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These tech companies are ridiculous to the point that some law should be written to curb their attitudes. These are the richest companies in our country, and p

These tech companies are ridiculous to the point that some law should be written to curb their attitudes. These are the richest companies in our country, and print money hand over fist. That they sell online life services like photo, storage, music, etc should require them to provide actual, human support. I find it really sad they even have to be forced into it. How much could it possibly cost to hire a few hundred 'filterers' that triage out the tech support, and a smaller team of people who look into real issues? Amazon and Walmart do it, and still both make tons of money. So what's the downside here?

ovao 5y ago
While I don’t disagree in particular that Apple should offer support for account recovery, and that a resolution shouldn’t require knowing the CEO’s email address and crossed fingers, I don’t necessarily follow the logic that ‘they store my photos’ necessarily means ‘they should be governmentally coerced into having dedicated support staff’. It’d follow logically that if your photos (or whatever) are valuable to you, you wouldn’t punt sole responsibility of their perpetual storage to third parties. Understand instead that the storage services they offer are voluntary, conditional and subject to loss due to error, negligence or even maliciousness (the latter of which rarely serves business interests). Apple should obviously do better here — assuming this story is indeed accurate - but introducing legislation here seems like a leap.
- silisili 5y ago
  > I don’t necessarily follow the logic that ‘they store my photos’ necessarily means ‘they should be governmentally coerced into having dedicated support staff’. Understandable. But I'm of the opinion that companies like Google and Apple more or less offer these services and advertise them as one stop shops for you, forever. And in many cases, mine included, I pay for it. That I make an offcolor comment on Youtube or get a chargeback against the Google store shouldn't lead to a complete blackout to said photos, in my opinion.
  - ovao 5y ago
    Agreed on that point. When too many services fall under a single umbrella of “[Company Name] Account”, the loss of access to the account as a whole because of some kind of transgression on one sliver of [Company Name]’s services is just a fundamentally bad approach.
- rswail 5y ago
  They should be regulated. In the same way that other utility providers (eg electricity, water etc) are regulated. They should be subject to consumer protection law. Apple was forced in Australia by the ACCC (our consumer protection regulator) to provide proper warranties and repair/replacement/refund protection, as specified by the law. I see no reason why they shouldn't be "governmentally coerced into having dedicated support staff" to support their compliance with the law.
  - ovao 5y ago
    I agree that they should be subject to whatever consumer protection laws are in place for the regions in which they operate; I disagree however that they should be viewed as utilities for the purpose of legislation. I’m unconvinced that access to those libraries of movies, music or photo storage could be considered along the same lines as electricity or running water. I’d agree that there’s too tight a coupling between account access and access to purchased media, but it’s unclear that government intervention is needed to mitigate that. At the very least it’d be useful to know the frequency at which this kind of thing happens before making a judgment call on it.
    - grumpyprole 5y ago
      People use their apple account to register with utilities and banks. If Apple decide to randomly shutdown your email because "artificial intelligence" (statistics), then this causes much more major problems than simply wiping your photographic life away.
    - simion314 5y ago
      >At the very least it’d be useful to know the frequency at which this kind of thing happens before making a judgment call on it. Why is that? Is there a number like 1 in 1000 where is acceptable for Big corporation to screw people and "steal" their accounts? Think about average Joe story that does not appear in news-papers and HN. Laws seem very obvious here, if you want to close a customer account you need to do some minimum stuff: 1 tell the customer what they did wrong, in the same way if you would show to a judge the evidence that this customer did X and X is illegal or against the TOS you show the customer what he did wrong. I understand that this might make your giant corporations anti-spam/anti-fraud job harder but we don't want to optimize for lazy developers and lazy corporations. 2 Offer the customer a simple way to download his account data 3 If the customer bought media and games you have to either refund the customer or find a way to transfer the media to the customer. You would say that this is a hard problem, the answer is again let's not optimize for making things easy for super rich corporation and super hard for regular people. Maybe some innovation would come out of this , like maybe some kind of way where I can buy a book or game and I can sell/donate it like any physical object I buy. The issue is that now people are excusing that is would be hard for super rich company to do a decent job so is OK if they do a terrible job as long as I, the HN reader don't care about the poor guys affected. Also from what I noticed from YouTube it seems that simple obvious solutions are not even explored, you treat a 10 years old account with a good reputation the same as a 1 day old account, are all the developers working on ad targeting and polishing the next version of some shit framework? Is there any Google product that you were impressed by their overall quality?
