I have no particular opinion about the facts of the specific case in question. But there is something weird about the way customer service is set up these days:
1) Company: Doesn't like dealing with problem users/clients.
2) Company institutes policy saying that they can do whatever they want with no explanation. This makes it more efficient to handle the problem users.
3) Sanctioned users are now more frustrated than before because they aren't even given any explanation of what happened.
4) Users who are tech savvy take to social media or use personal networks to get special dispensations (see: every time someone posts on HN about a problem with their Google account and gets special intervention).
5) Company: Is happy because there is still an informal workaround for dealing with sufficiently motivated users or weird cases.
6) Users: Are left more powerless and potentially frustrated than when they had more sane tech support channels, but the company doesn't have to care about this.
This seems really suboptimal and the OP's comments on power imbalances seem on target. [edit: formatting, wording.]
Imagine a world in which Experian or Equifax would only fix a mistake on your credit report if you had enough followers to embarrass them on social media. This is where appropriate consumer protection laws come into play. The whole idea feels intuitively like a silly overreach to me since I watched Twitter, Airbnb, and these other services grow from nothing and so I take them less seriously, whereas banks and credit bureaus have existed as giants since I was born. On the other hand, one could imagine GDPR adding a rule that users must be provided with a detailed explanation and an appeals process before accounts can be deleted, and it wouldn't seem too burdensome when compared with the rest of the regulation.
>imagine GDPR adding a rule that users must be provided with a detailed explanation and an appeals process before accounts can be deleted
Arguably, that's already the case. The combined rights given in articles 15, 16 and 22 make it very difficult to legally justify a policy of banning people without explanation or appeal, especially if that process is automated. At the very least, you have the right to see any data used in that decision-making process and to have any inaccurate data corrected.
I'd expect as much--since you can't refuse service to someone for the stated reason of having the wrong skin colour or religion, you of course also can't refuse service without stating any reason at all. That rule doesn't exist just to protect consumers only from being discriminated to their face.
I'm kind of surprised that this is in the GDPR, I thought it had been part of consumer protection regulations for much longer. Maybe that was only in specific EU jurisdictions.
People seem to be naturally anti-regulation, failing to see that those regulations don't exist purely upon the whims of bureaucrats, but chiefly to address previous issues brought to the regulator's attention.
Sometime in the last century, this idea was implanted by big businesses in the media and therefore the thoughts of the citizenry that regulation is more than anything, just people who couldn't succeed in business bullying people who are, and that shit is so fucking dangerous that it makes me shake. Amazon, AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, none of these companies give a FUCK about you any further than they are legally required to, not one iota further, and we constantly bemoan our politicians over having a "too regulated" business environment.
People? This seems to be a cultural trend in the US in particular.
In many other countries the value of laws, social services, anti-trust and anti-corruption regulations, and so on, are rightly seen as necessary and desirable.
Unfortunately the US is very influential globally, in various ways. eg trade agreements, or just brutally implementing neo-liberal economics on weak countries they can coerce economically and/or militarily.
The US has also (having effectively no anti-trust for decades) has let many corporations based or founded there grow to unprecedented sizes and power.
Theres also other countries /areas (Jersey, Cayman Islands, etc.) that make a business of tailoring their laws to allow corporations to avoid paying taxes, pollute, hide data, censor journalists etc.
I dunno, I think there is a significant sentiment in the US that regulation is bad, period. There was the idea that Trump floated that was quite popular with his base that they would blanket eliminate 2 regulations for every one enacted.
Regulation (except for environmental ones) tend to violate the non-aggression principle and are thus not preferable (it's basically the government using it's monopoly on legitimate use of force to determine on what terms people interact in the market). A non-coercive solution would be to incentivize/negotiate better terms of service, as suitable.
You are generalizing too much. Even harsh critics of government regulation are rarely if ever willing to say there should be NO regulations or that ALL regulations are "bad".
You haven't been paying attention to harsh critics of government regulation apparently. Lots of them say exactly that, and they overlap with the "taxes are theft" loonies.
> People? This seems to be a trend in the US. In many other countries the value of laws, social services, anti-trust and anti-corruption regulations, and so on are rightly seen as necessary and desirable.
That's fair. Should've been more specific about that, it's a very American thing.
But who regulates the regulators? As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with government bureaucracies? If anything, they're much much worse than the worst that companies inflict.
