People who lived with that insistent dread—the sudden wipe, the message that a device was now bound to an account whose password had been forgotten or whose owner had disappeared—found themselves walking to Waqas’s door. There was the young mother who had lost access to a phone with pictures of her newborn, a delivery rider whose earnings and contacts were trapped behind a screen, and the teenager who’d bought a secondhand device only to find it fused to someone else’s cloud.