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we're getting to the point where the only reasonable answer is to regulate this, as the tech giants have well demonstrated that their only concern is to do the
by fivre 6y ago
we're getting to the point where the only reasonable answer is to regulate this, as the tech giants have well demonstrated that their only concern is to do the bare minimum trust & safety work that's beneficial to their business. users are an afterthought at best.
if you provide identity services to more than 100k people or w/e, you need to have a defined dispute process, served by humans with the power to do shit, with legal recourse in the event that they fail to do so. the "run a flag up the pole on social media, hope you're important enough or friends with the right set of people if you want shit done" approach is terrible.
the inevitable "but that will be vulnerable to fraudsters" backlash is stupid--the existing systems are too; fraud prevention and such isn't something you can ever do perfectly, since it's inherently adversarial. the problem we have now is that EVERYONE is treated as if they're a mastermind professional fraud network from the outset, and this does seemingly little to prevent actual bad actors. Twitter's trust and safety team is an even more egregious example, where they very effectively and immediately suspended my attempt to create a single parody account, immediately suspended it again after unsuspending it, and said any future attempts to reach them would be blackholed because the first unsuspend request was still open (there's, of course, no way to see that ticket or respond to it--all you get are email notifications stating that the reply-to discards all inbound mail). this, of course, does seemingly nothing to deal with actual bot networks, since those are run by sophisticated actors who've figured out how to game the system.
something like Estonia's digital ID system is perhaps best, with, importantly, built-in protection against tracking: I should be able to generate an ID that a company can verify, but all they should be able to glean from that is that I have an ID and that I've authorized X other IDs for that company--it shouldn't be something that's traceable back to who I actually am or trace my actions across companies, which is very much not the case (and is something companies very obviously take advantage of for adtech purposes) for the de facto standard of using mobile phone numbers.
- cortesoft 6y agoWould you be ok if this law allowed a company to charge for the support request? Like, $50 to have a human review your dispute?
- rexf 6y agoThey would actually provide support? That's amazing! Right now, the solution is to contact them through social media campaigns and hope the right people step in to fix. $50 could be steep for many and trivial for others, but that's a different discussion.
- bleepblorp 6y agoAllowing companies to charge their customers $50 to resolve account access issues would only give companies an incentive to make 'mistakes' so they can earn $50 by spending a few minutes 'fixing' the error. Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.
- thoraway1010 6y agoYou miss the point entirely. Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high. Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account. Cell phone companies do handle this, you can do things like sim swaps etc with a real person - but you are usually paying $50 - $100 per MONTH with them. And even there plenty of folks have complained of having 2FA codes stolen as a result of this convenience. If they could charge $50 or $100 to provide paid support (a situation that is actually very COMMON at the enterprise level) for at least some people this will be worth doing. Then the business case is there to staff / resource etc the fix. Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account. But keep on banning paid support and you'll keep on getting no support.
- bradly 6y ago> Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account. Google made over $6 billion in profit in one quarter this year. YouTube had revenue over $5 billion in one quarter. They announced a $25 billion stock buyback. Google doesn't offer support because they choose not to.
- eternalban 6y agoCurious as to how you come up with the 100k number. (We're in general agreement.)
- bleepblorp 6y agoI agree; there's no way any of this will be resolved in our favor without regulatory intervention. There's no profit motive for service providers to get this right and businesses have very effectively insulated themselves from existing dispute resolution mechanisms such as chargebacks, and in the US, litigation.