Regulatory capture is a real thing too. Regulation isn't obviously positive just because there are reasons people trot out to justify it.
You're right, companies don't generally care about me. But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself.
You know how sometimes a corporation buys all of it’s competitors but keeps them in business? And it creates a false facade of competition? What if they bought the government and did the same thing? Well, consider it done. And the joke is on you for as long as you let it.
You, like most Americans tend to do, are failing to understand the democratic concept and the responsibilities it must entail.
A healthy democracy is very possible. It requires 2 basic things:
- An fair and flat electoral process with sufficient protections against financial and propagandistic inequalities.
- An engaged and educated populace, elections produce politicians who serve the electorate.
The second one is a catch-22. An educated populace requires quality education requires a healthy democracy. for that reason, when things go wrong, they are extremely hard to get right again. This is why public education and a focus on humanities has such a deep legacy in the history of building democracies. Without both, short-sighted and/or self-interested thinking like yours will doom the arrangement.
"You're right, companies don't generally care about me. But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself."
I've found that those agencies tend to care more about me than random companies. The rep at any of those places might not be able to help, but I can usually get them to try.
> But who regulates the regulators? As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with government bureaucracies? If anything, they're much much worse than the worst that companies inflict.
I think that last sentence could only be honestly written by someone who's lived their whole life in a society protected by strong regulatory structures. The massive benefits of regulation are taken for granted and forgotten, but the problems of implementation that still exist are magnified out of proportion.
Government bureaucracy is certainly not perfect, but lets not kid ourselves that it's worse than the alternative.
And the answer to your question is: a functioning legislature that's accountable to its constituents, and competently exercises its oversight role.
> Regulatory capture is a real thing too.
But rather than a call for less regulation, it's really a call for better oversight of the regulators.
My local neighbourhood police goes around visiting "difficult" households, mental patients that can still live at home, elderly in particular situations, addicts, checking up on "problematic" households that have been in contact with the law. I followed their stories about this aspect of their job on Twitter. They usually can't do anything much, in sad situations, but they do keep an eye out. Similarly they helped me out when my apartment burned down. Or when the corner shop got robbed, comforted the customer that had a knife held to his throat, and the owner. So they actually do care.
Certain parts of the social security administration (or equivalent) also care. They want to help people, that's what it's for. It depends on where you end up, if your case fits like a cog in the bureaucracy, that's what you'll get, it's efficient. But it's a social safety net for a reason, what else do the people do, whose jobs it is to guide people around and make sure they arrive at the right part of the bureaucracy, if not care?
There could be even more care, but when I see the homeless in other countries, how many are on the streets for no other reason than mental health, I think we're doing pretty good. I always judge a society by how they treat those who are the worst off. Lifting that very lowest rung, that is the only real progress in a society.
Oh you know another funny thing, your example about post offices? You probably remember those heart-warming stories of a grand-child addressing a drawing to "granpa" and the post office somehow figuring out where it should go (and similar stories). That kinda stopped when the postal service got privatised into multiple competing businesses. The delivery guy that belongs to the now-privatised previously-government postal service still has a pretty good idea who lives in the street, whether I have new neighbours, makes a (very short) chat. The delivery people of other delivery services, that have always been private, do not.
I'm sorry but in my experience everything points that government regulated services and the like inherently allow their clerks to care more than a private business.
I just imagined what it would be like if the local neighbourhood police got privatised. Brrr.
You and people like you talk as though the various regulatory bodies simply issue an edict and every corporation is obligated to oblige that very second, and it's ridiculous.
1. The regulations themselves are often based heavily upon opinions and trusted advice from people who actively are or who formerly were in the industry being regulated, not simply dreamed up and pulled from someone's ass
2. There is an entire months long process of discussion, meeting, decisions, appeals, revisions, etc. engaged in between experts on both sides, lawyers on both sides, etc. By the time a regulation becomes required law, it's likely been attended to by a few hundred if not thousand people from both private enterprise and Government over months if not YEARS of work.
3. Once a regulation becomes law, companies often have months of forewarning to get into compliance. In the event that a business is non-compliant with something, unless it's immediately life threatening, they are given warnings, written warnings, guidance, possible solutions, etc. Regulators are not some comic book villain trying to fuck over mom and pop stores. They are attempting to ensure the safety, efficiency, and long life of everyone involved in a business. They want you to be compliant, not to file paperwork and shut you down.
