24 ms·

Amazon Froze My Account and I Still Don’t Know Why

235 points by ilamont 9y ago

fhood 9y ago
Say what you like about Amazon, but you must admit that they are a very shrewd company. Provide fantastic customer service to the consumers, and almost none at all to the sellers. Brilliant.
- peteri 9y ago
  Although they do sometimes fall down for consumers, I have a 2nd gen kindle bought from the US but running on the UK store which no longer talks to the store (I can download content but not browse). I ended up in a maze of the US folks saying it's a UK store problem and the UK folks saying it's a US supplied kindle so talk to the US. After a few rounds of "reset back to factory" support calls I gave up. I suspect the problem is the clock which is out by an hour so SSL / authentication isn't working. I held out until we left summer time back to GMT but even then it was still broken (I also tried from the Caribbean in case it was a European time zone issue). The GSM modem diagnostic page looked correct. In the end I gave up and my partner got me a Kindle Oasis from Amazon UK for Christmas.
  - discreditable 9y ago
    Did you maybe miss out on installing the firmware update for the store prior to the deadline? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=202048000 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Iirc they were disabling some old SSL stuff (either sha1 or weak ciphers) that the old firmwares relied on. If that's your problem you just need to manually update and it should work again.
  - mynameisvlad 9y ago
    I had the exact same problem with a Japan-bought Kindle Oasis used in the US. My Oasis got stolen right before I left for the airport, wanted one while on my trip so ordered one in Japan. I got the exact same run around trying to get special offers removed: US support says to ask JP support because it was bought there, then JP support says to ask US support because it's registered there. There was an additional problem that 3G only works in Japan for those Kindles. I ended up sending an email to jeff@ asking for an exchange of the Kindle to a US one. Ended up getting a one-time credit for the cost of a new Kindle with 3G.
  - rtx 9y ago
    Kindle money comes out of Amazon's pocket. Any replacement or repair request approvals might negatively affect the reps appraisal.
- slededit 9y ago
  If someone steals your account they are unable to look back more than two email addresses (even if the multiple changes occurred in under a 24 hour period). If you can't guess the e-mail the attacker changed it to you are SOL. Luckily Amazon decided to auto-fill with the new address so I could use that information, but otherwise they couldn't help me.
ceejayoz 9y ago
Why not send the "I promise to follow the rules" email - since OP clearly desires to do so - and then follow-up afterwards instead of repeatedly ignoring the instructions given?
- Someone1234 9y ago
  As they explained in the article, they cannot agree to stop violating the terms if they have no understanding of how they're violating the terms. They did review them, and could not locate the violation. So they contacted Amazon for confirmation and wound up in this bot loop.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    The email doesn't ask them to agree to stop. It asks them to confirm they've read and agree to the rules, which they do. Reply to the bot, then escalate. If the bot required wording like "I'm very sorry for violating the rules", that'd be a potentially different story.
    - waisbrot 9y ago
      Even without an explicit admission of guilt, you're putting yourself in a compromising position. Amazon made an accusation and then asked for redress, so if you give them that and were then involved in a lawsuit you'd have to explain why your actions (giving Amazon what they demanded to forgive you for rule-breaking) are inconsistent with your claims (you didn't break any rule).
      - ceejayoz 9y ago
        So, add "Having reviewed them, I do not appear to have violated any of these terms and believe this to be a false-positive" to the wording they request, and send a follow-up to customer service. Present in court, if necessary.
redleggedfrog 9y ago
I think this is the future rise of the robots. It won't be Skynet, with clearly malicious bots trying to destroy humanity. It will be capricious and arbitrary bots, locking us out of our bank accounts and merchant accounts with little or no recompense. We've already seen it with Google, now here with Amazon. How soon until your phone gets turned off, and that's just the end?
- dingaling 9y ago
  In the past we spread our patronage and investments around to protect against the failure of businesses. Looks like in the future we'll do so to protect ourselves against AI.
  - ConceptJunkie 9y ago
    Maybe there will be a flipside to this. Perhaps we can hope for the ability to have our own AIs that work on our behalf.
    - waisbrot 9y ago
      Maybe if the story author had written a bot to reply "I don't understand. Please tell me what I did wrong." to every bot-generated email from Amazon, he could have made a more entertaining story. He could include some graphs of the reply-counts, estimate the AZ bot's latency, and draw out some maps of the various routes taken by the messages.
- kevin_b_er 9y ago
  And if you're in the US, there are no restrictions on corporations restricting your rights. Only the government. The more that is privatized, the less rights you have.
  - Finnucane 9y ago
    >And if you're in the US, there are no restrictions on corporations restricting your rights. That's not precisely true, though in practice it may depend on the willingness of regulators to enforce existing rules, or people being willing and able to sue in court. Our corporate overlords can often count on those factors working in their favor.
Liquix 9y ago
Great read, I loved the letter vs. spirit workaround she employed in the end. Amazon is growing in a bunch of directions very quickly, so issues like this are bound to crop up. I think the solution to this one lies in a business strategy (scale support staff at the same rate you are recruiting customers & sellers) or automation rule (i.e. flag and send to support staff if more than X replies have been sent && account remains locked). It will be interesting to see if they can solve these issues in a timely and cost-effective manner or if certain arenas (i.e. eBook publishing) will be neglected in favor of more lucrative & automatable ones.
