their time on Earth to the device in their pocket.
If it was be that simple. In that case I would have to go to the bank for every transaction/payment I want to initiate online. Banking app doesn't work for jailbroken devices. Using PC to access banks website works, but transactions still require 2FA and they don't support any other 2FA flow except the one in the app.
There's always a workaround. There are banks with far less annoying root checking and you can just switch. Many banks allow SMS or a physical authenticator for web banking or 3DS 2FA. There are also many was to bypass root detection. If your main problem is 3DS 2FA for online card payments, get a proxy card.
"you can just switch" and yet then you have to contact X people and change Y contracts that are related to your prior bank account. It is not that simple.
Plus nothing ensures the bank you switch to won't up their "defenses" in a week.
I never said it was trivial, I said it was possible. In many places, it's actually very easy. In others it takes some work, but we're talking about de-googling your life, having to put in some work is already implied.
At least around here, I can walk into a bank, sign a few papers, then that bank coordinates with my old bank to transfer all my direct debits, move all my money and notify all my periodic creditors (employer, social security, tax office...). Peer-to-peer payments (like splitting bills with friends) are usually done by alias (phone number or email) on our instant payment scheme, not by IBAN, and my new bank will take care of rerouting that too. And if for whatever reason someone has my old IBAN and tries to send me money in the future, they'll get a rejection and will just have to ask me for my new one, no big deal.
As for "in a week", come on, you're just being intentionally annoying. Obviously there's no guarantee. If they don't have root detection now, after everyone has had it for a decade, there's probably a reason and they won't implement it any time soon. And if you're just supremely unlucky and they actually do it right after you switch, oh well, you wasted and afternoon. Definitely less time wasted than trying all the million different root hiding techniques that probably don't work anymore.
You don't have to go to the bank for every transaction, you can just go there once to close out your account and open one somewhere that doesn't require that.
Depends though what you mean by "do not use Google". Having an Android phone with a Google account logged in will not affect you much. If they would block one account you just create another.
Having all your emails on Gmail and used for external services (bank, insurances, etc) is a different story though. I prefer to pay my email provider, at least they will care a bit more than they do for a free account...
I'm surprised, most banks I've come across force sms or phone-call 2fa only. A rare few allow generic TOTP authenticators, and maybe one or two has an app as an option. And I've only come across one bank that detects and warns for root access. Is there no "jailbreak hide" on ios?
In Poland it's SMS OTPs, bank app (heavily recommended and in some cases enforced by the bank) or additionally paid physical TOTP token devices. And almost all banks throw a hissy fit once you have some sort of vector of root detection left open.
It's also the buying of gift cards that can get Apple accounts locked: https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/r8b1lu/apple_will_pe...
If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards because of the real possibility of account bans.
- Don't give Apple gift cards to family and friends: You're potentially ruining the recipient's digital life if they redeem it.
- Don't buy Apple gift cards: You risk ruining your own digital life.
If you've been given an Apple gc for Christmas -- and you have paranoia of the risks -- don't buy anything online that's tied to your Apple ID. Instead, go to the physical Apple store to redeem it. And don't buy an iPhone with it because that will eventually get assigned to an Apple ID. Instead, get a non-AppleID item such as the $249 ISSEY MIYAKE knit sock.
I have thousands of credit-card reward points that could be traded in for Apple gift cards but I don't do it because Apple's over-aggressive fraud tracking means Apple's store currency is too dangerous to use.