escape clause

This story about a long-time Apple developer and writer whose account was closed without explanation and without any means of redress has been making the rounds in Apple-user world. And: scroll to the bottom of that post and you’ll see that the blogger, Michael Tsai, has covered several very similar stories in the past.

(UPDATE: Account restored! But that doesn’t change anything for me. In similar circumstances, I couldn’t count on my own story going viral.)

The story made me wonder — and if you’re an Apple user should make you wonder — what one could do if similarly locked out. I have everything backed up to Backblaze and to a hard drive attached to my computer, which is great for almost all my writing — mainly in plain text files (including HTML) and in Microsoft Word — but not great for everything else. For instance, I have almost 40,000 images and videos in Apple Photos, but those are kept in a proprietary database that I would be unable to open if my Apple account because inaccessible for any reason.

Greg Morris shrewdly puts the key point:

The scale of dependency is what makes this different from older tech problems. Losing your email account twenty years ago was bad. Losing your iCloud account now means losing your photos, your passwords, your ability to access anything else. We’ve built these single points of failure into our lives and handed them to corporations who can cut us off for reasons they won’t explain. That’s not a sustainable system.

So the first thing I did after reflecting on the story was to download as JPGs all the photos in my Photos database to a hard drive. I could of course have sent them to Google Photos, since it’s highly unlikely that I would lose access to both my Apple and Google accounts, but while I’m trying to avoid future trouble: I want to have every file I own to be saved in non-proprietary formats that can be so saved — I do this already with my email, which is saved in .mbox files — or in formats like .docx that have been reverse-engineered to be openable and editable by open-source applications.

The next step: to ensure that other mission-critical data are transferred to cross-platform or even non-digital sources. I’ve exported my notes from the various note-taking apps I’ve used in the past to text files, and I’ve stopped using Apple Reminders and Calendar — in those cases going all-in on paper (I was already mostly there). For some task-related matters, I may be making more use of Workflowy, which offers the option of regularly uploading copies of your outlines as text files to Dropbox.

The really time-consuming thing — I’m gonna see if Claude can help me write some scripts to manage this — will be to get files in Apple-specific apps and formats (Pages, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle) into formats readable on other platforms. One sad thing about this situation is that some blameless developers for Apple devices — like Omni, for instance — will suffer if many people do what I’m doing. They have pegged their business mission to the belief that Apple will be a reliable custodian of people’s data, or anyway to our belief in that somewhat questionable proposition.

Paper in preference to digital; flat files in preference to databases; cross-platform tools in preference to one-platform tools. This is the only way.