Incarcerated and Facebook
medium.com
medium.com
I don't know anyone that works at Facebook/Google/Uber/etc. When I have issues they just go unresolved. Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back. (Which I'm seriously considering -- even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out.)
It would be really nice if there were companies to give my money to that did have some semblance of customer support that didn't require making friends with the right people or curating a social media following.
I would begrudgingly take the loss to continue having access to their marketplaces. These companies have notoriously terrible customer service and they don’t really have any reason to fix it.
Besides get use to the horror of not ever using Uber when they close up shop or raise prices which is coming soon and would have come sooner if they could bankrupt lyft.
Imagine thinking you need Uber to live your life...
Honestly, I've given the money that I spent on Uber to Lyft (and Carey car services).
It's not the end of the world.
WTF? Taxis are expensive. Destitute people take the bus, ride bicycles (in various conditions), or walk.
The ADA requires 'paratransit' service for persons whose disabilities prevent them from using accessible, non-commuter, fixed route bus service. In many cities paratransit is handed off to taxi services.
Even on that article, the 2nd to last paragraph was:
> Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the man who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel.
With another platform offering rentals but taking a 30% cut, a trick I found was to google the address or name, often they'd be listed there as well. Then I'd call them and ask if they have a room, and if they could offer me a discount (I was travelling around Iceland, many people doing the ringroad would just show up in the afternoon/evening and leave the next morning). Obviously this doesn't work with anonymous airbnb providers.
"even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out"
Imagine buying something that costs over a thousand dollars and the company going “Oops we charged you twice well haha suck it.”
I won a chargeback when Uber [Jump] bikes charged me $50 for riding 0.0 miles while the bike was locked.
My guess was that their LTE provider was switching between towers right near the top of Capitol Hill [Seattle] and another tower that was not line of sight. So it just ran out the clock until it hit some kind of fail safe at 3hrs or whatever and stopped. Of course there was zero notification that I was still being charged. Hopefully this is now fixed.
It just helps, if it's a larger sum, since your arrangement's with the creditor not whoever 'you' paid.
My bank's charged back erroneous debit card charges without any issue a few times.
Have you considered to just let your bank reverse the transaction and let Uber sue you if they've got a problem with that?
Funny thing is, I'm in a city where Uber is fighting a competition with Lyft. I've already converted six different people with my story. Clearly customer experience and retention is not their priority...
It will only look bad if that person has enough clout to make the story that visible. But most people don't which is why Uber, Facebook, Google, etc. can do whatever they want with your account and offer you absolutely no recourse. The balance of power in these relationships is tilted so much to one side that nothing short of strong regulation will help the regular user.
Now a typical business can probably stop doing business with you simply because they hate you (not your 'kind', just you personally), but can Uber?
They are likely embershed in so many regulatory frameworks that require them to serve the general public fairly, that they won't be able to cut off service simply because you won a lawsuit against them.
I think any private company doesn't have the legal obligation to serve you or many of the rules that apply to public/government institutions. See Cloudflare refusing to serve right-wing extremist websites, or Youtube taking down similar videos and channels. The only justification they need is that you failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the service. The leverage some have is judging them in the court of public opinion.
I pointed out that by that logic if a vendor I'd done business with in the past like Amazon were, at this point, to simply charge me for and ship me a thousand books of their own volition as long as they actually delivered them they're telling me there's no recourse. They stand by it.
This is a self-inflicted problem and whoever suffers it had it coming.
It has been explained endlessly [1] why to avoid this kind of platforms due to their non-accountability. There are other free, reasonable, forms of communication. If somebody insists to keep using facebook/google, etc.; so bad! At best, their sad story will be useful to warn others against these predatory companies.
This is kind of the principle upon which society is built. I should be able to trust that the food at the grocery store is safe for me to eat; I shouldn’t need to conduct deep research into the supply chain to ensure it won’t poison me.
However, a technical writer, and a developer, such as is the case, is not only supposed to know about facebook's callousness, but to be active explaining it. The fact that even developers use facebook as if it was a socially acceptable possibility is an extremely sad state of affairs.
Maybe if you know someone in the exactly right team but even this isn't a given. Unauthorized messing with user data gets you fired.
This is actually very good to know and maybe Google should even blog about it. I end up in a lot of conversations with friends in a stalemate about Google and personal information.
When I make the argument people should be paying more for the software they use and i.e. paying Google for a GSuite account is one of the best decisions people can make.
Many people do not understand when they have a contract with Google and are paying for services, Google doesn't snoop around in personal data.
Why would you trust a company based on stalking users to not do so when their bottom-line depends on it considering they have plausibly-deniable ways to do so without getting caught? (and as the Facebook phone number fiasco proved, even if they do get caught the penalty is a slap on the wrist and can be factored in as costs of doing business)
We were spending about a million dollars a year on AdWords. Part of Google's requirements are that we give clients access to the Ad accounts as well. One client did not have Google accounts, so we registered some for them, granted them access, and provided them to them.