> As bad as this example is, have you never heard of the nightmares people fall into dealing with government bureaucracies?
Oh I have, and for years and years I took them at face value but ANECDOTE IS NOT EVIDENCE. Almost every time you hear about some person who ended up on the wrong end of a regulator's pen, if you start digging you'll find a long history of shady ass behavior from that person which is conveniently omitted from their account of the events, for I'm sure totally-not-lying reasons.
> Regulation isn't obviously positive just because there are reasons people trot out to justify it.
The vast majority of regulations are written in the blood of the people who had to die to show us that storing some chemical in a break room gave every 3rd employee cancer, or every person who ate fish from a polluted river who didn't know that the chemicals in it would destroy their bodies. The fact that you personally don't understand whatever is behind a given regulation, does not make it unimportant or frivolous.
> But neither does the Social Security Administration, the Department of Justice, my local police department, my local school board, or any post office in which I've ever found myself.
Except you can affect those if you get off your dead ass and vote.
Sounds like a great system for the incumbents, and a massive cost to any new players. You give it away when you say "both sides". In fact there are many sides, and regulation all to often favours the one with the best connections to the government - usually the largest.
Yeah, by now. The idea is to reverse that, because if you just say "fuck all regulations" you have pandemonium, which is the same in that it also favors the largest, but is different in that it's a million times worse than even what we have now.
The very same interests that subvert regulations then use that subversion to say regulations, "in general" are bad, without explicitly saying what the alternative would be. No regulations, or less corruption? What, exactly, are you arguing for?
BTW, you've been shadowbanned for 5 months or so. All of your comments start out invisible except to accounts with showdead=true. Those accounts can sometimes "vouch" one of your comments, like I just did here, making them visible to all users.
> People seem to be naturally anti-regulation, failing to see that those regulations don't exist purely upon the whims of bureaucrats, but chiefly to address previous issues brought to the regulator's attention.
I don't think that view is natural in common citizens, but rather it's the result of effective, long-term propaganda (a.k.a. public relations [1]) campaigns by those who the regulations typically protect against (businesses and their owners, mostly) and who therefor have to comply with them.
> Amazon, AirBNB, Google, Facebook, Apple, none of these companies give a FUCK about you any further than they are legally required to, not one iota further
You'd think this be common knowledge, right? But only yesterday I saw someone here arguing that Tesla is somehow an exception to this rule and really does and will care about us and the planet. I remember believing similar good things about Google in the very early 2000s (that did not last long for me).
Preference for less regulation is a normal cultural and personal characteristic, nobody had to implant anything. I don’t view big business as some amorphous entity but rather a collection of people that will do what’s best for them. It’s the same as with politicians who will do ANYTHING to get elected - even pass solid laws that benefit everybody. As long as your goals are aligned, it’s not a problem that they don’t actually give a fuck about you.
What would that world look like? When you wanted to borrow money, how would the lender expect that they have a good idea of your risk profile? You could tell them all of the companies with which you've had a good relationship, but ignore the ones where you've failed to pay them. If you could default or discharge your obligations without any repercussions, that would essentially end the ability for people to get loans without collateral. Apartment rental companies wouldn't know whether you had broken leases in the past. This would make the entire world much more conservative with their money because they'd have to treat everyone as the same risk profile. There would be no benefit for good economic behavior.
By statute, credit agencies can only keep 7 years of credit history on you. Wouldn't lenders be even better served without that 7-year limit? Yet the limit remains in place, because ultimately the point of all of this is to serve consumers and society at large, not just lenders. It's about finding a balance where economic value is maximized while reasonably protecting consumers. And given the Equifax breach it's not unreasonable to question whether the appropriate balance involves this system continuing to exist at all in its current form.
> ...have exercised our discretion under our Terms of Service to disable your account(s)
The language here implies that the account still exists in a suspended state, and is not deleted. If you're a european, under the GDPR they must give you all your data if you ask for it. Maybe this would include the reason they banned the account.
Otherwise, you can at least demand that they erase the data they're holding only to your disadvantage.
It isn't clear to me that the GDPR requires disclosure of data that is related to a person but was not created by or provided by that person.