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Again, this is the trend I posted about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014500 What happens if Amazon decides to disable your account? Well, folks. This is no longer a "what if", but a "now what?!" Sure, you can sue. But as many people here are pro-capitalist, they will assert a company's decision to fire users with absolutely no redress of the data that was decided upon. Personhood rights, and all that. (No, I don't believe that companies should get personhood rights. And yes, I do believe that we people have the right to see what data they use to determine how they work with us, or not. The GDPR in Europe is a good start.) Where does it leave everyone? Well, for these people, certainly not using Amazon AWS now. And I'm guessing that they can't even extract their data either. Aren't automated system "Great" ?
Havoc 9y ago
Why doesn't Amazon at least include a hint as to what's wrong. Automating this doesn't seem problematic per se, but omitting a key piece of info like that borderline malicious. It's a bit like an error message that just says "Error" - short of an absolutely green programmer I'd expect better.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  That would open them up to people who can try to figure out what the triggers are detecting unwanted activity and getting around it, and possibly opening them up to discrimination claims.
benmmurphy 9y ago
while i think her response was clever isn't it basically lying. like if you knowingly phrase something in a way to give someone a different impression from what you actually will later claim to mean its just a really clever lie.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  Which part of her response gives an impression different from what she actually meant? I assume she read the rules and plans to comply with them. She checked that none of her books violate the rules, so she doesn't have to delete any of them to live up to the statement.
  - benmmurphy 9y ago
    You are correct. I re-read her response and it looks completely reasonable to me on second reading.
j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Having had to work with Amazon support in a variety of capacities for many different businesses this is a common response to Amazon's support. Contrary to what a lot of people think these are generally not robots. They're just people with a very short training period governed by an extremely didactic decision tree. If you do not give the support person what they expect using Amazon's unique definitions for terms which are often orthogonal to the dictionary definitions (e.g. you are supposed to get IP owners to 'retract' complaints even if you are really supposed to 'resolve' those complaints and there is a giant distinction between 'counterfeit' and 'inauthentic' products in Amazon-land) . This often causes a lot of frustration as people shake their fists at the injustice of a highly bureaucratic system. Fist-shaking doesn't really do much and it just sorta amps up the frustration level. Sending lots of messages in also tends to befuddle the support people and/or cause giant problems if the wrong thing is said. In practice what it means is that people who try to sell on the marketplace without knowledge of the opaque rules that govern it will tend to get weeded out. People tend to expect that the systems that they rely on are governed by moral rules about who is right and who is wrong. But it is really more easily navigable by people who are savvy. What's fair doesn't really enter into the picture and the way that Amazon's systems in particular work tend to run against the average American's expectations for justice (expecting to be innocent until proven guilty, that laws and procedures be readily comprehensible, that judgment be even-handed and based on precedent, and so on). However unlike some other big tech cos like Google/FB you at least have avenues of appeal beyond suing them. If you have a business problem with Google you will probably have to do something insane to get their attention.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  > In practice what it means is that people who try to sell on the marketplace without knowledge of the opaque rules that govern it will tend to get weeded out. People tend to expect that the systems that they rely on are governed by moral rules about who is right and who is wrong. But it is really more easily navigable by people who are savvy. How does one avoid getting weeded out and become savvy if the rules are opaque?
  - dizzystar 9y ago
marta_moreno 9y ago
Hmm I wrote you an email. I am a dev only though. Let's see what we can do ;).
caro_douglos 9y ago
Unfortunately it's all too common with Amazon to not give a great reason as to why where and how you violated their terms/expectations (IMO 3rd party sellers have to go down a support rabbit hole in the hopes of finding the one support person that can "guess" what's causing the suspension). Can you imagine how painful it would be to that third party Amazon seller whose whole income is from their (recently) suspended account? Am relieved to hear that Amazon was not the author's only source of income...note the similarities to uber/lyft drivers being suspended.
black_puppydog 9y ago
As many I'm afraid of a future (and present) where big platforms like amazon, google, facebook are essentially without alternative, and laws governing competition and thelike become a farce in the face of "rule by terms and conditions". In Germany though, we recently had a nice case about a nation-wide football (soccer...) arena ban, in which the constitutional court ruled that this constituted a significant obstacle to taking part in regular social life. They pretty explicitely stated that this is not limited to football arenas, but can in principle apply to facebook and thelike. According to this ruling, they'd have to come up with a good reason for banning a user and there would be potential recourse. Very encouraging, really, since the ruling just admits what many already claim: the big platforms are an essential part of private/professional life, really they're more infrastructure than a choice made by the user.
bitL 9y ago
Welcome to Amazon! Look at what is going on with 3rd party sellers there; reliable, highly-rated sellers get their accounts indefinitely suspended for completely bogus reasons with no recourse. I guess they don't need them anymore so they don't care about their shoddy ML and its false positives...
