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I often wish that there was a law that says the larger a company is, the higher the standards it has to be held to. So a billion dollar company that locks out
by TekMol 4y ago
I often wish that there was a law that says the larger a company is, the higher the standards it has to be held to.
So a billion dollar company that locks out a user and does not correctly and quickly handle an appeal would get a giant fee that really hurts.
- nojito 4y agoTalk about a massive slippery slope.
- adastra22 4y agoThis is usually the case, although through the form of safe-harbor exclusions which allow smaller companies to get away with more.
- actually_a_dog 4y agoIf this is the "usual" case, why do we never hear about big companies ever getting any kind of regulatory fine that actually hurts?
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoA fine for what? Meta has no obligations to provide service to anyone other than their advertisers who've purchased such service.
- themitigating 4y agoWhy does the size of the company matter?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoResources available (fiat and people) for meeting regulatory requirements and the relative burden imposed by regulation. There are regulatory risk and compliance teams (finance specially, but also in other spaces) larger than most startups, with mid to high 8 figure budgets. Meta can afford meeting regulatory requirements imposed by nation states.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hackinthebochs 4y agoAside from burden on the company, the cost to the user from being arbitrarily locked out of a facebook property is much greater than some random start up.
- arnvald 4y agoBecause of the impact their actions have on people's lives. If my local barber tells me "don't come back here ever again", I'll find another barber within 15min walk from my place. If Facebook bans me, I might lose a way to communicate with hundreds of people, I might lose access to managing my business and talk to my clients. And often there might be very few viable alternatives. As Facebook and other large companies become dominant in certain areas, their responsibility should grow, too. And banning users based on some algorithmic detection, without the ability to contact human customer support to understand and fix the situation, should not be acceptable.
- themitigating 4y agoI just don't want more government regulation, we have enough
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- d1str0 4y agoWere you equally against the FAA regulating the use of drones around airports?
- themitigating 4y agoNo, because that's for safety.
- otterley 4y agoWhat’s a viable alternative?
- themitigating 4y agoDon't use whatsapp
- 4y ago
- nycdatasci 4y agoIf the value of a social graph with N users is ~N^2. The damage done by restricting access is similarly non-linear.
- layer8 4y agoBecause the larger the company, the more they should be able to afford it.
- smoldesu 4y agoI've tried greenfielding this innovative technique here on HN, it turns out people will defend the world's largest company for a "magic mouse" that needs to be charged upside-down.
- seaman1921 4y agoSo your solution is to fine the cr*p out of it until it becomes a smaller company Hard disagree - in a billion users a few thousands are bound to be misclassified - no ML model (or HUMAN) is 100% accurate I would rather the company focusses innovation on the next big step rather than incrementally taking care of these few long-tail and corner cases. Moreover, its the users who make a company big or small, if there are better options users would anyway migrate away - the comment sounds a bit entitled if I am being honest - you want a great product + great customer service, for free. (I don't buy the 'but i am giving them my personal data in return' argument)
- ClassyJacket 4y agoUsers cannot simply migrate to a competing service, the concept does not apply to messaging or social media, as you have to successfully convince everyone else on planet earth to move with you.
- anonymousiam 4y agoMaybe it should apply. SMS works on any carrier. Why not have an open framework that allows messaging between platforms? The reason: Because walled gardens are more profitable.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoThe Digital Markets Act (DMA) is coming to Europe and with it enforced interoperability of messaging software. Hopefully for 2023/2024. I'm curious to see whether companies will have the gall to implement different behaviours for European consumers and the rest of the world.
- GWBullshit 4y agoCompanies implement different behaviors in different markets within the same state within the US; I think you may be giving major corporations too much credit if you suspect that deep down inside they're driven by trivial concerns like shame or genuine concern for customer opinion.
- elric 4y agoThis should especially be true for communication services. If you reach a large enough threshold of users, you should be required to offer interoperability with competitors, and have 24/7 support humans available to help out with things like this.
- happyopossum 4y agoFor an essentially free service? Those sound like a pretty high bar.
- layer8 4y agoThey are a business, not a charity, so it seems appropriate. Nobody forces them to provide the service for free. The other argument is that the major messaging platforms have collectively become an essential basic utility, and accordingly carry some responsibility.
- frostwarrior 4y agoIt's not free. We pay with our data.
- runjake 4y agoThat’s free in the way grass is “free” for beef cattle.
- gerdesj 4y agoIf it was "free" then the company would have gone out of business long ago. So it is not free and she is a revenue generator for them. In return she might want some sort of basic support. Given the market value of the company, then it should be able to comply with basic standards of say decency, honesty and perhaps ... transparency.
- jjeaff 4y agoAnd I'd bet a hefty sum that even after they ban you, they continue collecting and selling any data they can still collect from the app installed on your device.
- FrenchDevRemote 4y agoisn't there a term in their ToS that says they can ban whoever they want? don't see why a software company should be fined for banning users, you should be able to ban any non paying user whenever you want
- pxeboot 4y agoI agree, but they should need to tell you why they banned you, and offer a chance to appeal.
- tempestn 4y agoWhich they do, theoretically, but the reason is "see our terms" and the appeal is "yep, reviewed, still banned".
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> the reason is "see our terms So when you go to jail, do they tell you 'see the law'? No, they tell spesifically which law you broke. If you are willing to accept this BS, how do you know they are telling the truth, what if you didn't break their TOS and the real reason they banned you is because they dislike your political views? What if tomorrow they ban everyone who supports donald trump, or whatever.
- scrollaway 4y agoBanning people on a global, worldwide communication network that has a reach of billions of users is not "I don't see why they can't just do it without any reason" material.
- zaik 4y agoThat's kind of what you get if everyone chooses to use walled gardens like WhatsApp or Signal. My XMPP address will keep working as long as I have control over my DNS records.
- enriquto 4y ago> I often wish that there was a law that says (...) Do you live in a democratic country? It's up to you and your neighbors then!
- hedora 4y agoI think all fines should be expressed in days of revenue. Permaban for no reason, and fail to respond to appeals? A fine of 1 day of revenue, per user, seems reasonable to me. (Revenue would include revenue of all controlled foreign subsidiaries, tax haven shell companies, etc, of course)
- cyanydeez 4y agoWe call those government utilities, and apparently, that's a bad thing.
- twawaaay 4y agoForce a company to bear financial responsibility for locking a user out of a FREE product where EULA says they reserve the right to do so. Do you see where your logic is failing?
- deepakkarki 4y agoWell the companies choose to own the network and run closed protocols. They are not just running a free service but gatekeeping an whole audience. Either have standard open protocols or be regulated.
- GWBullshit 4y agoYou're limiting yourself with this "logic"; is there a rulebook or something that mandates the use of "logic" when people are dealing with major corporations? If so, who wrote it and for whose benefit?
- Schroedingersat 4y agoShould just be a proportion of gross revenue + a proportion of gross assets of the largest company in the stack that owns any part of it. If it would take a 3 person team one employee 10 minutes to resolve, then fine based on about a hundred thousandth of total gross revenue.
- ymolodtsov 4y agoYep. If politicians really want to hold tech accountable this is the law to apply. There should be a way to escalate your requests to real people if we're talking about Google or Facebook, because so much of infrastructure depends on them.
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIt's good there are cons to big companies, hopefully this will drive people away from them until they're good. I purposefully avoided doing mobile development to stay away from Google and Apple and it looks like, for some years now, web apps are buttery smooth on any device.