So complaints from user1 about user2 or customer service notes about user2 wouldn't be considered personal data of user2 and thus wouldn't fall under GDPR rules.
If this isn't the correct interpretation, I would appreciate a pointer to something in the GDPR that elaborates on this.
>It isn't clear to me that the GDPR requires disclosure of data that is related to a person but was not created by or provided by that person.
Why wouldn't it? If it's data about an identifiable individual then - by definition - it is personal data.
Furthermore, in the ICO's recent report into political parties' use of personal data[0], they expressed the following view:
"Our investigation found that political parties did not regard inferred data as personal information as it was not factual information. However, the ICO’s view is that as this information is based on assumptions about individuals’ interests and preferences and can be attributed to specific individuals, then it is personal information and the requirements of data protection law apply to it."
There is a difference between the interpretation of the phrase "personal data" within the context of the GDPR and outside the context of GDPR. At least I think there is a difference.
For example, consider a website that maintains a collection of birthdays for public figures derived from public sources (historical documents, news accounts, social media posts from the public figures themselves, etc.). In many jurisdictions the birth dates might even be available via public record searches.
Clearly the birth dates are "personal data" in the colloquial sense of the phrase, but I don't think that the data as held by the website operator would be subject to the GDPR provisions, right?
>It isn't clear to me that the GDPR requires disclosure of data that is related to a person but was not created by or provided by that person.
It absolutely, positively does require that disclosure. Article 15 states:
"The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller confirmation as to whether or not personal data concerning him or her are being processed, and, where that is the case, access to the personal data"
"Personal data" is defined in Article 4 as:
"any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;".
If I have any information* that can be related to you by any identifier, directly or indirectly, it is personal data within the scope of GDPR. Server logs, invoices, customer service records, CCTV footage, emails between employees that mention your name or username, the whole kit and caboodle.
The definition of "processing" given in Article 4 includes storage.
The regulations would be a farce if I could hoover up data about you from third parties or through surveillance technology, but you had no rights over that data simply because you didn't provide it to me.
The quote there mostly defines what a natural person is, not what "relating" should be taken to mean.
Does it refer only to facts about a person, or does it include opinions and business decisions made by the company about that person? If one employee tells another by email that they dislike a particular customer and asks to have them banned, is that the customer's personal information in itself?
1. Yes, when exercising your "right of access", companies would have to send you all the personal data they have on you, except when disclosing this information would harm others (ie: notes of your manager about your performance or the example you gave) The exception does not mean that they can blankly refuse to give you any data, only the "offensive" part must be refused. By definition, that is still considered personal data however. As M2Ys4U mentioned: inferred data is also personal data.
2. there is a case where you don't have to provide all information: the right of data portability only applies to data provided by the data subject.
3. Someone is referencing article 14 below. That is not the same as giving access to data. Article 14 specifies how a data subject must be informed about processing of his data when you've received the data from someone else. For example: you've received someone's info from a recruiter and you now want to process his data to see if this person is a valid prospect. The article works together with article 13 (how to inform a data subject on what you are doing with the data he gives to you directly). Together, these articles are the reason for 50% of the privacy notices of the last couple of months :-)
The definition of personal data in GDPR doesn't mention "created or provided by that person" in any way. Can you provide a reference limiting the scope past the definition in Article 4?
Article 14 explicitly talks about data not provided by the data subject, further clarifying that it is in scope.
My wording wasn't quite right. GDPR refers to "personal data". I don't think all data about a person is "personal data" to be controlled by that person according to GDPR.
* are my interview notes during the hiring process "personal data" subject to GDPR provisions (disclosure, destruction, etc).
* are my business meeting notes with a contractor subject to GDPR?
> Maybe this would include the reason they banned the account
It might not unless the definition is really stretched. It's not data collected about you. Otherwise every email some employee sends discussing this situation would also need to be included.
>It might not unless the definition is really stretched. It's not data collected about you.
It's quite obviously personal data within the definitions used in GDPR. It's information that can be related to a natural person; those two criteria are the only criteria that must be satisfied for data to be regulated under the GDPR.
>Otherwise every email some employee sends discussing this situation would also need to be included.
Yep. If the contents of those emails can be related to a natural living person by any identifier (name, username, email address, account number etc) then it's personal data.
Its identifiable, yes, but not personal. Otherwise, all free-form text entry would have to be processed prior to a GDPR request, which is not likely.