muddi900 9y ago
I have had the displeasure of being on the wrong end. Amazon seller and vendor support is obtuse and designed to confuse. It is adversarial. It is about three steps away from being on the same level as a dealing with a federal criminal charge. I had to write a plan, to avoid my 'misconduct', which was repeatedly rejected by 'assigned team', a group of unnamed individuals that was only allowed to communicate to me in automated templates. I would only wish this experience on my worst enemies.
bhuga 9y ago
There's some assumption here that there's a reason for the account blocking, and if only a human could be reached, it could be explained in detail. But that may not be true. ML systems usually don't explain themselves by default; it's possible there's simply no further information available for a support agent to give. This is a fun talk about post-hoc explanations from ML systems. It's possible, but it takes real work: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-for-ai-explaining-black-box-predictions.html https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-for-ai-e...
nfriedly 9y ago
Amazon once froze my seller account for something stupid and it was impossible to contact a human or get it resolved automatically. They got humans involved and fixed it pretty quickly once I explained why I was canceling my AWS account.
gustavmarwin 9y ago
Twitter froze my account today and I have no idea why either. Hate blockchain all you want, but I'm in pure love of it. I/We sorely need transparency and decentralization.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  How would blockchain help? "Twitter froze my account!" "Yep. I see here twitter froze your account at this time, in this date, in this transaction chain. Proof of work is right here."
  - jiveturkey 9y ago
    don’t knee jerk on the throwaway blockchain comment. he clearly is using it as an example of decentralized systems. a quite poor example for his point, but still.
    - gustavmarwin 9y ago
      Why poor if I may? Sounds actually absolutely excellent imho.
  - gustavmarwin 9y ago
    That's how: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/87k9iz/presenting_peepeth_a_decentralized_alternative_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/87k9iz/presenting...
    - ItsMe000001 9y ago
      How does that help? There are thousands of well-meant projects from overenthusiastic but inexperienced developers. The "interesting project!" graveyard is overflowing. Nobody knows this project or cares apart from some enthusiasts, and that won't change. Never even mind the discussion about the purpose of the blockchain here. Even if there was a purpose, I'd say tweets are the last thing that needs to be archived all over the place. The unique service of Twitter is that it is famous, not that it is able to distribute tiny snippets of text. Just like Medium. By using the brand name service you get an increased chance to actually be noticed and read in exchange.
jiveturkey 9y ago
This is as designed. All these companies ban or block users without explanation because their hand is forced. If they reveal the detailed reasons, or even make it possible to discover why, they become wide open to gaming. It’s a losing battle to begin with and keeping every advantage (secrecy) is critical. Unfortunately. It falls into the “this is why we can’t have nice things” category.
- maxk42 9y ago
  This is the correct answer. Most of those "automated" replies were copy-pasted from humans. This book inadvertently brushes up against something they want prohibited on their platform, but if they explain why it will give you a vital clue as to how to game their system. They can't get into detail, but want to stop you. It looks like the author is writing stories that could be mistaken for Steven Universe fan-fiction, so it may be a lot more straightforward than this writeup lets on: The writing may come off as being related to a franchise they're not a part of.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
blklivesmatter 9y ago
You have written "bad" comments and google, facebook, or twitter notified amazon and requested your account to be deleted Think if tou was using amazon home key product Dont ever let these liar companies to your life
rurban 9y ago
Similar to my experience with them: I had two accounts, one US and one German. After I moved back to Germany I asked them to remove my US account, as I didn't have a US debit card anymore. First they were able to do that, after several complaints and waiting. But then they also deleted my other account, probably by accident. A so-called double close, which is fatal on glibc, and in my case. Thankfully I've changed my mind about their services and am quite happy without any account.
biggerfisch 9y ago
On a related note to Amazon taking automation too far, I've noted that they seem to have some serious problems with categorizing products. For weeks and weeks now, in my recommendations are "Men's watches" [1] which are almost always comprised mostly of SSDs and flash drives. The flash drive in question's product page lists it as the "#1 best seller in Men's Watches" and my guess is that SSDs are close enough to a flash drive to also get pulled into the mix. It's frustrating to see large companies with offices full of developers making such public mistakes and then pushing broken technology further. 1: https://i.imgur.com/Sp7Yd5s.png https://i.imgur.com/Sp7Yd5s.png
keith_analog 9y ago
I've been locked out of my Amazon account for a year now, for reasons I don't know. Amazon reps told me I'd hear back, but there's been nothing for months now. Fortunately, the credit card they have on file expired, and the ebooks I can no longer read are not so important to me. So, good riddance, I say.
cwkoss 9y ago
I wonder if there is a list of buzzwords you can send to the autoreply that will get it in front of an actual human. Like: "Hey, seems like your bot is broken and I need to talk to a human, so I've copy pasted the following terms to attempt to elevate the issue and reach a human: emergency fraud lawsuit hacked liability jeff bezoz better business bureau fuck shit escalate critical severe engineer SLA reliability false positive PARSE ERROR..."
- lainga 9y ago
  A corporate version of the old NSA salute. al-qaeda operation dirty bomb infosec target juliett class prism activate!