- Nevermark 5y ago
  A law that stated companies cannot cut off access to people's purchased digital goods without a findable process for sensibly resolving mistakes on their part seems valid. They are effectively stealing - by accident obviously. But once that happens and they give you know recourse - there is intent that mistakes on their part won't be fixed.
throwawaysea 5y ago
The real problem is that these companies have silently just become foundational infrastructure for a modern society. They aren’t some random private optional service. They were private disruptive innovation at one point, but because of their immense effectiveness, power, and influence, they are really more like public utilities. Our laws don’t recognize that yet and we need to start talking about this more to make it so.
ipaddr 5y ago
Should they be able to scan your photos? Should they make judgements on your photos based on ml classification? Should they run your photos against police data for crime matches? Should they be able to sell your photos or use them throughout their product? Can they use your photos in an ad campaign? What would the laws protected against?
- mjevans 5y ago
  A provider shouldn't, because their system should be designed to prevent them from being able to so they aren't someday required to at their own expense nor at the probable violation of their customer's privacy. As technology evolves it becomes increasingly easy to invade deeper and deeper into once private spaces. Such as someone's rooms. Someone's now electronically light and replica-table collection of externalized documents and memories; maybe within our lifetimes even within their minds.
jiggawatts 5y ago
In Australia, the powers of monopolistic or near-monopolistic telcos were effectively checked by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). The TIO has teeth and almost always sides with the customer, and they make sure that the fine exceeds any benefit that the telco might be gaining through the bad behaviour that resulted in the complaint. Unofficially, I heard that the fines for any valid customer complaint start at $7500 and go up from there rapidly. Something similar may be needed. A mega-IT-corp-ombudsman, with powers to fine corporations providing services to the public in proportion to their annual revenues or current market cap.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I wonder why the TIO can't help with complaints to Apple, Googles, and Facebook. They provide plenty of telecommunication services. There's really not that much difference between the FANGERS and the telcos who sell the sim cards. It's all just software.
  - stanislavb 5y ago
    That's a very good question.
- frupert52 5y ago
  It’s more like $30 a day for every level 1 complaint open with TIO and cost goes up from there. I seem to remember level 3 is around $250 a day though memory is becoming increasingly unreliable. Point is, even if TIO sides with the telco (unlikely, they encourage both parties to find a middle ground as they are consumer first oriented) on a case where it takes for example 10 days (again, unlikely) to resolve; the margin[1] on a residential NBN service with a budget provider like TPG has already evaporated and that’s without considering costs of having TIO liaison staff, etc. It’s a good model because it encourages the telco to resolve the complaint properly and in the customers favour before the problem can make it to TIO as once it gets to them, it always costs the telco money. Provider is better off wearing $100 cost to resolve than have the complaint spend 3 days with TIO level 1, taking up time and resources whilst also becoming a publicised negative statistic (TIO regularly publish report outlining telco performance from a number of complaints perspective). I think your suggestion is a good one. Just adding this detail because I think it’s important to note that the model is actually about encouraging better complaint handling and customer service than just being about fines and punishment. [1] assuming 12 month term on approx $65/m service but I am speaking in broad terms
Joeri 5y ago
These tech companies are ridiculous to the point that some law should be written to curb their attitudes. IANAL, but doesn’t contract law already cover this? Apple terminated the contract one sided. They are allowed to do so, but only by acting in good faith and fair dealing. That they were willing to let this person open a new account (new contract) but not willing to reinstate the existing contract and also unwilling to explain how this person could avoid a similar punishment seems to indicate at least a lack of fair dealing. The ABA has this to say: In general, the duty of good faith and fair dealing means, for example, that parties cannot evade the spirit of the bargain, lack diligence or slack off, perform incorrectly on purpose, abuse their power when specifying the terms of a contract, or interfere with or fail to cooperate in the other party’s performance. I wonder if this person had took apple to small claims court instead of trying to navigate apple’s kangaroo court system what the outcome would have been.

