3 ms·

This is a typical response from service companies in the Internet age. They don't care about truth, or what actually happened, the algorithm says you're bad th

This is a typical response from service companies in the Internet age. They don't care about truth, or what actually happened, the algorithm says you're bad then you're bad. There's no human to appeal to, no human oversight of if their algorithm is right or wrong. They use another algorithm to check it, which tells them that you must be a bad actor. I've had my own issues with Lyft that are similar. Banned from using their service even though I've never actually ordered a ride from them. Banned upon sign up. No review, no appeal, they don't even follow their own terms of service. I'm not one to normal advocate for government regulations and oversight, but there's way to much consumer abuse for these Internet age services. Consumer protections can't come soon enough.

Judgmentality 7y ago
Assuming you're willing to share, how did you get banned from Lyft without ever ordering a ride?
- scrollaway 7y ago
  Dunno about GP but I had a similar experience with Lyft, which had to do with the type of card I registered to Lyft. I don't remember the specifics but my case wasn't particularly weird… I was using an EU mastercard of some kind and they decided it was a bad one so they banned me. This all happened without ordering a ride. Had a similar experience with Uber, except that Uber actually eventually fixed it. Lyft was… unhelpful.
- pedrocx486 7y ago
  I had a similar experience with two other services. Digital Ocean banned be as soon as I registered. I verified my email, then was asked to confirm some personal info, as I was filling their form, I got an email telling me my account was disabled permanently and it was final. (I went on to use Linode and Scaleway after that.) And Pokemon Go, which I never installed on any of my phones, I got an email saying my account was banned. I wonder what account, since I never signed up to their services.
- elmerfud 7y ago
  I have no idea how I was banned or for what reason. I signed up for an account, verified, added my credit card (amex platinum), and then could never order a ride. Opened a support case with them and they told me I was banned, they could not, would not provide any details as to why. No appeals allowed despite what their tos says and they stopped responding to the support case. Black hole of the Internet age. I really wish I knew what it was. I use Uber mostly without issue. Same email, phone and CC. Occasionally Uber does wacky things like block my account due to fraud, but they always manage to fix it. I've figured out with Uber it's always due to travel. For example I'll order rides in Peru and then 7 hours later I'll have rides in the US, and not to my house or in my home area. Still wish they had a phone number because it can take weeks for them to unblock my account.
smitty1e 7y ago
> but there's way to much consumer abuse for these Internet age services. a) Government programs are programs, written in the language English. So let's be careful what services we launch with the stroke of the Presidential pen. They could be a cure worse than the disease. b) Whither capitalism? A remedy to consider in parallel with government regulation would be some actual competition. How do we get the functionality we want without quite so much Orwellian peril?
- elmerfud 7y ago
  There are very much examples of bad regulation but there are also good regulations to. While I'm a believer in capitalism, totally unregulated capitalism results in consumer abuse and stifles innovation. Good consumer protections can actually benefit companies and the market in ways they don't expect until it happens. The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act is an example of what I consider good consumer protections, and benefits the market as a whole.
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    Indeed. Even the sportiest economy needs referees to manage the game.
wowaname 7y ago
Honestly I can't be 100% spiteful toward Discord. Their customer service at least allowed me to easily begin the deletion process for my now-useless account. Compare this to Twitter, Google, or Yahoo!, where it's actually really difficult to get in touch with a human that doesn't spam canned replies at you and close your ticket soon after. (I'm especially disgusted at Yahoo! which seems to handle E-mail abuse related issues in the same customer support department as general account inquiries. Makes it really difficult to report spam as a fellow postmaster.) It's a shame about your experience with Lyft. I'll have to remember this if I ever need a car ride, but seeing how all of these crowdsourced transportation initiatives are popping up with similar policies and disrespect toward open platforms (locking you into their apps, for instance) it might be better for me to consider conventional transportation entirely, if I'm ever stuck without a car and I can call up a normal taxi. >I'm not one to normal advocate for government regulations and oversight Yeah, I'd like to say that, this is capitalism and customers can naturally choose the right choice and stop supporting unethical companies, but this is hard especially with the network effect in play with things like Discord. Everyone's on Discord (or Facebook, or Snapchat) and suddenly a person is in the wrong for "not just signing up and using it" because their friends use it just fine. If consumer protections forced Discord to release a way to self-host servers (rather than calling guilds "servers") and made Discord fix their login and anti-spam mechanisms, and allowed users to have third-party apps to access the service, then I wouldn't complain. I still wouldn't like the concept of Discord because I'm a believer in federated networking, but it'd definitely be an improvement over the current state. These consumer / online service laws would also have great effect on financial and educational websites, which have rampant anti-consumer and security issues plastered all over their Internet presence. It's really upsetting to see how many corners people are willing to cut at others' expense.
hi5eyes 7y ago
my friend got instantly banned from stockx before even confirming the order,, these algos run amok
jrockway 7y ago
To be fair, I don't think humans have any way of verifying that you're trustworthy. Anyone can send email from your email address. Anyone can fake a driver's license. Anyone can get a phone number that meets their criteria. Knowing who someone is on the Internet is nearly impossible. Knowing whether or not to trust someone once you know who they are is nearly impossible. There is no system of human <-> corporation trust in the real world. The best we have, maybe, is some record of how often you pay bills on time. Tech companies kind of have to have these automated bans, because it's easy to create new identities on the Internet and the government doesn't care that you're defrauding a tech company. If you defraud a bank, the government pays the full cost of prosecuting and incarcerating you. If you spam Discord... nobody cares. It's Discord's problem, not the taxpayers' problem. So they really have no choice here. The world sucks. Get a helmet. Having said that, banning people with a valid authentication token because of their IP address is simply the wrong algorithm. I can see why you might rate limit authentication attempts over Tor... but if you get your username/password right on the first attempt and provide the correct second factor... you should probably rate limit that valid session with a per-session rate limit key, rather than a per network endpoint key. (The era of IP address based rate limiting dies with IPv6 anyway, so they'll need a better plan someday.)
- vageli 7y ago
  > To be fair, I don't think humans have any way of verifying that you're trustworthy. Anyone can send email from your email address. Anyone can fake a driver's license. Anyone can get a phone number that meets their criteria. Knowing who someone is on the Internet is nearly impossible. Knowing whether or not to trust someone once you know who they are is nearly impossible. American banks seem to have no issue with this.

