2 ms·

In trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the To

by lapcat 3y ago

In trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the ToS, which seems impossible, since I hadn't done anything yet. They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I think that's the whole point of these fake bans, to extract personal data from you. Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes. To hell with the corporate-owned social networks. I want no part of them anymore. I'm sticking with Mastodon, which is free from this garbage.

Nextgrid 3y ago
[flagged]
- lapcat 3y ago
  > I say this in a derogatory fashion You're not supposed to do that here. > The reason you're insta-banned is that you didn't "engage" with it properly I was literally in the process of signing up. How else was I supposed to "engage"? > Facebook does not want technically-savvy people How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet.
  - adra 3y ago
    My guess is that you signed up through a VPN, and this is an anti-bot automated system. I'm not a meta employee, just speculating. Remember, VPNs are the collective abuse of all of their users, not just you; same with public access networks.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > My guess is that you signed up through a VPN Your guess is wrong. I don't use any VPN. Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims?
      - unethical_ban 3y ago
        I have noticed that after I get banned from Reddit for idiotic reasons, the accounts I create through VPN get silently blocked on a lot of subreddits, while the account that got created from home ISP had that problem less so. It's not victim blaming, just a fact that some sites punish VPN users.
      - Nextgrid 3y ago
        > Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims? Not OP but I'm not blaming the victim. I'm just trying to explain the reasons why the situation is like that and suggested (regulatory) solutions - the only solutions that would actually work.
        lapcat 3y ago
        You are blaming the victim: > there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992 In any case, your assumptions come with zero empirical evidence. It's just wild speculation, grasping at straws, looking for a "good reason" for Instagram to charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation. We all know that is a blatant lie.
        Nextgrid 3y ago
        I'm just explaining the truth. I'm not saying it should be considered OK - we should absolutely look down on the behavior and look for solutions to discourage it. Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate, but I think my speculation agrees pretty well with their business model and why they might choose to ban people whose analytics data (or lack thereof) matches yours. In fact, it's indeed not a ban, since you can appeal it by providing extra personal data - the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter. > charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation I'm not defending their claim - we all know "ToS violation" has been bullshit since the dawn of startups. It's the generic "unhandled exception"/500 error equivalent of the software world.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > You're not supposed to do that here. To be clear I'm not talking about you but about the concept of it "you are not the target market", as if it's something we should consider socially acceptable. I've seen this used as a serious response to legitimize some nefarious/user-hostile behavior which is what I'm "derogatory" about. We should look down on business models that depend on users being clueless and accepting of corporate abuse/malicious behavior and I've provided examples of solutions that could achieve that. > How else was I supposed to "engage"? Presumably you're running an ad-blocker or privacy-friendly stack. Or merely willing to use the product by signing up and setting up your account first rather than being nagged into signing up after trying to access loginwalled content. Or maybe you are privacy-conscious and the email/number you provided isn't in any contact databases that Facebook has stolen over the years from unsuspecting users (aka you used a separate email/number from the one you give out to real people). > How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet. See above - there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. Just behaving like a power-user and not taking 10 minutes peck-typing your details in the various forms can be enough if at scale such behavior was correlated with what Facebook deems "naughty".
roland35 3y ago
Having worked at these large companies, I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional or silly versus nefarious. The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical and I would feel bad for that engineer working on that hypothetical feature haha.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information. On the other hand, it works in their favor, so there will not be any attempts at fixing this trigger-happiness either. > The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical Just like the privacy reviews that ultimately get them to continuously do things that are in breach of the GDPR and that even a layman with no specific legal/tech knowledge would consider creepy/unethical/illegal? > I would feel bad for that engineer That's the thing, there is no single engineer working on this. There is no ticket "increase the amount of personal information given by people" - as per my first point it would be a huge liability to put something like this in writing. However, one engineer working on the ban system might have its KPIs tied to the amount of "bad" people blocked, where "bad" can be deemed as someone who got challenged and didn't subsequently complete or pass the additional verification (the thinking is that a legit user would have nothing to hide and complete the verification, and indeed many do). This effectively encourages ban trigger-happyness and indirectly increases data collection while being completely deniable. Remember that these companies are not stupid/incompetent - there's lots of money at stake to get this "right" (in their own way - aka beneficial to their business model). They just have to pretend to be stupid/incompetent in order to get plausible deniability and deflect eventual litigation/regulation.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information How big is this conspiracy? Hundreds to thousands of engineers leave Meta every year, and 0 have blown the whistle on this. The actual FB whistleblower from 2023 didn't allege anything similar to what you're suggesting.

