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The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other da
by lbriner 3y ago
The whole issue around not telling you what rule you broke "because then you might work around it" is total BS. It's like a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form because "it would help a hacker know what to type in it" (it was the password reset password they expected but you wouldn't know).
How much quicker would this be resolved if the first AI said, "your account has been blocked because we detected an advert related to live animals" to which you could appeal with your one sentence reason, "these are not animals, they are programming languages with the same names as animals" which would take a very cursory check and continue to bring in advertising revenue.
I think like another poster it is probably true that if you were spending a lot, you would have been given more time to argue your case. For someone who brings in $10 a month, it's not worth their time.
- reuven 3y agoYup, I'm sure that I'm just not big enough for them to notice or handle personally. That said, this is still absurd.
- mongol 3y agoYeah exactly. Imagine if our laws worked like that. Complete dystopia.
- omnibrain 3y agoThere is a book on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
- rurban 3y agoKafka is about human bureaucracy. This case is about AI bureaucracy.
- teddyh 3y agoSomeone needs to re-write “The Trial” for this millennium. The new title can be “The Algorithm”. (Re-post of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27378230>)
- marcosdumay 3y agoThere is no AI bureaucracy, at least until now, it's all human.
- larodi 3y agoif u think about it - laws that govern lives today, are predominantly these rules of the information systems. these rules impact us more than the laws governed by the judiciary. so we ARE in this complete dystopia, question is whether we'll see any sort of uprising or dark IT ages are just beginning...
- DrScientist 3y agoSadly it's becoming true - the use of closed sessions where the evidence against you is seen by the judge in secret is becoming more widespread. Against all natural justice - in the name of national security.
- bowsamic 3y agoIt is BS, the real reason they don’t tell you is because they genuinely don’t know
- noirscape 3y agoTo be somewhat fair to Meta; the "violation of unclear rules part" part is an appropriate response for spam detection. Usually any entity dealing with the web don't want to reveal how their spam detector works because doing so could in turn reveal information on how to circumvent it[0]. The issue is that Meta thinks they're large enough that they can apply this to every single one of their business customers and all other parts of their policy as well - normally a company will be inclined to keep the businesses it's partnered with happy because losing their business can have a knock-on effect that could result in a bigger knock-on effect. The sad thing is that Meta is probably correct in this assessment - losing one business wouldn't hurt them, regardless of spending. Even if you put a few thousand a month on the line, it's not worth for them to consider you. Heck even if you tell your friends about it - Meta doesn't give a shit. The true Kafka-esque nightmare here though is that even just knowing someone at the company is apparently not even enough to get it properly checked out and fixed (even corporations like Google who have similar black box policies to most users have the means to do that). It seems Facebook runs on "computer says no" logic when it comes to cases they don't have data on anymore. That is truly disgusting. [0]: This in part because most spam detection is ultimately still just checking heuristics; revealing the heuristic simply reveals what stat to adjust for. There's very few "sophisticated" detection methods - even the big email providers still just rely on heuristics combined with an internal trust score that they gain by checking how users respond to email.
- sideshowb 3y agoOr they could, you know, spend some of their billions on employing humans to review these cases.
- m4rtink 3y agoNot telling you whats wrong should be highly ilegal, given how important these systems can be for modern society.
- Lio 3y agoI'd prefer it if we legislated that organisations can't exclusively rely on closed systems like Facebook/Meta to run their services. I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook. Shit like that grinds my gears. Meta's users aren't citizens, they're serfs. :(
- HPsquared 3y agoSerfs were at least tied to the land and somewhat entitled to live there. It's a lower status than serfs.
- zx8080 3y agoNot human beings. Things.
- Retric 3y agoA surprisingly large number of people chose to become serfs due to the benefits it provided. It seems wacky, but companies really are treating users in ways that lords were legally prevented from treating their surfs. The privileges vs obligations of serfdom would be unpleasant by our standards, but it wasn’t slavery.
