This is largely based on my own observations and could be wrong, but it's my theory. Tech companies robbed an internet culture they didn't even realize or appreciate existed, and then shoved a bunch of people who had never used the internet before on it and convinced them that Facebook was the internet. Or rather, that the standards, norms, and culture on Facebook was somehow reflective of everything outside of Facebook. Just replace Facebook with the growing list of companies who engage in "platforms" in varying degrees.

tldr: this obsession with centralization made no sense to the way we do things as a human species, any of our values, any of our culture, and we let it happen anyway. The chickens have come home to roost.

Gmail's spam filtering. Recaptcha's bot rejection. Facebook's identity verification. Paypal's secure credit card processing. Google de-ranking link farms. Youtube's hosting costs. All of these very effectively solved real problems with the old web, and those problems were growing as bad actors became more sophisticated.

I like the old web too, but I do appreciate that an attempt to return to it would still require very effective tools to solve at least some of these problems, and they'd require constant improvement to keep the roving bandits at bay.

Gmail spam filtering? Isn't particularly good. I run my own email infrastructure and I get way less spam through it than on my gmail address. And I don't do anything particularly special other than configure postfix correctly.

Recaptcha? Was there ever a more hated piece of user abusive technology? Plenty of rage against it here in many discussions. I won't do business anymore with any site that won't let me buy without identifying 27 traffic lights in slow motion (looking at you adorama). We're all better off if this dies.

Facebook verification? Don't know what value this brings to anyone other than FB.

Youtube? Granted.. Hopefully with bandwidth costs reducing over time, decentralization becomes more viable.

Paypal? Always pay with credit card directly. The regulatory consumer protection for that was well in place before internet commerce even took off.

The original potential of the internet was in its fully decentralized functionality. Usenet being a great example (owned by nobody, hosted peer to peer) which should be studied a bit more now that we have generations of developers coming up never having known it. Of course, it was (mostly) overrun by spam. But unlike email where spam is pretty much defeated, there was never a meaningful effort in addressing spam on Usenet (forums and mailing lists took over instead). Applying the same techniques to NNTP could well be equally successful.

If there is any desire to avoid the internet becoming fully a new cable-tv controlled by just a few major player we need to pursue research into decentralized services as a priority.

(If nothing else, consider at least running your own email infrastructure if you're technically capable. Keep the foot in the door so it doesn't close permanently.)

And while I hate using recaptcha, I also had the even more unpleasant experience of watching a forum that I moderated die under a crushing assault of spam bots that were smart enough to make it past the built-in CAPTCHA. Recaptcha isn't there to solve problems for the people who interact with it, it's solving problems for the people who chose to put it on their site.

I wrote in a sibling comment what value Facebook's login brings to the sites that opt into it. (Offload all the work of password handling, claims about stolen accounts, preventing sockpuppetry and catfishing, etc).

But there should be accessibility laws to prevent government agencies from blocking access to citizens/taxpayers using these proprietary technologies.

I don't know offhand of an open-source captcha library that's nearly as effective as reCAPTCHA. All the old "wavy lines through slanted text" ones are completely broken with current OCR techniques.

> Facebook's identity verification

in real life, do you need to know the real name of the cashier and see their contract so you can trust them with your payment? You don't, you use common sense.

> Google de-ranking link farms

hey, haha, and what do we get instead? Monopoly on ad-driven search engine, great, I'd rather have link farms since I can easily filter those out with little brain-power. I can't do that with paid-for-propaganda

Now imagine we'd leave the way it was, people would learn how to deal with it, the same way you learned you can't leave unlocked bicycle in a city. It's a price to pay for anonymity, and we should all have right to be anonymous on internet.

A couple of ideas I've had:

- Leverage PGP and trust rings for identity without a need for non-anonymity. This could be structured in a nuanced manner so that we respect pseudo-anonymity while also maintaining the integrity that real identity brings.

- A wholesale education of the populace, instead of an education by fear, of the power of anonymity and services which further anonymity.

- A move away from the advertising and services-exploitation business model. Not that we can't have service oriented businesses, but those businesses cannot be exploiting people to do labor and a bottom line price.

- A data ownership model which establishes a monetary value for different types of data. We already do data classification inside mega-corps, and we're able to establish and correlate it's sensitivity. Extrapolating this to value would not be stretch. Users consent which data they give up in exchange for services. The price for the service is adjusted based on what data they give up, and how they choose it will be used (Data for marketing may be more valuable than say data for behavior research, or even vice versa!)

> Facebook's identity verification.