Judgmentality 7y ago

Assuming you're willing to share, how did you get banned from Lyft without ever ordering a ride?

scrollaway 7y ago
Dunno about GP but I had a similar experience with Lyft, which had to do with the type of card I registered to Lyft. I don't remember the specifics but my case wasn't particularly weird… I was using an EU mastercard of some kind and they decided it was a bad one so they banned me. This all happened without ordering a ride. Had a similar experience with Uber, except that Uber actually eventually fixed it. Lyft was… unhelpful.
pedrocx486 7y ago
I had a similar experience with two other services. Digital Ocean banned be as soon as I registered. I verified my email, then was asked to confirm some personal info, as I was filling their form, I got an email telling me my account was disabled permanently and it was final. (I went on to use Linode and Scaleway after that.) And Pokemon Go, which I never installed on any of my phones, I got an email saying my account was banned. I wonder what account, since I never signed up to their services.
elmerfud 7y ago
I have no idea how I was banned or for what reason. I signed up for an account, verified, added my credit card (amex platinum), and then could never order a ride. Opened a support case with them and they told me I was banned, they could not, would not provide any details as to why. No appeals allowed despite what their tos says and they stopped responding to the support case. Black hole of the Internet age. I really wish I knew what it was. I use Uber mostly without issue. Same email, phone and CC. Occasionally Uber does wacky things like block my account due to fraud, but they always manage to fix it. I've figured out with Uber it's always due to travel. For example I'll order rides in Peru and then 7 hours later I'll have rides in the US, and not to my house or in my home area. Still wish they had a phone number because it can take weeks for them to unblock my account.