- bell-cot 3y ago> I saw a sign last year for forestry service work happening locally to me. Apparently they're only going to provide safety announcements on Facebook. There probably are (and should be) laws or regulations forbidding that, especially because "safety". OTOH, from the PoV of the lower-level Forestry Service people who decided to do that - I'd guess they're stuck in a miserably understaffed and low-budget bit of a pretty dysfunctional government, and doing traditional safety announcements would cost them 100X the time and headaches of "just put it on Facebook".
- CalRobert 3y agoIn theory the GDPR means you should be able to request all your data as well as opt out of automated decision making (which would address the "why was I flagged?" and "stop being stupid this is clearly not a snake") side of things. Of course, that's only in Europe and it's not a very easy law to avail of, sadly.
- NullPrefix 3y ago> you should be able ... And then you get banned for life
- johnnyanmac 3y agoretaliation against legal compliance sounds like an easy lawsuit, even for the EU.
- 0xpgm 3y agoAnd some of these companies pride themselves as AI technology pioneers. Yet it seems their automated systems in this case are simply doing keyword matching. Mind-boggling!
- nxobject 3y agoTo be fair, it's also a failure of empathy for a user who might be flagged as a false positive.
- 0xpgm 3y agoTrue. Sometimes we pursue technology to its own ends forgetting that technology is supposed to help humans.
- Anchor 3y agoAnother sad anecdote: A bank in Finland suspended an account for a text in free-form message field of a bank transfer. The message was for a vet visit of a dog named Ira. When you say "Ira's payment" in Finnish, you add suffix -n, so the text field said Iran, which of course must indicate money transfer to a sanctioned country. It is comforting to know that the bank system catches all the illegal activity that the sanction-busting criminals helpfully announce.
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoA bank in France (Boursorama, now Boursobank IIRC) locked someone's account because they did not provide the document. Yes, "the document", without telling which document. When calling the support, they first said that it must be indicated, no kidding. And then they said that it was not possible (despite getting screenshots). It is sometimes a matter of having the wrong attribute set somewhere in a database and welcome to hell.
- specproc 3y agoIRA is also a possibly shady acronym in some parts of the world.
- m00dy 3y agoYou do not possess sovereign rights on digital platforms. I am curious about how much time it will take for the entirety of humanity to recognize that we are currently inhabiting a digital medieval era.
- Yizahi 3y ago"digital medieval era" - this is a frighteningly precise characteristic.
- skeletal88 3y agoIn 1984 they don't have laws, only crimes, so whatever you do, you have to guess if it is illegal and will be punished or not. It is on purpose to keep the population in constant fear
- pjmlp 3y agoDon't need for book references, that is how it is today in many countries, and it has been always in less democratic societies.
- btparker 3y agoYeah! How dare they, referencing literature.
- pjmlp 3y agoThat wasn't the point, no need for literature references when you can enjoy that kind of life today when living in less fortunate regions.
- absrec 3y agoDraconian IT laws mean that in many countries you could be persecuted for threatening national security as a blanket rule with indefinitely the long harassment called investigation.
- pjmlp 3y agoThey are already in place in such countries, plenty of people suffer through them daily.
- K0balt 3y agoOr, just dealing with FAANG
- steve1977 3y agoYour sarcasm has been noted and recorded.
- Aeolun 3y agoHell, if they let ChatGPT handle this and make a decision it would be better. At least you’d feel like you were interacting with a human.
- raincole 3y agoWhen we submitted our game's store page for Steam to review, they told us exactly which rule we broke and how we needed to fix it. That's how you tell companies who care about their users and those don't. (Not saying Steam never did shady stuff)
- johnnyanmac 3y ago> Not saying Steam never did shady stuff They seem very opaque on rules broken whenever you submit VN's. Which is odd given the... variety of VN steam offers. You can have stuff rated by the ESRB rejected, you can have sequels to games that are still being sold on Steam rejected. some SFW VN's are also rejected, so it's not as simple as sexual content not being allowed. Then you go on the page and are recommended "Sex with Furry Hitler 3" and can't help but wonder if you simply got the wrong reviewer.
