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Is there legal recourse for a user who has invested a significant amount of their digital life with a service provider and who gets unilaterally cut off? What h
by AceJohnny2 5y ago
Is there legal recourse for a user who has invested a significant amount of their digital life with a service provider and who gets unilaterally cut off? What happens to any service that you'd have signed up with through "Sign in with Apple" ?
We're still in the early days of such a digital-provider-dependent lifestyle, and it seems the legal system hasn't yet reacted yet. The closest equivalent is how US Phone companies do have a "duty to connect the call,", specifically in legal response to the unilateral power they (used to) have. Unfortunately, that's led to the current (US) problem with spam/scam calls & text, because though they have a duty to deliver, they don't have a duty to authenticate.
The user seems to have run afoul of Apple's fraud detection systems, hence the "cold shoulder" response (you don't want to give fraudsters a clue on how to dodge the ban-hammer next time, and you don't want them to DoS your support lines). After all, we only have the user's (carefully constructed) story to go on. At the scale Apple/etc operate at, fraud is a huge, difficult problem. I expect the companies tune their processes in favor of the fraudsters, because bad press like OP's story probably does them way more damage than a few hundred/thousand fraudsters.
No, I don't have a pithy solution for solving either problem, though I do expect legislation to eventually catch up to give legal recourse for users. I guess the cost of fielding such legal recourse will just be added to "the cost of doing business" by these companies, and that cost will somehow trickle down to users. At the very least expect much harder sign-up procedures once that legislation is enacted, and maybe more regular "are you a real user" annoying checks on the users.