smitty1e 7y ago

> but there's way to much consumer abuse for these Internet age services. a) Government programs are programs, written in the language English. So let's be careful what services we launch with the stroke of the Presidential pen. They could be a cure worse than the disease. b) Whither capitalism? A remedy to consider in parallel with government regulation would be some actual competition. How do we get the functionality we want without quite so much Orwellian peril?

elmerfud 7y ago
There are very much examples of bad regulation but there are also good regulations to. While I'm a believer in capitalism, totally unregulated capitalism results in consumer abuse and stifles innovation. Good consumer protections can actually benefit companies and the market in ways they don't expect until it happens. The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act is an example of what I consider good consumer protections, and benefits the market as a whole.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  Indeed. Even the sportiest economy needs referees to manage the game.

wowaname 7y ago

Honestly I can't be 100% spiteful toward Discord. Their customer service at least allowed me to easily begin the deletion process for my now-useless account. Compare this to Twitter, Google, or Yahoo!, where it's actually really difficult to get in touch with a human that doesn't spam canned replies at you and close your ticket soon after. (I'm especially disgusted at Yahoo! which seems to handle E-mail abuse related issues in the same customer support department as general account inquiries. Makes it really difficult to report spam as a fellow postmaster.) It's a shame about your experience with Lyft. I'll have to remember this if I ever need a car ride, but seeing how all of these crowdsourced transportation initiatives are popping up with similar policies and disrespect toward open platforms (locking you into their apps, for instance) it might be better for me to consider conventional transportation entirely, if I'm ever stuck without a car and I can call up a normal taxi. >I'm not one to normal advocate for government regulations and oversight Yeah, I'd like to say that, this is capitalism and customers can naturally choose the right choice and stop supporting unethical companies, but this is hard especially with the network effect in play with things like Discord. Everyone's on Discord (or Facebook, or Snapchat) and suddenly a person is in the wrong for "not just signing up and using it" because their friends use it just fine. If consumer protections forced Discord to release a way to self-host servers (rather than calling guilds "servers") and made Discord fix their login and anti-spam mechanisms, and allowed users to have third-party apps to access the service, then I wouldn't complain. I still wouldn't like the concept of Discord because I'm a believer in federated networking, but it'd definitely be an improvement over the current state. These consumer / online service laws would also have great effect on financial and educational websites, which have rampant anti-consumer and security issues plastered all over their Internet presence. It's really upsetting to see how many corners people are willing to cut at others' expense.

hi5eyes 7y ago

my friend got instantly banned from stockx before even confirming the order,, these algos run amok

jrockway 7y ago

To be fair, I don't think humans have any way of verifying that you're trustworthy. Anyone can send email from your email address. Anyone can fake a driver's license. Anyone can get a phone number that meets their criteria. Knowing who someone is on the Internet is nearly impossible. Knowing whether or not to trust someone once you know who they are is nearly impossible. There is no system of human <-> corporation trust in the real world. The best we have, maybe, is some record of how often you pay bills on time. Tech companies kind of have to have these automated bans, because it's easy to create new identities on the Internet and the government doesn't care that you're defrauding a tech company. If you defraud a bank, the government pays the full cost of prosecuting and incarcerating you. If you spam Discord... nobody cares. It's Discord's problem, not the taxpayers' problem. So they really have no choice here. The world sucks. Get a helmet. Having said that, banning people with a valid authentication token because of their IP address is simply the wrong algorithm. I can see why you might rate limit authentication attempts over Tor... but if you get your username/password right on the first attempt and provide the correct second factor... you should probably rate limit that valid session with a per-session rate limit key, rather than a per network endpoint key. (The era of IP address based rate limiting dies with IPv6 anyway, so they'll need a better plan someday.)

vageli 7y ago
> To be fair, I don't think humans have any way of verifying that you're trustworthy. Anyone can send email from your email address. Anyone can fake a driver's license. Anyone can get a phone number that meets their criteria. Knowing who someone is on the Internet is nearly impossible. Knowing whether or not to trust someone once you know who they are is nearly impossible. American banks seem to have no issue with this.