by lapcat 3y ago

Nextgrid 3y ago

[flagged]

lapcat 3y ago
> I say this in a derogatory fashion You're not supposed to do that here. > The reason you're insta-banned is that you didn't "engage" with it properly I was literally in the process of signing up. How else was I supposed to "engage"? > Facebook does not want technically-savvy people How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet.
- adra 3y ago
  My guess is that you signed up through a VPN, and this is an anti-bot automated system. I'm not a meta employee, just speculating. Remember, VPNs are the collective abuse of all of their users, not just you; same with public access networks.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > My guess is that you signed up through a VPN Your guess is wrong. I don't use any VPN. Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims?
    - unethical_ban 3y ago
      I have noticed that after I get banned from Reddit for idiotic reasons, the accounts I create through VPN get silently blocked on a lot of subreddits, while the account that got created from home ISP had that problem less so. It's not victim blaming, just a fact that some sites punish VPN users.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > Why is everyone trying to find reasons to blame the victims? Not OP but I'm not blaming the victim. I'm just trying to explain the reasons why the situation is like that and suggested (regulatory) solutions - the only solutions that would actually work.
      - lapcat 3y ago
        You are blaming the victim: > there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38913992 In any case, your assumptions come with zero empirical evidence. It's just wild speculation, grasping at straws, looking for a "good reason" for Instagram to charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation. We all know that is a blatant lie.
        Nextgrid 3y ago
        I'm just explaining the truth. I'm not saying it should be considered OK - we should absolutely look down on the behavior and look for solutions to discourage it. Obviously without looking at the code behind it I can only speculate, but I think my speculation agrees pretty well with their business model and why they might choose to ban people whose analytics data (or lack thereof) matches yours. In fact, it's indeed not a ban, since you can appeal it by providing extra personal data - the concept of "bullshit ban -> provide personal info for security -> automatic unban" procedure is routine nowadays, pioneered by Twitter. > charge me with a completely unwarranted ToS violation I'm not defending their claim - we all know "ToS violation" has been bullshit since the dawn of startups. It's the generic "unhandled exception"/500 error equivalent of the software world.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  > You're not supposed to do that here. To be clear I'm not talking about you but about the concept of it "you are not the target market", as if it's something we should consider socially acceptable. I've seen this used as a serious response to legitimize some nefarious/user-hostile behavior which is what I'm "derogatory" about. We should look down on business models that depend on users being clueless and accepting of corporate abuse/malicious behavior and I've provided examples of solutions that could achieve that. > How else was I supposed to "engage"? Presumably you're running an ad-blocker or privacy-friendly stack. Or merely willing to use the product by signing up and setting up your account first rather than being nagged into signing up after trying to access loginwalled content. Or maybe you are privacy-conscious and the email/number you provided isn't in any contact databases that Facebook has stolen over the years from unsuspecting users (aka you used a separate email/number from the one you give out to real people). > How would they even know? Like I said, I hadn't even finished signing up yet. See above - there's something about your software stack and/or behavior that makes you "naughty" in the eyes of Facebook. Just behaving like a power-user and not taking 10 minutes peck-typing your details in the various forms can be enough if at scale such behavior was correlated with what Facebook deems "naughty".

roland35 3y ago

Having worked at these large companies, I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional or silly versus nefarious. The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical and I would feel bad for that engineer working on that hypothetical feature haha.

Nextgrid 3y ago
> I can almost guarantee that what happened was something unintentional It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information. On the other hand, it works in their favor, so there will not be any attempts at fixing this trigger-happiness either. > The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans The number of privacy reviews to add a data collection around bans would be astronomical Just like the privacy reviews that ultimately get them to continuously do things that are in breach of the GDPR and that even a layman with no specific legal/tech knowledge would consider creepy/unethical/illegal? > I would feel bad for that engineer That's the thing, there is no single engineer working on this. There is no ticket "increase the amount of personal information given by people" - as per my first point it would be a huge liability to put something like this in writing. However, one engineer working on the ban system might have its KPIs tied to the amount of "bad" people blocked, where "bad" can be deemed as someone who got challenged and didn't subsequently complete or pass the additional verification (the thinking is that a legit user would have nothing to hide and complete the verification, and indeed many do). This effectively encourages ban trigger-happyness and indirectly increases data collection while being completely deniable. Remember that these companies are not stupid/incompetent - there's lots of money at stake to get this "right" (in their own way - aka beneficial to their business model). They just have to pretend to be stupid/incompetent in order to get plausible deniability and deflect eventual litigation/regulation.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > It's unintentional on paper because nobody is stupid enough to put in writing that they intentionally make the ban mechanism very trigger-happy in order to collect more personal information How big is this conspiracy? Hundreds to thousands of engineers leave Meta every year, and 0 have blown the whistle on this. The actual FB whistleblower from 2023 didn't allege anything similar to what you're suggesting.