Of the dozen or so accounts we set up for that client (it was a group of car dealerships under one high-level umbrella, so separate but together), one got suspended almost immediately by the accounts team.
We submitted a ticket with the accounts team regarding it, and when it was still banned a few months later I finally reached out to our contact at AdWords. She submitted a follow-up ticket with the accounts team.
By the time I left that job about 4 years later, she still had not received a response.
For cases like Facebook or Google I have a friend who works there to sort things out, but I don't have any connection in Uber. It's so frustrating.
The only realistic shot at this is through shaming this behavior - the ability for monoliths to lock you out of large swaths of services is a serious, serious problem.
Most of us don't have personal vendettas against Uber or similar companies and want to take them down.
But if they do treat you like shit, then it should be your right (and duty) to fight back to discourage such behaviour in the future.
The goal isn't to take them down with tons of chargebacks, simply to make the chargeback rate correlate with the bad customer service. They clearly don't care about the latter but will definitely care about the former. If it does take them down however it won't be a big loss and will clear the space for a better competitor to step in.
Maybe, an Attorney General can take on them after a lot of users report being banned after disputing fraudulent charges?
Same thing happened to me. I checked twitter and reddit and easily found various other people with the same problem, so it's nothing new, Uber just doesn’t care about fixing it and would rather torture paying customers with their atrocious customer support. I've heard contacting the Uber support twitter account works better than the in-app support, but I gave up before then and issued a chargeback.
We tried the process to verify it was her account, but after being asked to submit passport photo + her photo, the ticket stops progressing for the past 2 months and it has been very frustrating for us. The account has years of my mom's photo that wasn't backed up elsewhere. If there happens to be any engineer passing by that can escalate this internally, I would be much appreciated.
Facebook's "user support" is getting to the point where Google's support is looking like a sane one. At least the automated system works when it is supposed to. I got a couple of really weird behaviors trying to unlock the account: the system asked to select an item from an empty list to send 2FA code. The initial sms 2FA code that we received when the attacker tried to login somehow got wrong encoding data (utf8 vs utf16), which shows up as non sensical Chinese character.
But of course its their business to know who usess their service and choose whom to allow to use it.
Facebook use is not a right!
it just seems like a really weird decision - the benefits of removing people who are currently incarcerated seem minimal compared to the risk of mistakenly flagging somebody.
I always get downvoted for saying this but ... it’s getting that way. Facebook has become the primary social and contact mechanism for a large number of people. The network effects start to transcend the point where someone unelected in an office in California should get to decide who benefits from it and who doesn’t.
Facebook needs regulating, urgently.
Although "facebook police" sounds like a great term to use in an ironic sense.
Which part of the first amendment states that?
(OK, it doesn't - the first amendment, and indeed the constitution, limits what government can do, not what people can do)
Why do governments ask for it? Many prisons have regulations banning social media use, even indirect use in which a friend or family member posts on the inmate’s behalf. Why do those regulations exist? Well, all it takes is some odious figure (murderer,rapist,etc) to have a social media page, then victim’s family gets upset, then tabloid media wants to exploit it, then politician promises to “do something about it”, then bureaucrat does the politician’s bidding and amends the prison regulations...
Obvious questions: how are these checked? What prevents someone from submitting a fake ID?
I'm sure the people responsible to check this are outsourced monkeys who aren't paid enough to care and will approve anything, so in the end Facebook created a built-in way to DoS a user's account, potentially forever unless you have a contact inside to restore your account.
I can only assume that this is some perverse extension of the same idea; protect society from the bad people.
>Fortunately I have some friends and ex-colleagues who work at Facebook so I reached out to them and asked for help, some of whom were kind enough to submit internal support tickets on my behalf. I wasn’t sure that was going to help so I fired off more emails and uploads of my ID but heard nothing. Thankfully 3 days later, I got a very terse email — “We unlocked your account”
This is a common refrain that I see in all these FB/Google "locked out or banned" horror stories. Unless you have some friends at high places at FB/Google, you're SOL if you ever get locked out of your FB or Gmail account.
There's some article that said 90% of computer users are below proficient, they have their routines but get totally lost if something doesn't work...
OTOH, having no support isn't the answer either, especially if the issue is actually on their side, and the user is genuinely inconvenienced.
It would also probably generate more support scams.
This would solve the issue of monkeys wasting support's time while offering a way to get support for those who know what they're doing and are happy to put their dollars on the line.
Does this model actually work? I'm sure there are some reputable companies that could make it work, but I'm not sure I know anyone who would trust Facebook to get this right.
One could crowd-source it, but there's probably a high chance of brigading...
Just offer support to the proficient ones.
