I don't even bother with bigger tech companies, including Valve. Getting completely senseless automated and canned responses just makes my blood boil and certainly doesn't resolve anything.
Another pet peevee are automated A (not very) I chat bots.
If you want to have a truly horrendous experience try Air Asia's automated customer "support".
You can't call anyone at these new companies.
Even then they were non-committal about fixing it despite the person making multiple fraudulent purchases.
As an S3 customer for web hosting, I couldn’t understand why I was paying 10 cents a month for EC2 charges since I don’t use it. They just refunded me an entire month, but I really wanted to know what was happening!
It's not that I think Amazon is wonderful, I just don't think they're worse than any other giant corporation I've dealt with. Which is why I don't understand jdsully's comment.
Having a first-tier CSR click a dashboard button costs them the 10 cents per month plus 25 cents of labour to pay the guy to read the complaint, find the button, and press it.
Opening a ticket for a well-paid engineer to actually dissect the billing system and figure out where the 10 cent charge comes from, develop a fix, push it through validation and deploy it, probably costs $300.
Though i’d Estimate a fix costs at least 10x $300, if not 100-1000x.
With AT&T I tried for over a month to get internet installed and after hours of phone calls and them telling me a technician was coming they eventually revealed the billing department had flagged us and wanted a larger deposit for some reason. The two systems seemed totally separate.
Companies don't have to be feudalism in microcosm by definition, it just so happens that aristocratic ownership tends towards oligarchic governance.
It's not easy to relocate to another country. It's trivial to switch to using some other tech product.
and corporations don't pretend or even have to pretend they are some sort of republics.
Freeing yourself from the grasp of these companies is hard enough for the tech savvy. For laymen it is virtually impossible.
I simply can’t prioritize caring about something that doesn’t appear to impact my life in any way. But I’m admittedly not much of a principalled-living person. Too much internal hypocrisy for me to pretend to be principled.
Nevertheless there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
Your question reminds me of the "If you have nothing to hide " fallacy
They nevertheless maintain a shadow profile of mine.
Would you care to elaborate how I can "trivially switch off" that they abuse my data?
There's not even a need for me to switch to another provider.