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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

The more I see this sort of thing, the more I'm heartened that individuals are fighting back against Facebook.

"We want Facebook to say exactly what their process is when they receive such a request - behind that profile was a human being and there are lots of people affected, a circle of friends who love that person." Seems like a legitimate request to facebook. Having transparent policies is a must imho

Did ever look how spam filtering or search results ranking algorithms work? They work exactly because companies keep their policies secret. Transparent policies would get abused instantly.

Facebook processes might change every month to react on actions of billion users. What good disclosing it could ever make? You could see examples of abuse of Facebook policy in other comments here.

I don't necessarily thing Facebook was in the wrong here. Sure maybe somebody made that request to delete the profile against the family wishes but Facebook doxing someone also isn't very acceptable.

It's a court ordering it, they have the ability to require those sorts of things, it isn't doxxing someone if that person committed fraud.

I'm not against the court order. I read the parent's comment as though Facebook was in the wrong for not giving the name to the family before the court order.

Fair. You also said you're not sure Facebook was wrong, and made reference to doxing. Let's see if we can clear up those points.

Providing the identity (or some approximation) of this person, to the family, is not the same as releasing his home address on 4chan. The term "dox" does not apply.

(It might apply if Facebook blindly obeyed the request to restore the page, and it turns out the page has personal information on someone who doesn't want it there. Technically the information was already public, and actually listed in the same place, so I still wouldn't use the term "dox".)

I wouldn't expect them to unquestioningly restore the page upon request, but refusing to talk to someone who says their dead family member's profile was taken down by mistake is shitty behavior. Legal, maybe, but I wouldn't go so far as "not wrong". It's pretty wrong. Right?

Sorry, but if you're not family it next-of-kin, and you requested for Facebook to delete someone's profile, you should be identified to their family, and the profile restored.

What if you have power of attorney? Even if you were family, Facebook should not be help responsible for having to provide you with a name. The person who made the request has a right to their privacy and if Facebook acted in good-faith (which is questionable, I know) and validated the person making the request had the right to do so then I don't see any issue with Facebook's actions so far.

That's what the court order is about - determining whether Facebook acted in good faith, or whether there was a process for determining power of attorney.

You even said that whole point was questionable - enough of a question to have a court legally compel Facebook to answer these questions.

I don't see any issues with the court case pressing forward to get some answers, do you?

OK, next-of-kin and/or power of attorney, I should have added. Yes, I agree. I'm sure the court would, as well.

But not some random person, fan, or acquaintance, as it appears in this case.

Even assuming their action was purely malicious (and not, say, an extended family member or friend or even fan of the band that was a bit surprised to see a still active profile for someone they were well aware was no longer around and thought they were fixing things), it's a weird world where Facebook has some sort of moral duty to disclose their identity to people apparently obsessed with pursuing them.

If the profile can't be restored, that sounds like a separate policy issue with Facebook defaulting to permanently deleting rather than simply hiding profiles in these circumstances.

Agreed. That's how every other claim against an estate works.

You missed the story. It was not about whether Facebook was allowed to delete the profile - it was about giving information to family members of the guy who died.

What causes outrage from companies such as Google or (here) FB is not what hey do - but that it is impossible for normal people to get any information about anything! Your Youtube video was deleted - why? No response. My dead partners data disappeared - why? No response. No response to anything. This IS outrageous! Not responding to reasonable requests - and that has nothing to do with "legal" - is one of the worst ways of humans to interact with one another. Try it at home. Their behavior of ignoring you - and again, this has nothing whatsoever to do with what is "legal" - is what gets to people. Psychologically that's just really, really bad, the worst way to treat someone. Which raises the issue to another level: How arrogant as well as stupid are this mega-companies that they think they can do that, that there will be no long-term repercussions? This can't go on forever, people don't accept that, so wouldn't it make business sense to treat your "data-providers" (if not customers) just a bit better? How mighty do they already think they are that they don't have to answer very reasonable questions of people impacted by things they do? Nobody says they can't do it, we just want to TALK! Give me a human, not a bot response!

What makes it especially bad is that the requests are tiny! They could be handled easily (yes yes - needs actual humans, i.e. "expensive", oh the horror for those mega-companies who don't know what to do with all their money - but it's easy).

> but that it is impossible for normal people to get any information about anything! .... Psychologically that's just really, really bad, the worst way to treat someone. Which raises the issue to another level: How arrogant as well as stupid are this mega-companies that they think they can do that

This problem has its origins in the big users-as-products companies wanting to totally eliminate their user support costs, but it's going to get worse. With all the hype around "machine learning," soon no one, not even insiders, may know why your stuff was deleted or your account banned, because it was all delegated to an inscrutable "AI" system that acts but can't expose it's "reasoning."

> This IS outrageous!

I know we are beating a dead horse here.

But why are people who are not customers expecting customer service.

You do get customer service from google if you are paying customer on their gsuite products. That seems reasonable to me.

Do you know how much Facebook makes, on average, off each of its members?

Doesn't matter. You don't pay any of that. You aren't the customer.

Not trying to be argumentative or anything, but newspapers and magazines have long had a similar model, but you have to pay for them. So does that 25 cents change you into the customer, even though they make way more from ads? I think it is a greyer area then people think.

We are entering what is called by some deep thinkers as "The Attention Economy" and you pay for stuff with your time and attention which clearly is worth money.

So according to this it would be ok for them to not provide any customer service if they were breaking even or running at a loss?

Are you asking my opinion? In my opinion all companies, as well as government agencies and most other organizations, should have polite, knowledgeable, trained, and responsive customer service.