Take Facebook as an example, when you request your personal data, they present what is linked in their database to you, which is of course not where anyone mentions your name. Who is to say that my name (Paul Smith) identifies me and not some other Paul?
Actually, when someone is identifiable with a couple of pieces of data, that becomes personal data. For example, if you would be the only Paul Smith on earth, we would consider that personal data. If you are the only Paul Smith in the US and the context reveals that we are talking about someone in the US, those 2 pieces together are personal data (and so on).
That is what they mean with "indirect identification" in the link provided by jdietrich.
I think we will actually see the right to have an account be instated and the right to permanently ban people taken away from websites, now that we can see their lifespan may actually be decades and the banning becomes profoundly disproportionate for non-criminal activity. It's analogous to the MPAA/RIAA demanding to disconnect people for piracy, except it might have already been in effect for over 2 decades for some people and websites.
As others had said that is almost the case already, and it does give you the right to know the basis for an automated decision and have a human review it.
4a) said savvy users also have to be willing to write these emotionally persuasive victim-narrative posts and pump them on social media. I think this is the polar opposite of what the average tech-focused person wants to be doing.
Github stole my 4-character username ("mind") to hand over to some machine learning startup-lookalike. Their official justification is it had been inactive for over two years (it had not), and a third party had reported it (to take, obviously). There was also no pre or even post notice, just the next time I logged in it showed up already changed. I could have easily and promptly responded to any notice - the lack of account activity was due to being occupied with the fallout from a significant death in the family.
I tried emailing customer service, but of course there's no need to consider facts when they've got policies.
I thought about trying to raise a social media stink when they were being acquired by Microsoft. But at the end of the day it's just not worth trying to craft a narrative to be received by the "web 2.0 class". I had enjoyed having the short name as Github is obviously a common center for bug reports etc, and I figured I'd eventually mirror repositories there. But at this point any illusion of cromulence they had is gone, and repos need to first be published on a real solution anyway. So whatever.
1. yes. 2. yes. The complete lack of a notice period is my biggest problem, as I could have easily responded to an email to say that it had not been abandoned.
My username was forcibly changed to "mind-zz". I found this out a mere 2 months after it happened, upon logging in.
Admittedly, my account did have little activity. I used it to make a bona fide Rust bug report, logged in at various other times to check said bug report or just look around, and then life happened.
So there weren't public URLs that were being relied on. Although according to the customer service response, they would have done the exact same thing even if it had copious early activity.
Presumably there's more of an invisible line based on how much your usage looks like you're dependent on them, and how much of a public disruption it would cause. But that's the point - the actual Rust repo isn't about to get yanked out from under all of us, and people that fit the mold of creating their new repos on Github are probably fine. But the less you're in the "community" the more you're at the mercy of their arbitrariness.
> Thanks for reaching out and my apologies for any worry this change has caused you. First, let me assure you that there has been no unauthorized access to your account: your username was changed by GitHub staff.
> We were contacted last March by someone with interest in claiming@@mind@@ for their own use. Upon inspection, we found that your account had not been accessed in over two years and we believed it to be abandoned. We released the username so another user could register it, per our name squatting policy: https://help.github.com/articles/name-squatting-policy
(AsteriskAsterisk was changed to @@ due to HN formatting)
----
As I said above, my account definitely had been accessed within the past two years. And it had been created and immediately used. And given that I do email on my own domain, it was pretty easy to see that this wasn't part of some farm of accounts. (I responded with all these points, to no avail).
And now here I am again justifying my own position in terms of their deliberately wide-open policy, to make sure I stay on the right side of public consensus - really, if I was "name squatting", then so is anyone who takes a break from using a service.
My guess is that someone greased the rules behind the scenes for a friend's startup. Which is of course is illegible to "support", so they just end up running interference.
I just looked over my account again, and realized I had actually created it in 2008 and had been reporting the occasional bug with it over the years. So we're talking a 10 year old account that shows a definite pattern of use - just maybe not the pattern Github envisions as being their ideal customer.
(This had completely slipped my mind - it's been a hell of a year).
>4) Users who are tech savvy take to social media or use personal networks to get special dispensations (see: every time someone posts on HN about a problem with their Google account and gets special intervention).
The only reason I maintain a Twitter account is that it seem to be the only way to engage the "good" customer support at so many companies these days.