- tjpnz 3y agoEven a mediocre fraudster won't need to be told what they did wrong. That bullshit line of reasoning is to cover their asses from litigation.
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoIt should be legally required to state a clear broken rule and example. Right now they do this to avoid legal issues but as a citizen, I want them to be legally responsible.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThey also do this to save on staff costs; if you don't tell someone why they were banned, they won't have any counterarguments either, nothing to try and argue with. No room for arguments = no time needed for a human to interact. For a while now, it's become pretty common knowledge that the big tech companies do not want anything involving people, because people don't scale. This is also why they invest so much in "AI" tooling, so there's even less people needed.
- TravisLS 3y agoI'm not sure where the threshold is for spending. I have an account that was spending over $500K/yr on Facebook ads and we were blocked by AI with no recourse for over 6 months before we finally found a human who was able to reverse it.
- plagiarist 3y agoI would have ended all spend with Meta. I suppose you don't have much choice if you're spending $500k on acquisition there.
- bgro 3y agoAh just like Microsoft who randomly locks my email I account I use only to receive spam email. Suddenly I’ve violated something in the terms of service and here’s a copy of the 200 page legal document. So my account is banned despite not sending emails or anything, just receiving spam email. Oh unless I provide my phone number. Then they’ll unban me and I can continue presumably breaking the terms of service.
- pteraspidomorph 3y agoOnly your phone number? That's almost benevolent. Here's a list of things companies have asked me for (including Facebook), and which I refused to provide: - Copy of unspecified ID or driver's license - High resolution copy of national ID, front and back - Copy of birth certificate - 3D video of face
- thefounder 3y agoThis is the most common "security" measure in the payments industry(i.e paypal)
- RobotToaster 3y ago>a company I complained to the other day because they didn't label one of the inputs on their password reset form That sounds like an accessibility issue, if they're American it could be an ADA violation.
- unethical_ban 3y agoI've been banned from Reddit several times for absolute b**** reasons. Most recently I was banned for report abuse. But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits. I was reporting those and also commenting on threads as to why I was reporting them so that others could see it. Without any discussion, comment, or initial warning to say " hey stop using this report mechanism ", my year old account was banned outright. So I created a new account, but I assume found out that despite posting pretty benign comments they were uncontroversial, that account got shadow banned. I'm not sure what mechanism i triggered. So now I created another new account which seems to be functional for the moment. I think the lesson I should be taking away from this is that almost all of Reddit is absolute garbage, and I should only be going there for niche hobbies and professional support forums. Let the rest of that God forsaken site burn. Anyway, I thought this was relevant because of the fact they didn't inform me of my sin before banning me.
- swayvil 3y agoYou are 90% probably a goat. A troublesome edge-case. A poor investment. They want sheep. Only sheep.
- Terr_ 3y agoA while ago my Reddit account of over 10 years (zero prior issues, bajllions of comments and karma) was randomly killed via a Kafkaesque process I'm calling "Schrodinger's Ban": 1. With zero notification or reason, you are shadow-banned, and every post/comment you ever made vanishes from public view. 2. You use the "Appeals" page, and get a canned apology that it was a mistake withtheira spam-filter, and a message claiming your account has been restored. 3. Except they lied. You're still blocked, and now the Appeals page stops working because it falsely claims your account is already in good-standing! 4. All your messages through unofficial channels (modmail) are also blocked/filtered-to-uselessness so that you can't reach out to anybody. 5. If you load up another established account, like a job-search throwaway from 5 years ago... the exact shame shitty sequence of events kills it too.
- noptd 3y ago>But it has an incredibly huge problem with a particular style of spam account that reposts old content on certain subreddits. Well that's your problem right there. That type of spam boosts a number of activity and usage KPIs and increases engagement. Reddit has even been caught using bots to artificially build out new subreddits by Google translating and reposting existing content from other subreddits to give the illusion of popularity in order to bootstrap new subs. Why would they want to cut down on any of that when it would affect their bottom line?
- brookmg 3y agoThey won't change this unless some huge government body forces them, unfortunately. The market just follows the big players and there is nothing we can do. Something like EU should step in.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]