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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

she made up a birthday and answers to the security questions. 8 years later, she does not know that information and there’s no way for us to guess it.

Well that sucks, but the vendor did provide an account recovery mechanism which they chose to circumvent.

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I feel like Apple did nothing wrong here. If they parent/daughter chose to go around every recovery mechanism Apple provided it's their own fault. Physical possesion of a device should never equal direct access to all its data.

> Physical possesion of a device should never equal direct access to all its data.

Apple appear to have extended this principle beyond the data and are preventing use of the device entirely. It ought to be possible to wipe the device and start from scratch with a new Apple account.

If a stolen device can be trivially reset there is no deterrent to stealing them or to buying stolen property.

This case (OP's) is an example of when a device reset could be required despite not having been stolen. What we're left with is the balancing act of deciding whether this example is an acceptable price to pay to achieve the deterrent effect you're describing.

And I'd also be interested to know if it really does have a deterrent effect. Does anyone know if criminals really do avoid stealing iPads?

when a device reset could be required despite not having been stolen

For which you would use the security questions that they avoided doing for spurious reasons...

We've entered a loop here, because you're referring to something they could have done differently at the beginning, but we had been discussing the situation that had been created by them going through the process they way they actually did.

Yes, this could have been avoided by following Apple's procedures correctly. But given that we didn't do that, this story has highlighted a case where we can be prevented from using our device despite not having committed a crime.

There are presumably other cases where a similar could occur:

1) A mistake during the setup process. What if I enter the wrong birth date in error. 2) Death of device owner. What if the person who inherits it doesn't know the answers chosen.

I'm sure plenty of other cases exist.

Not being able to factory reset a device that you have in your physical possession is not reasonable, in my opinion.

Not being able to factory reset a device that you have in your physical possession is not reasonable, in my opinion

You have a car parked outside your house. You have no keys and no paperwork proving ownership, nor is there a record of you in any central repository. Should you be able to just claim it by virtue of physical proximity? I think most people and most legal systems would say no.

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