When I was having trouble with my U-verse TV box, AT&T sent me a new one and then scheduled a tech to come out a few days later to "install" it. I plugged it up and called AT&T to have them activate the box, but they refused to let me give them the relevant serial number from the box to activate it over the phone and were adamant they had to send a tech to do it. I complained into the void on Twitter and AT&T replied asking me to DM them the relevant information(account number, serial number, etc) and they got it turned on in five minutes. They still couldn't/wouldn't cancel the tech visit so he showed up and we told him he wasn't needed.
> The only reason I maintain a Twitter account is that it seem to be the only way to engage the "good" customer support at so many companies these days.
I've heard enough people say the same thing to assume it must be true. I also saw a lot of this type of complaining (usually expressed in hyperbolic, super-outraged language) when I used to use Twitter.
This seems very counter intuitive though. Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible? It makes the company look bad, and encourages opportunistic complaining (I'm sure there are people who feign outrage over some small issue in the hope of being sent some coupons or a discount code).
Surely they'd be better off investing in private complaints channels (email, chat etc), and making it clear that you'll get the fastest response by using those.
I wonder if it's because the customer service channels were often outsourced or off-shored years ago, and are hidden behind layers of process and management. Whereas the head of marketing has the company Twitter account on her phone.
>Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible?
It's a perverse result of treating customer service as a cost center. The department that you call when you have a problem has targets - average call duration, cost per resolution etc. On a micro level, that seems fairly rational. They want customer service representatives to deal with complaints as quickly and cheaply as possible. On a macro level it's largely irrational, especially in the age of social media. Those CSRs are incentivised to fob off customers, who are then incentivised to complain on social media.
The problem persists because of a division of responsibility - private complaints are resolved with resources from the customer support budget, but public complaints are resolved with resources from the marketing budget. For the customer service department, it's hard to argue that you should spend $200 to please a customer who is only worth $20 a year. For the marketing department, it's a no-brainer to spend $400 to prevent a social media shitstorm.
Fixing that problem requires either strong leadership from the very top of the org chart, or tremendous bravery from just below the top. Someone has to make the case for the company losing fairly large sums of money in customer support expenses to prevent the risk of people badmouthing them on Twitter. Loss aversion cuts both ways - you don't want to spend the money to prevent a hypothetical, but you'll spend the money in a heartbeat to fix a bad news story.
> Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible?
I think the topic here is that customer support only/mainly replies in a constructive and interested manner when the issue is brought to public, e.g. on Twitter, because now they are being publicly called out for their behavior. Appalling, but appears to be true.
On the other hand, when using private channels for customer support you'll get responses that range from being passed around by call center operators that are powerless (and thus useless) to solve your problem, to downright being lied to.
Private support channels, namely those operated by real people, are costly, making Support a constant target for budget cuts rather than actual, professional management (that "investment" you mentioned). Plus, these channels are known for their hostile/toxic environments and meager paychecks, so it seems unfair to expect high quality professional customer support from the "official" channels; but the bean counters made the budget work, hooray!
Because it's public, they act on it. I'm completely certain they'd prefer to be doing off-Twitter support, via the complex phone tree, emails that take 72 hours for a response, etc., but they don't have that option.
Express Scripts has figured out how to avoid having to do meaningful support over Twitter. If you ping their main, verified account, they (apparently - I still haven't found a way to determine if it's legit) reply back on a separate support-only unverified Twitter account, asking for things like name, birthday, phone, insurance number, etc.
I don't know if it's incompetence or intentional. (and again, I still haven't been able to confirm if it's genuine...)
Either way, it likely gets them out of a lot of expensive Twitter support, as people (should) go "nooooope" when asked by a random stranger for that info.
This sounds familiar -- Amazon suddenly blocked the Kindle version of my book about 8-bit arcade game programming (https://www.amazon.com/Making-8-bit-Arcade-Games-C/dp/154548...) and won't provide a path to remediation or give any further response other than "we're upholding our previous decision". Some of the author forums actually recommend emailing Jeff Bezos directly in these situations.
I bought a physical copy of your book as a teaching aid for some kids I help tutor, its really great!
I can't imagine why Amazon could justify blocking the Kindle version, maybe (and this is a stretch) the scanned content may have triggered some security check?
