alt Hacker NewsApple Is Holding My Pictures Hostage Until I Accept Their New Terms of Service
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Anyone dealing with notarization will also recognize the classic "Apple Is Holding My CI Pipeline Hostage Until I Accept Their New Terms of Service".
Apple is committing extortion: 'accept these terms if you want your pictures back'. Due to their wealth, their obviously are above the law, but it'd be neat if they could somehow be held accountable. I'm not saying Luigi the CEO, but a class action suit or an organised protest may raise awareness.
Wow my timing for buying a NAS and strong-arming my family to upload all of their stuff there was perfect it seems! I literally bought it a couple months ago, exactly because I was expecting to get locked out of either my account or my photos at some point
This is the dark pattern of "upload everything and delete the local copies" laid bare.
This is possible to override, of course. But it's not the default, so only the most tech-savvy users make use of the settings that keep your videos and photos local.
All in service of getting you to pay for iCloud storage when your phone starts to contain more data than they offer for free (5GB, which is laughable in 2026).
You can just read the TOS if it is that big of a deal to you. They aren’t that long. Probably twenty minutes of reading.
People don’t do that because the terms basically say “you can use the service if you act normal. In the context of providing the service we may do any number of things a normal person would expect us to do.”
Reading them isn’t a good use of tim because most people using the service were going to act normal. But we collectively forced them to make the terms this long by suing companies when the terms weren’t clear and by deciding that the letter of the law matters more than what’s sensible. Accepting long terms of service is just the consequence of our collective decisions.
File a GDPR request to have a download provided to you? Seems pretty simple fwiw.
Not that I agree with the practice of rug-pulling, but "hostage" is a strong term.
I moved my photos to self hosting so I’m in control. I’ve seen enough stories to worry about losing them with Apple. Google and Amazon are using them however they please.
To be fair, people can get phones and install a FOSS OS on it, that's pretty easy, it's sad that Apple does this, but I would expect the same thing on Windows or practically any commercial provider, nothing is really surprising here.
It actually surprise me how many Linux users that do care about their security & privacy just seem to apply poor judgement when it's about their mobile devices, sure, you might not get the LATEST phone but who cares? Why are people trading their values and expertise the moment they touch the latest Samsung or iPhone? What's so special about them anyway, there is literally alternatives (or just vibe code it) for most softwares on it.