I’m no lawyer, but as I read it, fully automated decisions with no possibility of human appeal is a violation of GDPR (and, IIRC, its UK predecessor the Data Protection Act): https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

The question is: How do you enforce that or even complain about it? Say your Amazon account gets locked for whatever reason due to an automated decision (probably all of these decisions are automated). There is no way to contact Amazon without an account. It's not like they have a link on their website that says "Request human appeal under GDPR" (I haven't checkt tbh, but I'm 99.9% sure they haven't).

I wonder what happens if you file e.g. in small claims court against a company like Amazon? They'd probably never get the message, and even if you win due to them not showing up and making their case, good luck enforcing the judgement.

Short of hiring a major law firm whose letterhead might get someone's attention and/or making major waves, I don't see how Joe Sixpack can force a human appeal without major monetary outlay.

I think their strategy of burying their head in the sand and just ghosting you works probably pretty well for the large majority of cases where people simply won't bother (or be able to bother). The cost for the one or two cases that have the energy and commitment to fight is comparably minor and quickly resolved once it hits the front pages somewhere.

> I wonder what happens if you file e.g. in small claims court against a company like Amazon? They'd probably never get the message, and even if you win due to them not showing up and making their case, good luck enforcing the judgement.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclo...

This is ultimately their weakness. Whether it's the binding arbitration exploit that Uber had to deal with or small claims court default judgments these organizations are highly susceptible to coordinated and distributed actions in the real world.

You need to view this as asymmetric warfare where you're using your opponents advantages against them. If they're bigger then you swarm them with small entities. If they can avoid dealing with the public by using AI intermediaries find venues where they simply can't and repeatedly pressure them there.

"Don't struggle only within the ground rules that the people you're struggling against have laid down."

It's amazing how much quicker a company responds when they hear something from their legal department rather than some form that they're dumping into the void.

To that last quote, you can often intuit when someone has taken this strategy as the Goliath in the situation will start using terms like "proper channels" and "cowards".

BoA had it happen a couple of times after they screwed over home owners and tried to ignore the courts. It seems like there should be a significant consequence to forcing the aggrieved party to form a posse with the sheriff in order to collect the local branch's office furniture.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111210150756/http://www.naples...

A court letter, even from small claims, is something you don't ignore. Last I checked, FANG do show up to small claims court, because loosing there is enforceable by law which can get expensive to ignore, if the accuser is willing to let things escalate.

In GDPR cases, you don't go to court, you go to your local data protection agency (pray you don't live in ireland). They will contact Amazon and ask for a statement. Ignoring them isn't something you can do if you value your revenue, because unlike single customers, the agency's task is to go after you with a problem for years, ghosting doesn't work, and they can issue legally binding fines you can't ignore.

Enforcement of either a court order or fines is easy if you got the title on them. If they continue to ignore you can probably get an attachment order, ie, you plus a court official plus some police officers arrive at the nearest amazon HQ and will demand the fine to be paid or they start taking company property to be auctioned off to pay for the fine.

Alternatively you can have a letter delivered by court service, which also is hard to ignore because the court service will require someone at amazon to be read a cover letter, followed by a signature and rather official stamp. After that your letter is considered to be proven in content and delivered. That is something that raises a lot of red flags in legal departments.

> The question is: How do you enforce that or even complain about it?

The company "should" have a DPO, whou you can complain to. If that fails you can complain to the DPA [0]

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

Re: small claims court: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26087997

With no human I've meant a human proxy relaying the AI decisions.

You go to your local GDPR / privacy office and possibly hire a lawyer I would say.

Small claims court seems to be a US thing so that doesn't apply in most areas where GDPR is available anyway.

I doubt amazon would just ignore a lawyer's letter. If they do, enjoy your free income I guess

UK has a small claims court. Many jurisdictions do. However, GDPR isn't directly actionable, you have to go through the ICO who will take a long time.

Seems we need an automated way to do the filings, like the apps that automatically file against your bogus parking tickets, etc.

Both enables the aggrieved small biz, and by making it easy, creates a potentially massive problem for the Amazons & Googles who make ignoring the toxic effects of their system a way of doing business

Isn't GDPR a Europe only thing.

Won't help for a US small business selling on Amazon, I imagine

There may be other local laws; GDPR itself was a unification of existing local laws.

I’m not a lawyer, but as far as I know GDPR only applies between a private individual and a company, not between two companies.

Happened to me in the exact same way with eBay. User (relatively inactive) for 13+ years, go to sell something (boots lol) with original pics, full description, everything set up correctly, and banned within 5 minutes. No way to appeal, and last email after they said they'd refund my $1 ad post charge, was that my account was being deleted.

Yes, I wrote a book and wanted to sell it on Amazon, a book (!).