Thanks! I appreciate it. I don't know why, could be related to PDF formatting but it's the exact same template as my other book. Could be a trademark claim, or just some grumpy reviewers, without feedback I have no idea. So now I'm selling a downloadable PDF on Gumroad.
If you will keep pestering them with an email about what you have done to correct your book (make up some stuff based on their guidelines) and send it over and over and over (waiting until they respond each time), changing it up a bit each time, you'll usually get through to an idiot that will unblock you.
A few years ago I had an issue with a large company. I guessed that the CEO's email was his_first_name@website.com and sent him a message. To my surprise he emailed me back and we exchanged a few emails. It'd be interesting if Bezos really did intervene in these types of cases. From my own data point, a CEO can care about this stuff even if the support their company provides is crap.
There is an 'executive relations team.' Too many people recommend writing to jeff@ which is a mistake because the decision of that executive relations team is usually final. So if you make a mistake in your letter, misunderstand something, or they just don't decide in your favor it actually forecloses other opportunities you might have had to get a resolution.
This is a huge problem inherent in large-scale platform-type businesses in growth stages. The scale required to be competitive in these arenas is such that if support costs scaled linearly they would strangle you. At least until you reach near-monolopy status and can raise prices. These platforms each hit a nadir in customer service before a few embarrassing failures that trigger apologies and more transparency.
It's also worth noting that these customer service failures are only newsworthy when the platform has ubiquity. That is, getting banned only matters if it locks you out of a significant portion of a market.
As others point out there are some industries that have consumer protections. For example, Visa basically cannot single out individuals to be ineligible for Visa cards. It's worth considering whether these protections should be extended to any company controlling large market segments.
Maybe machine learning can (ironically) bring some humanity back to customer service. And I don't mean infuriating, worthless chatbots. I mean instead of having single-criteria lists of "offenses" that trigger bans have machine learning models that can look at customers holistically in a way that would be very difficult to manually program. This approach could be taken now using "dumb" scoring and weighting algorithms, but it would require a lot of manual work tweaking and analyzing.
There’s no evidence of reversal from nadir, ie it is an ever deepening black hole of “screw the customers.” eg. Google and Apple have no customer service. Generally the approach is fake apology then onwards into the abyss.
Why would Visa care to ban anyone from their network? They get paid no matter what, and have zero liability. The banks issuing Visa cards can certainly ban people, and use credit reports to deny applicants. Banks and merchants are the ones eating the fraud/chargeback losses, and they'll drop you in a heartbeat if you're causing them to lose money.
Another option for users is to file a complaint with the appropriate regulator, screenshot their submission and provide it to the company in question. For companies that, like AirBnB often operate in the gray area WRT regulations (and for which regulators often appreciate extra firepower) this could elicit a quick response.
It is sad that you have to do this, but it might be the most effective option. It might also help others in the same situation.
Sadly in the US, this isn't a channel we have available much. The FCC just announced that they're just gonna tell you to go pound sand unless you pay them.
State Attorneys General can still do things, sometimes.
It's important to keep in mind how many problem users there may be. Trolls can create millions of accounts, and to respond thoughtfully to each one would require orders of magnitude more manpower than the trolls themselves. So every service needs a bulk insta-perma-ban hammer for large-scale trolls. Twitter is banning accounts by the millions in order to make a dent in the trollage.
Sadly, there will be false positives. Legitimate users that get mistakenly banned need recourse. Traditionally, your recourse was through the law. But courts are so slow and inefficient that it takes months and thousands of dollars to get even the simplest thing decided, let alone some kind of he-said-she-said dispute like the case here.
If I were the OP, I'd just sign up again with a burner phone number.
This has been a problem since humanity moved beyond living in extended family villages. It's the problem of civilization. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Knowing people who have power makes you more powerful. Power, because it depends on popularity, tends to be distributed according to a power law (funny coincidence, that).
Man, I'm so happy to read this, exactly how I feel regarding pretty much everything involving a subscription.
- Company abuses contract (imo fraudulently but they can always say it's negligence)
- Company waits to see if user is motivated enought to take action against them
- As more and more company do this, less and less people are capable to keep up with the extra work (support calls, letters, judicial action) and less and less "honest" alternatives exist.
> This seems really suboptimal and the OP's comments on power imbalances seem on target.