235 points by ilamont 9y ago

Say what you like about Amazon, but you must admit that they are a very shrewd company. Provide fantastic customer service to the consumers, and almost none at all to the sellers. Brilliant.

peteri 9y ago
Although they do sometimes fall down for consumers, I have a 2nd gen kindle bought from the US but running on the UK store which no longer talks to the store (I can download content but not browse). I ended up in a maze of the US folks saying it's a UK store problem and the UK folks saying it's a US supplied kindle so talk to the US. After a few rounds of "reset back to factory" support calls I gave up. I suspect the problem is the clock which is out by an hour so SSL / authentication isn't working. I held out until we left summer time back to GMT but even then it was still broken (I also tried from the Caribbean in case it was a European time zone issue). The GSM modem diagnostic page looked correct. In the end I gave up and my partner got me a Kindle Oasis from Amazon UK for Christmas.
- discreditable 9y ago
  Did you maybe miss out on installing the firmware update for the store prior to the deadline? https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=202048000 https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=... Iirc they were disabling some old SSL stuff (either sha1 or weak ciphers) that the old firmwares relied on. If that's your problem you just need to manually update and it should work again.
- mynameisvlad 9y ago
  I had the exact same problem with a Japan-bought Kindle Oasis used in the US. My Oasis got stolen right before I left for the airport, wanted one while on my trip so ordered one in Japan. I got the exact same run around trying to get special offers removed: US support says to ask JP support because it was bought there, then JP support says to ask US support because it's registered there. There was an additional problem that 3G only works in Japan for those Kindles. I ended up sending an email to jeff@ asking for an exchange of the Kindle to a US one. Ended up getting a one-time credit for the cost of a new Kindle with 3G.
- rtx 9y ago
  Kindle money comes out of Amazon's pocket. Any replacement or repair request approvals might negatively affect the reps appraisal.
slededit 9y ago
If someone steals your account they are unable to look back more than two email addresses (even if the multiple changes occurred in under a 24 hour period). If you can't guess the e-mail the attacker changed it to you are SOL. Luckily Amazon decided to auto-fill with the new address so I could use that information, but otherwise they couldn't help me.

ceejayoz 9y ago

Why not send the "I promise to follow the rules" email - since OP clearly desires to do so - and then follow-up afterwards instead of repeatedly ignoring the instructions given?