ovao 5y ago

While I don’t disagree in particular that Apple should offer support for account recovery, and that a resolution shouldn’t require knowing the CEO’s email address and crossed fingers, I don’t necessarily follow the logic that ‘they store my photos’ necessarily means ‘they should be governmentally coerced into having dedicated support staff’. It’d follow logically that if your photos (or whatever) are valuable to you, you wouldn’t punt sole responsibility of their perpetual storage to third parties. Understand instead that the storage services they offer are voluntary, conditional and subject to loss due to error, negligence or even maliciousness (the latter of which rarely serves business interests). Apple should obviously do better here — assuming this story is indeed accurate - but introducing legislation here seems like a leap.

silisili 5y ago
> I don’t necessarily follow the logic that ‘they store my photos’ necessarily means ‘they should be governmentally coerced into having dedicated support staff’. Understandable. But I'm of the opinion that companies like Google and Apple more or less offer these services and advertise them as one stop shops for you, forever. And in many cases, mine included, I pay for it. That I make an offcolor comment on Youtube or get a chargeback against the Google store shouldn't lead to a complete blackout to said photos, in my opinion.
- ovao 5y ago
  Agreed on that point. When too many services fall under a single umbrella of “[Company Name] Account”, the loss of access to the account as a whole because of some kind of transgression on one sliver of [Company Name]’s services is just a fundamentally bad approach.
rswail 5y ago
They should be regulated. In the same way that other utility providers (eg electricity, water etc) are regulated. They should be subject to consumer protection law. Apple was forced in Australia by the ACCC (our consumer protection regulator) to provide proper warranties and repair/replacement/refund protection, as specified by the law. I see no reason why they shouldn't be "governmentally coerced into having dedicated support staff" to support their compliance with the law.
- ovao 5y ago
  I agree that they should be subject to whatever consumer protection laws are in place for the regions in which they operate; I disagree however that they should be viewed as utilities for the purpose of legislation. I’m unconvinced that access to those libraries of movies, music or photo storage could be considered along the same lines as electricity or running water. I’d agree that there’s too tight a coupling between account access and access to purchased media, but it’s unclear that government intervention is needed to mitigate that. At the very least it’d be useful to know the frequency at which this kind of thing happens before making a judgment call on it.
  - grumpyprole 5y ago
    People use their apple account to register with utilities and banks. If Apple decide to randomly shutdown your email because "artificial intelligence" (statistics), then this causes much more major problems than simply wiping your photographic life away.
  - simion314 5y ago
    >At the very least it’d be useful to know the frequency at which this kind of thing happens before making a judgment call on it. Why is that? Is there a number like 1 in 1000 where is acceptable for Big corporation to screw people and "steal" their accounts? Think about average Joe story that does not appear in news-papers and HN. Laws seem very obvious here, if you want to close a customer account you need to do some minimum stuff: 1 tell the customer what they did wrong, in the same way if you would show to a judge the evidence that this customer did X and X is illegal or against the TOS you show the customer what he did wrong. I understand that this might make your giant corporations anti-spam/anti-fraud job harder but we don't want to optimize for lazy developers and lazy corporations. 2 Offer the customer a simple way to download his account data 3 If the customer bought media and games you have to either refund the customer or find a way to transfer the media to the customer. You would say that this is a hard problem, the answer is again let's not optimize for making things easy for super rich corporation and super hard for regular people. Maybe some innovation would come out of this , like maybe some kind of way where I can buy a book or game and I can sell/donate it like any physical object I buy. The issue is that now people are excusing that is would be hard for super rich company to do a decent job so is OK if they do a terrible job as long as I, the HN reader don't care about the poor guys affected. Also from what I noticed from YouTube it seems that simple obvious solutions are not even explored, you treat a 10 years old account with a good reputation the same as a 1 day old account, are all the developers working on ad targeting and polishing the next version of some shit framework? Is there any Google product that you were impressed by their overall quality?
Nevermark 5y ago
A law that stated companies cannot cut off access to people's purchased digital goods without a findable process for sensibly resolving mistakes on their part seems valid. They are effectively stealing - by accident obviously. But once that happens and they give you know recourse - there is intent that mistakes on their part won't be fixed.

