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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 addre

by 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.

by ovao 5y ago

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.