Someone1234 9y ago
As they explained in the article, they cannot agree to stop violating the terms if they have no understanding of how they're violating the terms. They did review them, and could not locate the violation. So they contacted Amazon for confirmation and wound up in this bot loop.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  The email doesn't ask them to agree to stop. It asks them to confirm they've read and agree to the rules, which they do. Reply to the bot, then escalate. If the bot required wording like "I'm very sorry for violating the rules", that'd be a potentially different story.
  - waisbrot 9y ago
    Even without an explicit admission of guilt, you're putting yourself in a compromising position. Amazon made an accusation and then asked for redress, so if you give them that and were then involved in a lawsuit you'd have to explain why your actions (giving Amazon what they demanded to forgive you for rule-breaking) are inconsistent with your claims (you didn't break any rule).
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      So, add "Having reviewed them, I do not appear to have violated any of these terms and believe this to be a false-positive" to the wording they request, and send a follow-up to customer service. Present in court, if necessary.

redleggedfrog 9y ago

I think this is the future rise of the robots. It won't be Skynet, with clearly malicious bots trying to destroy humanity. It will be capricious and arbitrary bots, locking us out of our bank accounts and merchant accounts with little or no recompense. We've already seen it with Google, now here with Amazon. How soon until your phone gets turned off, and that's just the end?

dingaling 9y ago
In the past we spread our patronage and investments around to protect against the failure of businesses. Looks like in the future we'll do so to protect ourselves against AI.
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  Maybe there will be a flipside to this. Perhaps we can hope for the ability to have our own AIs that work on our behalf.
  - waisbrot 9y ago
    Maybe if the story author had written a bot to reply "I don't understand. Please tell me what I did wrong." to every bot-generated email from Amazon, he could have made a more entertaining story. He could include some graphs of the reply-counts, estimate the AZ bot's latency, and draw out some maps of the various routes taken by the messages.
kevin_b_er 9y ago
And if you're in the US, there are no restrictions on corporations restricting your rights. Only the government. The more that is privatized, the less rights you have.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  >And if you're in the US, there are no restrictions on corporations restricting your rights. That's not precisely true, though in practice it may depend on the willingness of regulators to enforce existing rules, or people being willing and able to sue in court. Our corporate overlords can often count on those factors working in their favor.

Liquix 9y ago

Great read, I loved the letter vs. spirit workaround she employed in the end. Amazon is growing in a bunch of directions very quickly, so issues like this are bound to crop up. I think the solution to this one lies in a business strategy (scale support staff at the same rate you are recruiting customers & sellers) or automation rule (i.e. flag and send to support staff if more than X replies have been sent && account remains locked). It will be interesting to see if they can solve these issues in a timely and cost-effective manner or if certain arenas (i.e. eBook publishing) will be neglected in favor of more lucrative & automatable ones.

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

Again, this is the trend I posted about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014500 What happens if Amazon decides to disable your account? Well, folks. This is no longer a "what if", but a "now what?!" Sure, you can sue. But as many people here are pro-capitalist, they will assert a company's decision to fire users with absolutely no redress of the data that was decided upon. Personhood rights, and all that. (No, I don't believe that companies should get personhood rights. And yes, I do believe that we people have the right to see what data they use to determine how they work with us, or not. The GDPR in Europe is a good start.) Where does it leave everyone? Well, for these people, certainly not using Amazon AWS now. And I'm guessing that they can't even extract their data either. Aren't automated system "Great" ?

Havoc 9y ago

Why doesn't Amazon at least include a hint as to what's wrong. Automating this doesn't seem problematic per se, but omitting a key piece of info like that borderline malicious. It's a bit like an error message that just says "Error" - short of an absolutely green programmer I'd expect better.

lotsofpulp 9y ago
That would open them up to people who can try to figure out what the triggers are detecting unwanted activity and getting around it, and possibly opening them up to discrimination claims.

benmmurphy 9y ago

while i think her response was clever isn't it basically lying. like if you knowingly phrase something in a way to give someone a different impression from what you actually will later claim to mean its just a really clever lie.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
Which part of her response gives an impression different from what she actually meant? I assume she read the rules and plans to comply with them. She checked that none of her books violate the rules, so she doesn't have to delete any of them to live up to the statement.
- benmmurphy 9y ago
  You are correct. I re-read her response and it looks completely reasonable to me on second reading.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago

Having had to work with Amazon support in a variety of capacities for many different businesses this is a common response to Amazon's support. Contrary to what a lot of people think these are generally not robots. They're just people with a very short training period governed by an extremely didactic decision tree. If you do not give the support person what they expect using Amazon's unique definitions for terms which are often orthogonal to the dictionary definitions (e.g. you are supposed to get IP owners to 'retract' complaints even if you are really supposed to 'resolve' those complaints and there is a giant distinction between 'counterfeit' and 'inauthentic' products in Amazon-land) . This often causes a lot of frustration as people shake their fists at the injustice of a highly bureaucratic system. Fist-shaking doesn't really do much and it just sorta amps up the frustration level. Sending lots of messages in also tends to befuddle the support people and/or cause giant problems if the wrong thing is said. In practice what it means is that people who try to sell on the marketplace without knowledge of the opaque rules that govern it will tend to get weeded out. People tend to expect that the systems that they rely on are governed by moral rules about who is right and who is wrong. But it is really more easily navigable by people who are savvy. What's fair doesn't really enter into the picture and the way that Amazon's systems in particular work tend to run against the average American's expectations for justice (expecting to be innocent until proven guilty, that laws and procedures be readily comprehensible, that judgment be even-handed and based on precedent, and so on). However unlike some other big tech cos like Google/FB you at least have avenues of appeal beyond suing them. If you have a business problem with Google you will probably have to do something insane to get their attention.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
> In practice what it means is that people who try to sell on the marketplace without knowledge of the opaque rules that govern it will tend to get weeded out. People tend to expect that the systems that they rely on are governed by moral rules about who is right and who is wrong. But it is really more easily navigable by people who are savvy. How does one avoid getting weeded out and become savvy if the rules are opaque?
- dizzystar 9y ago

marta_moreno 9y ago

Hmm I wrote you an email. I am a dev only though. Let's see what we can do ;).

caro_douglos 9y ago

Unfortunately it's all too common with Amazon to not give a great reason as to why where and how you violated their terms/expectations (IMO 3rd party sellers have to go down a support rabbit hole in the hopes of finding the one support person that can "guess" what's causing the suspension). Can you imagine how painful it would be to that third party Amazon seller whose whole income is from their (recently) suspended account? Am relieved to hear that Amazon was not the author's only source of income...note the similarities to uber/lyft drivers being suspended.

black_puppydog 9y ago

As many I'm afraid of a future (and present) where big platforms like amazon, google, facebook are essentially without alternative, and laws governing competition and thelike become a farce in the face of "rule by terms and conditions". In Germany though, we recently had a nice case about a nation-wide football (soccer...) arena ban, in which the constitutional court ruled that this constituted a significant obstacle to taking part in regular social life. They pretty explicitely stated that this is not limited to football arenas, but can in principle apply to facebook and thelike. According to this ruling, they'd have to come up with a good reason for banning a user and there would be potential recourse. Very encouraging, really, since the ruling just admits what many already claim: the big platforms are an essential part of private/professional life, really they're more infrastructure than a choice made by the user.

bitL 9y ago

Welcome to Amazon! Look at what is going on with 3rd party sellers there; reliable, highly-rated sellers get their accounts indefinitely suspended for completely bogus reasons with no recourse. I guess they don't need them anymore so they don't care about their shoddy ML and its false positives...

muddi900 9y ago

I have had the displeasure of being on the wrong end. Amazon seller and vendor support is obtuse and designed to confuse. It is adversarial. It is about three steps away from being on the same level as a dealing with a federal criminal charge. I had to write a plan, to avoid my 'misconduct', which was repeatedly rejected by 'assigned team', a group of unnamed individuals that was only allowed to communicate to me in automated templates. I would only wish this experience on my worst enemies.

bhuga 9y ago

There's some assumption here that there's a reason for the account blocking, and if only a human could be reached, it could be explained in detail. But that may not be true. ML systems usually don't explain themselves by default; it's possible there's simply no further information available for a support agent to give. This is a fun talk about post-hoc explanations from ML systems. It's possible, but it takes real work: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-for-ai-explaining-black-box-predictions.html https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2017/just-so-stories-for-ai-e...