Big tech, Google and Facebook in particular don't have "weird process gaps". What they have is a willful ignorance of any and all customer service. They are the vanguard of a new economy devoid of any and all notion of customer service. That quaint notion is too expensive in today's economy. Today, "customer service" is provided via a one way email black hole.
The only way anyone gets customer service from any unicorn is either by shaming them in a vial social media post or leveraging an internal contact. There used to be a time where one could call and talk to an actual person who actually worked for the company and might, just might be in a position to help. Those days began to end with the shift to offshore call centers and now have completely vanished thanks to canned email responses. I NEVER in my wildest dreams would have though "I wish Google had an offshore call center to support me".
Years ago, while flying British Air from Nairobi to London I had my camera equipment and dress shoes stolen by ground crew. I called up BA and explained that I had watched a person on the tarmac open my bag as it was being loaded onto the plain. I don't even know if the ground crewman was a BA employee or an Airport employee, but the BA rep on the phone told me she was mortified at what had happened and the next day they couriered a check to me. No bickering, no stonewalling, no email voids, just pure customer service.
That one great experience was snatched from the jaws of disappointment by a timely customer service rep with the authority to help and has meant that I will fly BA whenever it is possible over all other airline options. Would they do the same today? I doubt it, but they did it once and I will always be a fan as a result.
I've heard a lot of well-deserved criticism of BA as well, but it does seem like many of their staff are still willing to go above and beyond.
Left my keys on the plane seat, and remembered once I was at baggage claim. All Delta would do is let me fill out some paperwork. I ended up having to have a locksmith come out to the airport parking lot to make a new key for my truck.
Don’t forget that just last year we were watching videos of innocent passengers being violently dragged off planes that they paid to be on. Despite some feel good anecdotes, airlines are by no means a bastion of customer service nirvana. Airlines hold 2 of the top 20 spots among the “Most Hated Companies” in the US.
Good customer service, even when your ASP is tens of thousands of dollars per customer, is probably the single hardest thing for most companies.
Whether it’s Airlines, Search Engines, Phone/Computer Manufacturers, Car companies, etc., we’ve seen basically every otherwise beloved brand fall on their face when it comes to customer service at scale. (And that’s when we’re not discovering their products are faulty, dangerous, secretly crippled over time, spying on us, exploiting our personal data,...)
Of course there are weird process gaps. Here we are seeing an account being flagged for incarceration, possibly because the account is actually being attacked by someone submitting fraudulent requests in an attempt to get it closed.
I don’t have a Facebook account and I don’t want one. But if that isn’t a weird process gap I don’t know what is.
Are you referring to the United incident in 2017, or a later one?
You don't get customer service from an ad platform unless you are a paying advertiser. Complaints from the eyeballs carry less weight than complaints from the money shovelers.
If you are a supplier of eyeballs, you are purchasing stuff in exchange for eyeballs. You are purchasing things, so you are a customer. Also, when you pay for an Android phone, you are a paying customer of Google, with cash, credit, or whatever. Lots of other things, but those are the first that come to mind.
I usually pay for things these days via an odd ritual in which I insert a small plastic card into a slot, and then, believe it or not, it is actually returned to me.
If I give you something in exchange for a chicken, and you maintain "I did not pay you, because a chicken is not cash", do you think the IRS will be convinced there was no transaction? Or s/chicken/bitcoin/.
However, if a dictionary definition is presented to me, and it doesn't include a usage of which I am aware, that doesn't mean I disagree with it even then. It likely just means that something was left out - maybe because people still hope to sell dictionaries, or alternatively because, having given up on selling them, neither accuracy nor completeness is required to sell online ads.
Do you agree or disagree with it? According to this definition, am I “paying” to use Facebook?
As such, definition #13 seems applicable - "money, goods, etc." can't possibly be construed to mean "money and not goods, etc."...can it?
Definition #17 might also apply - you "pay" to use Facebook, oh how you pay...
Anyway, I don't have any particular issues with this entry, and I think the very first definition demonstrates that payment is commonly understood to include "doing something" which is an extremely broad category.
Definition 17, while fitting, is outside the scope of this current thread.
The point is, Facebook only cares about your experience with their service if you are paying them money. Even the IRS doesn’t care; Facebook doesn’t send you a 1099 for your use of their service, do they? The IRS doesn’t charge them tax on your data, do they? This would seem to indicate that the situation falls outside the “exchange of value for value” type definition of “pay.”
If I understand your dismissal of definition (1), you are implying that it is significant that definition (2) by contrast only says "money" and uses an example of dollars. I think that's too legalistic and just an artifact of the way things were edited. Dictionaries aren't written to prevent lawyers from finding loopholes, so I don't think you can count on everything being repeated absolutely uniformly. In actual legal documents, they define terms or phrases used repeatedly up front to reduce the repetition, and dictionaries don't seem to customarily do that. So again, definition (1) is evidence about how people behave in the world, not necessarily the definition we are using and from an unimpeachable authority.