There is an easy solution: Tell all your friends that they should avoid companies that have such a policy in their terms of service and create a public blacklist of such companies including an explanation what policy in their terms of service justifies putting the company on this blacklist.
The existence of a power imbalance indicates you can't really do without the other party. The big companies have amazing economies of scale, and consumers (on their good side) can benefit greatly from them. There's a handful of airlines, two mobile networks, one ISP for most people, etc.
edit: Also, in my experience running businesses, the 10% of the customers cause 90% of the problems, so eliminating them results in much greater profits and cost savings. And if the problem customer is not high value, then there isn't much incentive in dealing with them.
I.e the 10% are not worthy of having an ISP, or health insurance.
As for the ISPs, this often isn't even about the customers being annoying, but simply their subscriber line being rotten or in an undocumented state which to sort out is too complicated for the tech-drones.
But you can look at the individual services and tell them what alternatives there exist and what "dubious" terms of service these companies avoid.
It is not an all-or-nothing, but an "avoid, except for these two exotic use cases, for which there currently exists no alternative (and as soon as there exists one, drop also these)".
Sure, and that probably will hurt such bad actors to some degree, but alternatives also come with downsides too - no product is perfect out there, and people often have different priorities.
Not to say I applaud Google's strategy - I think it is horrific.
Stories like this are why I avoid relying on the sharing economy when I really need something. If I'm going on a trip with my kids in tow, I don't want to be at the mercy of AirBNB where someone can flippantly screw me over with little recourse. If I want to rent a car on vacation I might try to reserve a car through Turo but I'll reserve through a traditional car rental company just to be safe.
I know I can have a bad experience with a traditional company but I also know they're not just gonna close my account and persona non grata me with no appeal. It's kinda sad that these sharing economy businesses are even more heartless than the incumbents in some ways.
Note that the "sharing" economy is an outright lie. Its piecework wrapped in what AirBnB, Uber & Turo hope is a more palatable verbiage. Sharing is when someone shares something with you, generally without recompense. None of these companies sell anything like that!
Consumers generally don’t care about these terms until it affects them personally. Additionally, in the author’s case, I can’t name one alternative to the type of service provided by AirBnB. Maybe I’m out of the loop.
> I can’t name one alternative to the type of service provided by AirBnB
What exactly is it that AirBnB provides that hotels don't? I like staying at AirBnBs, but there are lots of alternatives depending on exactly what components of the services they provide you require.
Places to stay in small towns where there is at most one hotel that might be inconvenient or full or nonexistent. Places to stay where you can actually use a kitchen (great in areas with weak food availability or for people with allergies). Not having to argue with hotel night staff about whether you can pay by card. And in general way better service (from hosts).
Yeah, I've used priceline to stay in Michigan, mostly. I've never had trouble with declining to put a cc on file at the hotel.
Drove out to Connecticut and their policy was hard, of course I didn't have cc funds available and I had a carload of kids that had been traveling all day. One of the guys there, a bellhop I think, put the charge on his card and trusted me not to screw him. One of the nicest things a stranger has ever done for me.
Hotels require credit cards because without them you get far too many problem guests (drug dealers, partiers, pimps, hookers). Based on my experiences, I wouldn't want to stay in a hotel that didn't require credit cards.
Sorry there seems to be some confusion here. I was complaining that a hotel would not let me pay by card (because they were not declaring the income presumably). "Our machine is broken, we only take cash etc". I escalated it up the chain and the machine miraculously unbroke in that case but it's not the first time I have this kind of experience in a hotel.
Ouside of truly exceptional circumstances, consumer boycotts just do not work. Tragedy of the commons and all that. If you want to see change, something you need to demand regulation.
1) Company: Doesn't like dealing with problem users/clients.
2) Company institutes policy saying that they can do whatever they want with no explanation. This makes it more efficient to handle the problem users.
3) Sanctioned users are now more frustrated than before because they aren't even given any explanation of what happened.
4) Users who are tech savvy take to social media or use personal networks to get special dispensations (see: every time someone posts on HN about a problem with their Google account and gets special intervention).
5) Company: Is happy because there is still an informal workaround for dealing with sufficiently motivated users or weird cases.
6) Users: Are left more powerless and potentially frustrated than when they had more sane tech support channels, but the company doesn't have to care about this.
This seems really suboptimal and the OP's comments on power imbalances seem on target. [edit: formatting, wording.]