The ability to choose an identity online not connected to your legal or in-person name, to make it more difficult to find and stalk you in person, is a feature, not a bug.

For these purposes, an actual Real Verified Name is overkill, and a unique identity number would be enough. But Facebook offers that service for Free(TM) so there's not much incentive to the site operator to aim for something more minimal. And with GPT-3 and other systems inching closer to passing the Turing test, this only makes alternatives more challenging for them.

Those are problems in the Wild West that would need solutions if we were to reclaim the net from Facebook and Google.

(Google no longer rejects or bans you for fake-sounding names, ever since the Google+ controversy, but it still enforces a Western-style first/last name instead of other cultures' name formats or single-part usernames.)

If our dictionaries vary to much in their definitions then our communication becomes more and more difficult.

Maybe dictionary is not the best analogy (this is just an analogy) but I hope I'm getting my point across with this example.

To the extent that what you are saying is true, it is only true because these companies have walled themselves off. You used to be able to chat with Facebook users over XMPP even.

It just sucks for the internet. I don't think, if those companies ceased to exist, that they would automatically get recreated because of some inevitable niche or market law. I think that they got where they are because of a fluke of the times they were created in -- people could not grasp how they make money.

In large scale, what you're asking is more dubious. If you concede that the United States alone has 11 major cultures, then you have to begin a process of "on-boarding" everyone onto your new, structured culture that your platform is designed around. That's why these debates about who is represented in the building of the platform come about, because under that model those concerns take center stage and they should.

I guess what I'm saying is the whole problem never needed to exist. There's better ways to share information than being on one platform.

> It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal

"You must understand, all problems are [user]'s own. If you only made certain to properly follow proper protocols, no such problems would exist!"

> but you don't know what you're being accused of doing.

"If there is a problem, fill out complaint form, and place it in an envelope addressed to the name of the hospital in which you were born."

# The Onion wasn't supposed be a prescient view of our future.

This. And it happens in all businesses Google is part of. As a website owner who monetized with AdSense for a decade, this year their algorithms suddenly decided that 33% of the ad revenue was from "invalid clicks". The month before this happened, I was experimenting with a different ad provider. My suspicion is when I returned to AdSense the month-over-month increase in revenue tripped up the algo. Talking to Google reps was of no use because they have no control over the algo. I lost ~$12K in revenue over 2.5 months and eventually just stopped using Adsense.

Google has the ego of a market leader. They don't care for their customers, that's nothing new.

[0]: as an example, obtaining root on a container in an Azure DevOps CI pipeline. You have to bind-mount the Docker management socket into the container, then use that to gain initial root access and install sudo, then use sudo to run all your commands. I don't recall ever having to do that on any other CI service.

While the rest of MS is improving those 2 teams are still a problem, the "cloud" is ripe with ways to obfuscate and needlessly complicate licensing to over charge companies and MS excels at that

Google has none, this is why Microsoft and Amazon excel leaps and bounds above Google in customer experience

I'm going to suggest (without any backup) that it's much more common but you simply don't hear about it.

My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able to use my account. I am not going to do that, so yeah.

What I believe happened is that he attempted to login to my account a few times, which triggered their bullshit...

I suspect if there would be enough demand for this service, a "grey" industry of people buying prepaid SIMs and renting access to them would appear.

This assumes there is a way to tell which numbers are prepaid or not. To the best of my knowledge they both originate from the same pool of numbers and it is impossible for an outsider to tell whether a given carrier's number is prepaid or postpaid.

Not "somehow". Our national leaders in the US since Google was created have been fabulously pro-business, to the extent that they have never updated our laws governing privacy for the computer age (IE, limiting what businesses can do with data) and they've gutted consumer protections along the way.

Since the US government is so thoroughly corrupted by money, once a corporation is large enough they can effectively write their own laws. Google and others have done this, so there's no law stating that they must give consumers rights in a dispute, must provide their data, or even must be fair.

Government + money = corruption.

I think the "cattle, not pets" implications haven't quite sunken in yet. Stragglers get turned into mutton.

That means having another phone number, right? I tried to make a Google account for this kind of purpose, but had no way to receive the text they insist on without linking the new account directly to the old one.

"! We apologize but Amazon has noticed some unusual reviewing activity on this account. As a result, all reviews submitted by this account have been removed and this account will no longer be able to contribute reviews and other content on Amazon. If you would like to learn more, please see our community guidelines. To contact us about this decision, please email reviews - [email protected]."

The 'community guidelines' link goes to a page with what the rules are, but doesn't say what rules have been broken.