nfriedly 9y ago

Amazon once froze my seller account for something stupid and it was impossible to contact a human or get it resolved automatically. They got humans involved and fixed it pretty quickly once I explained why I was canceling my AWS account.

gustavmarwin 9y ago

Twitter froze my account today and I have no idea why either. Hate blockchain all you want, but I'm in pure love of it. I/We sorely need transparency and decentralization.

freeone3000 9y ago
How would blockchain help? "Twitter froze my account!" "Yep. I see here twitter froze your account at this time, in this date, in this transaction chain. Proof of work is right here."
- jiveturkey 9y ago
  don’t knee jerk on the throwaway blockchain comment. he clearly is using it as an example of decentralized systems. a quite poor example for his point, but still.
  - gustavmarwin 9y ago
    Why poor if I may? Sounds actually absolutely excellent imho.
- gustavmarwin 9y ago
  That's how: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/87k9iz/presenting_peepeth_a_decentralized_alternative_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/87k9iz/presenting...
  - ItsMe000001 9y ago
    How does that help? There are thousands of well-meant projects from overenthusiastic but inexperienced developers. The "interesting project!" graveyard is overflowing. Nobody knows this project or cares apart from some enthusiasts, and that won't change. Never even mind the discussion about the purpose of the blockchain here. Even if there was a purpose, I'd say tweets are the last thing that needs to be archived all over the place. The unique service of Twitter is that it is famous, not that it is able to distribute tiny snippets of text. Just like Medium. By using the brand name service you get an increased chance to actually be noticed and read in exchange.

jiveturkey 9y ago

This is as designed. All these companies ban or block users without explanation because their hand is forced. If they reveal the detailed reasons, or even make it possible to discover why, they become wide open to gaming. It’s a losing battle to begin with and keeping every advantage (secrecy) is critical. Unfortunately. It falls into the “this is why we can’t have nice things” category.

maxk42 9y ago
This is the correct answer. Most of those "automated" replies were copy-pasted from humans. This book inadvertently brushes up against something they want prohibited on their platform, but if they explain why it will give you a vital clue as to how to game their system. They can't get into detail, but want to stop you. It looks like the author is writing stories that could be mistaken for Steven Universe fan-fiction, so it may be a lot more straightforward than this writeup lets on: The writing may come off as being related to a franchise they're not a part of.
deleted 9y ago
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blklivesmatter 9y ago

You have written "bad" comments and google, facebook, or twitter notified amazon and requested your account to be deleted Think if tou was using amazon home key product Dont ever let these liar companies to your life

rurban 9y ago

Similar to my experience with them: I had two accounts, one US and one German. After I moved back to Germany I asked them to remove my US account, as I didn't have a US debit card anymore. First they were able to do that, after several complaints and waiting. But then they also deleted my other account, probably by accident. A so-called double close, which is fatal on glibc, and in my case. Thankfully I've changed my mind about their services and am quite happy without any account.

biggerfisch 9y ago

On a related note to Amazon taking automation too far, I've noted that they seem to have some serious problems with categorizing products. For weeks and weeks now, in my recommendations are "Men's watches" [1] which are almost always comprised mostly of SSDs and flash drives. The flash drive in question's product page lists it as the "#1 best seller in Men's Watches" and my guess is that SSDs are close enough to a flash drive to also get pulled into the mix. It's frustrating to see large companies with offices full of developers making such public mistakes and then pushing broken technology further. 1: https://i.imgur.com/Sp7Yd5s.png https://i.imgur.com/Sp7Yd5s.png

keith_analog 9y ago

I've been locked out of my Amazon account for a year now, for reasons I don't know. Amazon reps told me I'd hear back, but there's been nothing for months now. Fortunately, the credit card they have on file expired, and the ebooks I can no longer read are not so important to me. So, good riddance, I say.

cwkoss 9y ago

I wonder if there is a list of buzzwords you can send to the autoreply that will get it in front of an actual human. Like: "Hey, seems like your bot is broken and I need to talk to a human, so I've copy pasted the following terms to attempt to elevate the issue and reach a human: emergency fraud lawsuit hacked liability jeff bezoz better business bureau fuck shit escalate critical severe engineer SLA reliability false positive PARSE ERROR..."

lainga 9y ago
A corporate version of the old NSA salute. al-qaeda operation dirty bomb infosec target juliett class prism activate!