At the very least, they could use email, which for me is actually better than talking on a phone (which I detest, especially if the rep has a strong accent). Email has many other good benefits and provides a documented trail that can be used to escalate cases by either party, or even in a court of law if necessary.

> In my opinion all companies, as well as government agencies and most other organizations, should have polite, knowledgeable, trained, and responsive customer service.

ok I understand but how does that relate to how much money they are making per customer?

Your question was about that.

it’s not easy.

it sounds trivial because you are trusting. fb has a duty to protect itself (and its users) against fraudulent requests. acheiving this with low wage factory-like processing by contractors not paid to think across many languages and cultures is in the realm of hard.

better to err on the side of caution. imagine the backlash from erring on the side of permissiveness.

to be clear, in this specific case i believe fb went too far in stonewalling the family.

I am not trusting!

I had a business myself, and I believe if humans are random. Depending on the environment they grow up in humans can end up torturing for fun. Anything bad that anyone can think of - somebody is doing it or going to do it, same as with anything good.

But none of that has anything to do with the basic request: TALK to people.

> imagine the backlash from erring on the side of permissiveness.

So what? Why is it better to manage the current outrage? It isn't. Same thing: You talk. That's what humans do. And as I wrote in another response: Scale is the problem of the business, which after all uses just that to make lots of money (in the case of those giants). They are always looking for was to improve and for what to invest their considerable wealth in - well, here is a good problem to solve!

What it seems we are facing here is pure, unadulterated greed. They want to rake in billions and do the bare minimum. We, The Human Race, cannot continue to reward this behavior.

You really think all the woes fb is going through now, from being too loose with data, is on the same level as managing criticism from being too tight?

TALKING to people is impossible when the people are in the large millions and even billions, and you are a corporate entity. You are just not going to get thousands of staff to communicate a consistent intelligent message and philosophy, across many hundreds of cultures. It's a good problem to look at if it would improve the bottom line. It won't.

I think you are also assuming fb actually cares. They don't. fb isn't a human.

Facebook's ad revenue per user is something like $5 a year: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/02/facebooks-revenue-topped-5-p...

Presumably their per user costs eat up most of that. That means that having any human manually do anything for you will almost certainly cost more than the value you bring to them.

Ad supported stuff generally cannot provide customer support, excepting perhaps paid customer support, which people tend to find horribly objectionable.

> Facebook's ad revenue per user is something like $5 a year

It looks like that's the global number, which includes people too poor to afford an internet connection (so FB subsidizes that for them to keep up its user growth statistics).

Your link also states:

> In the U.S. and Canada, ARPU rose 35 percent to $21.20.

I believe that figure is per quarter, not year, and globally. It is a little over 5 a month for the US and Canada, not per year - 20 something a quarter.

Their graphic is page 8 of this earnings report https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2017/Q4...

which says to see SEC filings for the definition of ARPU.

I found

"We define ARPU as our total revenue in a given geography during a given quarter, divided by the average of the number of MAUs in the geography at the beginning and end of the quarter." p. 23

http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/2309fab3...

Across 2.2 billion users, nothing is tiny. A team would have to sensitively handle thousands of requests around the clock (the worldwide mortality rate is 8.33/1000, which would suggest 18 million per year or 2000 per hour, but their user base might skew wealthier and younger for now).

Scale is the company's problem, after all, that is what it uses to make money!

The request of the person IS tiny - and so is each response.

Favebook’s policy for not giving information to family members came out of situations where the decreased was not on good terms with their family. When to give out information and to whom are not obvious or easy decisions when you have a billion users.

As I already wrote: Nobody (reasonable) asks them to do anything other than TALK. If that is the issue, then say so! Of course, they would also have to provide a way out if the issue can be shown to be invalid.

From the article: Ms Sabados said she spent a year talking to Facebook before pursuing legal action.

This. It is hard to imagine a situation in which providing information on the identity of person who requested the removal of a dead person's profile to an aggrieved party is going to result in anything other than the harassment of that person. Especially in circumstances like this when that person may well have felt they were acting reasonably, and does not appear to have committed any actual criminal or civil offence.

Facebook's responsibility to not promote the harassment of its users exceeds its responsibility to provide details of why they carried out a request.

Additionally, Facebook had some reason to believe that even if they wanted to doxx that person, disclosing their communication to a third party without that person's own permission may have been a breach of UK/EU data protection laws

Thank you!

I don't want my scumbag parents or extended family getting information about who is carrying out my affairs from random companies after I die. There's a reason why I'm planning on writing a will to specifically exclude them from any sort of inheritance if my husband and I died together.

Plus these were unmarried partners!! Unlike spouses, unmarried partners have no legal standing as next of kin in most of the world.

Thank you! Amount of insane comments here is deeply disturbing.

Deceased person could have "secret" lover whom he was going to marry. He could have secret son who had more right to decide what to do with the page than anyone else.

He wasn't married to person who harassed Facebook. He could have relations with dozen other women all of whom asked fb to erase all history of it including messages and photos. Grieving person might try to demand restoring profile and giving her access to it so she could identify them and make their life living hell. Yes this might sound farfetched and a little bit insane but stories like this really happen all over the globe thousands time a day.

Its easy to agree with fb here especially because "widow" couldn't possibly do anything good with requested information.

Not everything is "doxxing". In this case somebody made a request to Facebook under their own name, and there's no clear reason why they should be entitled to anonymity.

Kind of stupid to call this "doxing". It's not like they're requesting his SSN, addresses, and banking details get posted all over the web.

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