"My Apple ID has been Disabled"

I’ve had an apple id for 7 years or so, and this has happened once or twice before, but in the last week it’s happened three times.  Each time I have entered a new password, and within a day my account has been disabled again.

I have several apple devices (Mac Pro in my home office, Macbook Pro, imac in my office, another imac in my wife’s home office, Mac Mini in our home theater, ipad, iphone), so I wondered if that was the cause (each computer trying to sync with the old password triggering another lock down).  My use also spans distinct networks, including my work at a large apple competitor, so perhaps that has something to do with it.  In any case, really frustrating.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to just use my Apple ID without having to reset it first. Every time I try to purchase from iTunes, I get a message that my Apple ID has been disabled.

I also receive periodic emails with instructions on how to reset my Apple ID, no explanation given.

I suspect that someone else is constantly trying to log in with my ID. I asked Apple support what to do about it, and was advised to change my ID to something else. This is absurd, it’s been my ID for over a decade and I don’t want to hand it over to someone else. Maybe it’s deliberate? 

No other cloud or store account has ever given me this much grief. I never had any sign in troubles on Gmail or Amazon, only with my Apple ID.

Nowadays I avoid using iTunes as much as possible, and it’s one of the main reasons I hesitate to buy a Mac or an iPhone. With more and more moving to iCloud, my life will be hell.

Email as username is a bad idea. I was among the people whose Gawker accounts were exposed. While my Apple ID password has nothing to do with my Gawker account, that doesn’t stop people from trying it out anyway. Once or twice a month, I have to reset my password because someone’s made the attempt.

It looks like I can change my email address, but I don’t have another email address to use. It’d be nice if my login could be something that’s not an email address, but alas it isn’t. My only recourse is to sign up for some free email service and send my iTunes emails to that, but then I’ll never check it. 

So Apple is America’s most valuable company. They are, like everyone else, betting the company on the cloud. You may be familiar with the cloud, as it’s where all your valuable stuff is. The stuff that you may lose access to at any moment.

The most valuable companies have your valuable data in the cloud. We may think the cloud is decentralized, but it’s not. It’s totally centralized. All the valuable data is now in one place with one password that’s connected to your one bank account. We’ve centralized and simplified fraud and the public pays for it.

I’ve got email in Gmail, Music in Spotify, files in DropBox, documents in SkyDrive, photos in Flickr, and media and Apps in the Apple Cloud.

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