We emailed Amazon, using the email address in the post and got this reply:

"I relayed your information to the team trained to handle this scenario regarding your inability to post reviews. They are not able to provide an exact date or time when they expect this issue to be resolved. For more information about our policies, please see our Community Guidelines (http://www.amazon.co.uk/review-guidelines) We appreciate your patience in this matter.

Warmest regards,"

'Warmest Regards'? Really - you just told me she's locked out and it's gonna stay like that for the foreseeable future. :(

The Internet has been the single best thing that has happened to the world ever. Information is effectively free now. It's given limitless opportunity to billions of people everywhere in the world, regardless of class or wealth or social status. Largely, the Internet itself is not discriminatory.

Sure, it has its downsides, like misinformation, and 1 in 10m people getting locked out of their accounts.

I lost my Google account, which was tied to my phone number (Google Voice), a few years ago. It sucked. But, honestly, it wasn't even as bad as losing my license.

I'll take free information for that.

Are you certain you two are speaking about the same concept?

The "facts" are a bit misleading though. You won't hear stories like this when it isn't framed as a case of an algorithm gone rogue, and of course whether the billion-dollar shepherd assumes it is infallible or not is something being projected onto the story.

For instance, it is a prison-time offence for an individual employee of a financial institution to tell a customer they filed a SAR on them.

The way you get kafka is BSA compliance officers have personal liability for this reporting, so they prefer not to have customers that trigger reporting, but they cant tell a customer why they are dumping them, so the word comes from ‘on high’ or an algorithm and thats it. Nobody internally can help because for their own good they do not know the reasons for account termination.

This may be that or it may not, but probably its not that google is being dicks to its own employees. It is an outcome of a pernicious set of government and institutional dynamics.

You're missing half of the analysis. What percentage of account suspensions are preceded by an SAR filing?

(Probably not many.)

Imagine I make a laser bug zapper and install them at every fast food joint in the US. 9999 out of 10000 times it zaps an insect. 1 out of 10000 times the laser fires it blinds a child.

I could wax all I want want about the 99.99% accuracy, the _relative_ accuracy won't mean a thing to the million people blinded by it.

When there is a mix of spambot garbage and human beings that being harmed the right metric isn't the ratio. Blinding a million children wouldn't go from unacceptable to acceptable just because the level of insects swarming around a restaurant increased by a factor of 10. The harm stands alone, and there is a level of harm which could not be justified by any amount of boring spambot influx.

I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds that something bad will happen to me.

Given a stable rate of bad things, population growth alone causes more bad things to happen.

If we took your argument about absolute harm seriously, then we should, say, encourage population reduction until there are only 10k human beings on the planet. That would surely minimize the number of bad things that continue happening to people.

It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone.

If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.

I don't really see how this line of argument really translates to this issue with Google. First of all I should have acknowledged that imprisoning data is almost assuredly unacceptable and that unless Google is acting directly in response to a law enforcement action they should give you a way to download your data when they tell you that they have chosen not to continue the business relationship they have with you.

But there will be cases where they cannot do that, and in some cases it will be a mistake but the reason they cannot solve this problem cheaply is because usually it is not a mistake and so litigating 99,999 cases to find the one worthy of saving is a hard case to make, why should Google pay for that?

I should have mentioned up-front that this article scared the hell out of me and I'm probably moving to Fastmail. I've had my own domain for going on two decades and am still grandfathered into the free gsuite for it but I'd much rather pay someone who will support me than use a free service that could cost me access to data that I might want again in the future. I also realized I could be vulnerable to a trap where my DNS account is disabled at the same time my email is, meaning I couldn't even move the DNS without first recovering access to my mailbox.

I don't think it's that big a leap to say that it is unlikely that there is any plausible reduction in spam from an automated facility that justifies the kind of extreme harm and disruption created by locking an honest user out of their decades long email-- which might be more damaging to them then a home fire--, with zero effectual recourse. Yet it happens because the cost of the spam is on google's 'balance sheet' while the damage to the user is not.

So that is the sort of argument that I'm making. I think google is creating damages wildly out of proportion to any plausible benefit, but it works out for them currently because the damages are externalities.

Were Google a more conventional company the threat of litigation (even litigation they'd ultimately win) would help internalize some of these costs, but Google has grown to such a size and scope that even the federal government finds prosecuting them to be extremely daunting.