Cutting you off at the scale they are at is just no big deal to them, but you may in fact miss your payment.
Not an excuse though, but spending money on these services is rare and it could be argued if you really are the customer of Facebook for example.
The companies in question probably just rely on the dependency of users, so any support has a low priority.
This has never been the case on HN. Here are some 'pg comments on the topic 'dang provided a while back[0].
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 (2008)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347 (2008)
The whole point of having a downvote system is to correct people towards more productive behavior, no? If people don't know what they said wrong, how can they fix it?
If the the user can't figure out why they're being punished, and someone like me who has been on this site for a long time and is also going "why on earth did that get downvoted", then what purpose does it serve other than as a public flogging device?
Then again, considering that the site design hasn't changed to even have a up-vote button that works on mobile, I'm not exactly holding my breath that anything here could ever change.
Either the gaps are not that rare, or FB doesn't give a shit. There are no other options.
Enough to employ people to look into the problem(s) and fix them?
Assuming 200 working days a year and that 1 CSR can handle 10 cases a day, that means 1000 people can handle the case load. Given Facebook has ~43k employees right now, and assuming they actually have nobody to handle these cases, they would need to hire 2% more employees.
I’m not sure if that meets the definition of “a few extra people,” but FB could easily do it if they wanted to. 1000 people being paid $60k apiece plus $60k worth of additional carrying costs (benefits, etc.), that amounts to $120M in additional expenses. Naively subtracting that number from their 2018 net income of $6.88B leaves $6.76B (actually more due to the additional expenses being tax deductible).
So, basically, we see that FB cares less about user support than making an additional 1.7% profit. Yeah, they don’t give a shit.
So Facebook should just admit it doesn't scale, and work on doing things smaller and better.
If it was a startup, the HN crowd would be all about "doesn't scale!" But since it's a FAANG, it's, "Sure! Just keep on going and hurting society. Am I vested yet?"
No, thought the dev team, this mistake would never happen, the only way to "get out of jail" is to show us your release papers!
It's pervasive, isn't it. Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. What I realized once was, the TSA agent doesn't want or isn't allowed to think and make decisions, because making decisions mean being responsible for those decisions...
Unfortunately, children being used for smuggling stuff or as bombs on legs is nothing new :'(
Humans are cruel.
What’s next? You’re behind on your car payments or child support?
Your credit score is too low...
I would have assumed that an incarcerated person could give their credentials to a trusted person outside to manage their account for them and relay information.
Please say more.
My initial assumption was that if they can't get the account, they would just try and mess it up for me.
On reflection it's probably unrelated and just one of those things.. I guess if they're reading this post, I'll find out soon :)
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
I vaguely recall reading something similar, within the last couple years. Probably on HN, but not for sure. In that case, the victim did temporarily lose a domain. And the exploit involved taking over their email.
Maybe use two-factor authentication with a third-party app? I don't know specifics, though.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700139
But it did not involve an email takeover. Which story are you referring to?
It was longer ago. And I don't remember any more about it.
I only said HN because it's my main source for random reading.
Not sure what the angle is? Like, I don’t see how requesting a password reset would help them exploit the account. Maybe they are just testing for flaws in FB’s system, still weird though.
Maybe a new version of the directory harvest attack[0]?
For example, if someone has an email address (or list of email addresses) from somewhere else, one can easily tell if you (or they) have a Facebook account by simply requesting a password reset against it (them). If there's no throttling on password reset requests, one could process a large list rather quickly.
[0] - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/recipient-filterin...
Interesting, thanks for letting me know - I'd assumed the same - hoping I'd click on the reset link perhaps and that would help them access my account.
It seems to be relatively easy to lock someone’s account since they don’t check. Related: https://bitrebels.com/social/how-to-someones-facebook-shut-d...
It occurs to me that companies don't run bug bounties and authorised pentesting programs for process flaws - I assume that would be deemed out-of-scope "social engineering" even if it doesn't involve any psychological trickery and just involves uploading a forged official document and seeing if they even try to validate it at all.
Given how bad their dispute resolution is, and the huge dollar value of getting your account back in an emergency, insider support channels are highly valuable.
If I were in an AG's office I'd find a case of quid pro quo and research a bribery suit. These companies operate internationally, so there are FCPA implications as well
(and I'm not a lawyer)
Don't use services like Facebook.
Of course now a lot of people will moan when they read this because they think my alternative is living in a hut in the forest but what I want to say is that these companies have that kind of power because we gave it to them by exclusively using their services because it was so convenient when they lured us in.
Using other services or even building them on your own is more effort but it could be worth the extra time when I look at scenes like this one.
Ehm ehm and why ?