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I totally agree - there is a total lack of responsiveness to any communication or contact by all of these internet giants once their "systems" determine that yo

I totally agree - there is a total lack of responsiveness to any communication or contact by all of these internet giants once their "systems" determine that you are guilty. It is a one-way, dead-end street. Surely, all of them must realize that no matter how sophisticated their pattern matching algorithms and fraud detection mechanisms, they can be prone to error. This may be by design though - these companies have no problem with systems with a high false-positive/Type I error rate (convicting innocent people), as long as they can decrease their False-negative/Type II error rates (letting guilty people go free). This is of course the exact opposite of how the rest of our legal and court systems are designed - and therefore the frustration and dissonance.

ericd 15y ago
Many times, when dealing with fraud, the damage done by a false negative completely outweighs the damage done by a false positive. This is almost always the case for the company, in some cases it's also true for other users involved. Thus, companies are frequently OK with having a high false positive rate in order to get the false negative rate to be close to zero. The company obviously realizes it has a large number of false positives, and it's probably decided that it's worth it.
- swombat 15y ago
  There's nothing wrong with deliberately having a high false positive rate. Airport security does that too. The problem is if you treat everyone who gets flagged up as irredeemably guilty even though you know you have a self-positive rate. This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal.
  - JadeNB 15y ago
    > This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal. Not so loud, TSA will hear you.
  - ericd 15y ago
    Very true, they definitely should dig a bit into their margins to provide a method of appealing the decision - I think it would actually help them quite a lot on the PR front, so it might be good even from a bottom line perspective.

ericd 15y ago

Many times, when dealing with fraud, the damage done by a false negative completely outweighs the damage done by a false positive. This is almost always the case for the company, in some cases it's also true for other users involved. Thus, companies are frequently OK with having a high false positive rate in order to get the false negative rate to be close to zero. The company obviously realizes it has a large number of false positives, and it's probably decided that it's worth it.

swombat 15y ago
There's nothing wrong with deliberately having a high false positive rate. Airport security does that too. The problem is if you treat everyone who gets flagged up as irredeemably guilty even though you know you have a self-positive rate. This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal.
- JadeNB 15y ago
  > This would be akin to having airport security send anyone who sets off the metal scanner to a maximum security prison without right of appeal. Not so loud, TSA will hear you.
- ericd 15y ago
  Very true, they definitely should dig a bit into their margins to provide a method of appealing the decision - I think it would actually help them quite a lot on the PR front, so it might be good even from a bottom line perspective.