There should still be a solution though. Maybe this is a terrible idea, but one idea: Google could sell a service where you pay them $200 and they thoroughly review your case, tell you what happened and work with you to restore access to data, maybe even setup email forwarding for 90 days or something that comes reasonably close to making you whole even if they can't restore service.

If in the course of doing this work they figure out they screwed up closing the account in the first place, the money is refunded. Of course fraudsters would not generally want to sign-up and pay this money as - even if the information of how they were caught was worth $200 - that would create a paper-trail. And it could still be the case that Google is under a FISA letter or something and can't fulfill this service, and in that case they'd refund your money as well.

Not about how you detected them, but you should tell them what you detected. E.g. if you're using a spam filter, you don't want spammers to know which exact keywords triggered the classification, but it wouldn't hurt much to let people know that their account was locked for sending spam instead of some other reason.

People willingly chose the free option and chose to not pay companies that would have offered support.

Anyone who's had to deal with Google support for paid business accounts will tell you that the situation is barely any different for paying customers. Things might be different for very large businesses who are spending millions per month, but that's hardly relevant to how Google might handle email customers hypothetically paying $9.95 a month for a personal mailbox.

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I do not understand why anyone defends consumer abuse by businesses. Unless they work for said businesses, or own their stock, there is absolutely nothing to gain by siding with an abusive business over an abused customer. The business isn't going to reward their supporters' loyalty by treating them better.

Collaborating with hostile entities is not a redeeming quality.

Then don’t pay google $10 a month. I don’t. I do the work of supporting businesses that I think deserve it. I know some businesses have monopolies that customers can’t fix by voting with their wallet, but email isn’t one of them.

> Collaborating with hostile entities is not a redeeming quality.

Using their free services and not voting for the right candidate in the market by paying for the service is collaborating with hostile entities (in the example of email where there is no monopoly and almost zero cost to switching).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

I get support from Fastmail, and Migadu and Target and banks and plenty of other companies. I also provide support for my businesses.

Support usually sucks with monopolies, such as ISPs who know you have no alternative. But even then, I’ve always been able to get someone on the line to fix my issue.

The problem with such opaque systems is that it can go terribly wrong, but the answer is to not centralize anything important; always keep a backup. After all, the cloud is someone else's computer.

I've said this before here, I'm pretty libertarian, and very much in favor of small gov, but at this point its become clear that anyone who strives to become an internet platform where market dominance equals monopoly or duopoly, should be held to strict regulatory standards, re: free speech, appeals, etc. similar to what a gov entity is held to.

About that - the government can be pretty opaque. I too would like some strict regulatory standards to apply to the CBP.

Getting your account unbanned shouldn't require having an insider.

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There should be a clear reason for why an account is banned. When you're accused of a crime in a society, we don't just tell you to read abstract law. We tell you exactly what you've been accused of, such that you can defend yourself appropriately. There is this basic principle in English law that states:

- It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

What's been happening with many of these companies is that many guilty actually do escape, whilst many innocent actually still do suffer.

Although, in this case, I guess the guy was just looking for any qualitative explanation for how to fix the situation, not specifically asking for exceptions to policies to be made.

Disclaimer: not saying anything about the qualities of said services.

Not at all.

Being able to more efficiently access other systems and employees at your company than outsiders isn't "unjust" in any way.

Not being able to do so, seems very broken and weird. :(

Couldn't that same argument be used to support secret laws and secret courts enforcing those secret laws? After all, we're definitely seeing the problem of people going as close as possible to the line without overstepping.

I think those laws would help tremendously, but mostly by forcing everyone to be overly cautious not to break them, creating strong chilling effects. They'd stifle freedom, and so does Google's secret law system.

To minimize fallout, I think it's more useful to split up Google along services (Search, Youtube, Gmail, Office/Suite etc). You could search for double plus ungood things on Google Search then without running the risk to loose access to your emails.

No need to have new secret laws - there are already enough obscure laws that I guarantee you have broken many of them whose statute hasn't expired. That is why you shouldn't speak to cops without a lawyer.

That said - it's not a Google problem as it's the norm. Most services, banks or even potential employers will tell you the reason for declining service - not because they want a chilling effect, but because there are so many ways it can get wrong (for them).

And I'm definitely not "so sorry" about.

Why?

edit: also, I have the battle scars from moderated a few niche online forums/properties that were mildly popular. People who abuse services are surprisingly tenacious and creative. If there is the potential to make money - even a little - you get abusers who are tenacious, creative and sophisticated

Unfortunately the devil’s advocate has brought us no closer to an understanding of the problems posed by OP: how to appeal an unknown violation, how to regain access to ones data, etc.