throwawaysea 5y ago

The real problem is that these companies have silently just become foundational infrastructure for a modern society. They aren’t some random private optional service. They were private disruptive innovation at one point, but because of their immense effectiveness, power, and influence, they are really more like public utilities. Our laws don’t recognize that yet and we need to start talking about this more to make it so.

ipaddr 5y ago

Should they be able to scan your photos? Should they make judgements on your photos based on ml classification? Should they run your photos against police data for crime matches? Should they be able to sell your photos or use them throughout their product? Can they use your photos in an ad campaign? What would the laws protected against?

mjevans 5y ago
A provider shouldn't, because their system should be designed to prevent them from being able to so they aren't someday required to at their own expense nor at the probable violation of their customer's privacy. As technology evolves it becomes increasingly easy to invade deeper and deeper into once private spaces. Such as someone's rooms. Someone's now electronically light and replica-table collection of externalized documents and memories; maybe within our lifetimes even within their minds.

jiggawatts 5y ago

In Australia, the powers of monopolistic or near-monopolistic telcos were effectively checked by the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO). The TIO has teeth and almost always sides with the customer, and they make sure that the fine exceeds any benefit that the telco might be gaining through the bad behaviour that resulted in the complaint. Unofficially, I heard that the fines for any valid customer complaint start at $7500 and go up from there rapidly. Something similar may be needed. A mega-IT-corp-ombudsman, with powers to fine corporations providing services to the public in proportion to their annual revenues or current market cap.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I wonder why the TIO can't help with complaints to Apple, Googles, and Facebook. They provide plenty of telecommunication services. There's really not that much difference between the FANGERS and the telcos who sell the sim cards. It's all just software.
- stanislavb 5y ago
  That's a very good question.
frupert52 5y ago
It’s more like $30 a day for every level 1 complaint open with TIO and cost goes up from there. I seem to remember level 3 is around $250 a day though memory is becoming increasingly unreliable. Point is, even if TIO sides with the telco (unlikely, they encourage both parties to find a middle ground as they are consumer first oriented) on a case where it takes for example 10 days (again, unlikely) to resolve; the margin[1] on a residential NBN service with a budget provider like TPG has already evaporated and that’s without considering costs of having TIO liaison staff, etc. It’s a good model because it encourages the telco to resolve the complaint properly and in the customers favour before the problem can make it to TIO as once it gets to them, it always costs the telco money. Provider is better off wearing $100 cost to resolve than have the complaint spend 3 days with TIO level 1, taking up time and resources whilst also becoming a publicised negative statistic (TIO regularly publish report outlining telco performance from a number of complaints perspective). I think your suggestion is a good one. Just adding this detail because I think it’s important to note that the model is actually about encouraging better complaint handling and customer service than just being about fines and punishment. [1] assuming 12 month term on approx $65/m service but I am speaking in broad terms

Joeri 5y ago

These tech companies are ridiculous to the point that some law should be written to curb their attitudes. IANAL, but doesn’t contract law already cover this? Apple terminated the contract one sided. They are allowed to do so, but only by acting in good faith and fair dealing. That they were willing to let this person open a new account (new contract) but not willing to reinstate the existing contract and also unwilling to explain how this person could avoid a similar punishment seems to indicate at least a lack of fair dealing. The ABA has this to say: In general, the duty of good faith and fair dealing means, for example, that parties cannot evade the spirit of the bargain, lack diligence or slack off, perform incorrectly on purpose, abuse their power when specifying the terms of a contract, or interfere with or fail to cooperate in the other party’s performance. I wonder if this person had took apple to small claims court instead of trying to navigate apple’s kangaroo court system what the outcome would have been.