Welcome, kids, to TIL – Today I Learned. Today’s TIL is “Don’t post your correspondence with AppleCare representatives or Apple will totally tell the government on you.”

David Boles had a nice Apple monitor that died on him. He had a little trouble transferring AppleCare coverage to his new monitor after it pooped out and so he posted some advice on his blog. Nothing major, just “don’t forget to connect your AppleCare accounts.” Very innocuous.

But then, from out of the inky shadows, comes Apple like the Spanish Inquisition, informing him he’s breaking the law worse than Josey Wales:

Hello, I am one of the policy representatives here at Apple. It came to our concern that our policy was broken. It is illegal to transmit information from voicemails, e-mails, transactions, etc, into public or private blogs and forums, vlogs, as well as documentation onto the internet, except for the proper authorities.

We have been informed that a conversation with a member of our Agreement Administration team has been posted on a blogging website.

We do view all e-mails that are sent to our departments for security reasons. “This transmission may be privileged and may contain confidential information intended only for the person(s) named above.

Any other distribution, retransmission, copying, or disclosure is strictly prohibited. If you have received this transmission in error, please delete this message from your system.” This is a very strict policy that we enforce, and that the government is under watch of. We do ask that you take down the posting of the conversation that you had which was posted on

“http://goinside.com/2012/01/26/warning-check-your-applecare-support-profile/” . If no compliance is made, further action will have to be forced upon.

You will have 24 hours to take the post down. Thank you. Apple Policy Restrictions

I suspect that this email didn’t come from a native English-speaker (“If no compliance is made, further action will have to be forced upon”) and it’s laughable that anyone would hold that “This transmission” garbage up as proof that you can’t post an email. Heck, I just reposted it so now Apple will have to sic the government on me, too.

Anyway, it’s a fun situation that I’m sure will be cleared up by nobody caring about it in a few days.