I bought a new iPhone to my daughter and I decided to tell you this story, because I discovered that it happened to many. Not to buy a new iPhone, be to hear. Phase one: enthusiasm. Phase two: data transfer. Phase three: “Dad, I don’t remember the password of the ICloud account”, and there the suicide mission starts there. In the theory Apple is that thing for which everything “works alone”, in practice just an account ends blocked begins a 4k Kafkian nightmare.
Three times we are wrong the password (on the advice of assistance, among other things, in the phone of my daughter remotely, with the arrow piloted by the assistant who tells you what to do, because if he clicks he can see your data, and he does not want to see anything, for privacy, ok) and the system decides that for “my security” we must stay out for 24 hours. As if one forgot the house keys and the goalkeeper said: “Quiet, to protect you, we close you outside until tomorrow”.
The next day we recall, my partner and I, with the three iPhones, the open Mac, also the iPads and a block-notes, you never know, everything ready. Second assistant, for heaven’s sake: very kind, very prepared, very confident, very Apple Style: “It gives you six days, but in reality it is only a placeholder. Tomorrow everything is unlocked”. We wait another 24 hours and the next day does not unlock a cabbage. So we recall again, new operator, new calm voice, new wall: the block is real, lasts six days, and nobody can do anything.
The previous colleague? He was wrong. They almost apologize for giving us hope, as if the fault were ours for believing it. And then comes the pearl, not rare because speaking with me my friends I discovered that it is a common nightmare: “I recommend”, the last operator tells us, “do not use any device connected to your daughter’s account. Not even the old phone. Otherwise you risk the total loss of the account.”
Understood? For six days not only you have to wait, but you have to refrain from touching anything, as if the only gesture of using an Apple device could trigger the self-destruction of the digital identity of your daughter, as if, to protect you from a fire, they told you not to breathe, as if I had at home a sensitive bomb to Wi-Fi and the only recommendation was: “Don’t look at it too much”.
And the absurd thing is that Apple assistance is serious, the best: when they have to change you a product, they change it, when there is a technical problem, they solve it. They are courteous, prepared, professional. Yet, in this case, they do not have access to the system. The system is armored, unchangeable, inaccessible. Not even they can do anything, and they say it clearly.
The paradox is this: the account is mine, the phone is mine, the data are mine, but I cannot demonstrate who they are, nor authorize anything. They treat you as if you were a thief who tries to access himself, and nobody can help you, not by malice, but because they can’t. They are blocked as you, maybe more. The truth is that we entered the era of the master technologies, in which you are no longer the owner of nothing, only the custodian of a digital identity managed by an algorithm that protects you from your own data.
If security consists
In being walled out of their digital world, I prefer danger. Or at least, let me choose who I want to be screwed: by my daughter who forgets the password, or by Apple who tells me “we do it for her”.