Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if you showed up to a self-storage facility one day and find a different lock on your unit. You go to the manager and ask what the hell is going on.

> Oh, you? Yeah, your unit was full of stolen goods, so we seized it and changed the lock.

> There was nothing stolen in there! What about a bunch of banged up furniture and old cans of paint made you think it was stolen?

(the manager stares blankly)

> Well?!

(crickets)

> Can I at least take back my stuff that you didn't mistake for being stolen?

> We burned it all and sunk the ashes in the Mariana Trench. There is no recourse. As far as we're concerned, you don't exist. Have a nice day!

> Gee, thanks... ᵃˢˢʰᵒˡᵉ

---

If we ever come up with a digital bill of rights, one of the amendments should include being given a grace period to retrieve all of the data that you stored with a service in case they decide to terminate your account. It's absurd that you can store your data with a service one day, and in the next it's all gone because reasons.

Actually, I would modify that comparison.

More like, imagine if you show up to your storage one day and the lock is changed. You talk to the manager and he says, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service".

"Which rule did I break?", you ask.

He answers, "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service."

You appeal multiple times and receive the exact same answer with a blank stare from the manager until he says: "you can no longer have access to your items because you have broken one of the rules in our 5,000 page terms of service, this decision is final and no further communication from you will be reviewed."

Then he just sits and stares at you blankly like you don't exist, no matter what you say.

This is also exactly how Amazon handles shutting down sellers as well.

Facebook does the same with ads customers if they think one of their ominous rules has been broken repeatedly. If the algorithm decides so, you can lose the ability to ever run an ad again by logging in from the wrong IP number.

Only a law that prohibits or at least severely limits automated handling of customer complaints would help against these practices.

> Only a law that prohibits or at least severely limits automated handling of customer complaints would help against these practices.

I only recently learned that GDPR actually includes such a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... although a footnote later appears to say "no, it does not" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... so I guess we leave that fight to lawyers

There is further commentary elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24572144

I’m switching to T-Mobile as soon as the next phone is released because something in AT&T’s CRM is broken in such a way that they don’t remember how many times I’ve called them to fix an autopay that’s been broken since I reported my old card lost a year and a half ago. Every person I get on the phone treats me like a child who can’t fill out a support form. So they fill it out for me and no payments are ever done. This is the same card I used to manually pay in their support system, which works. If I pretend not to know when the last time was I contacted them, they can’t tell me. Escalate a ticket, no answer.

I’m afraid that whatever is broken will stop the phone number transfer from succeeding.

What are the "items" in this analogy?

Could be your video content, or your emails, or whatever you have stored on servers, or in the case of Amazon, any merchandise you may be seeking through fba.

Well, no.

Imagine you stored all your stuff in a storage unit you didn't pay for, where the owner can show people round your stuff, but the owner surreptitiously takes photographs of people and what they are interested in. They then sell those photos to random people who then turn up at your house, your work, on the street, at your gym, in your supermarket and down the pub to try and sell you shit they know you're interested in. These people also sell those photos to a few hundred other such organisations.

Someone claims you stole their stuff, the owner of the building can't be arsed to investigate and tells you to gtfo.

That's the actual comparison.

Who would defend the guy borrowing the space? No-one. But then, if people found out their photos were being sold, they'd also be up in arms!

That's the reality, but somehow that's become the norm on the internet.

Replace "lock" with digital key and "manager" with "automated email" and this starts to sound like 2027.

Kafka, at least, got to talk to a person. OTOH, we get to enjoy our Kafkaesque distopia without having to physically go to some office.

Sounds similar to how Paypal users routinely had their assets frozen. There was even a website about it, I think it was paypalsucks.com.

you say 'frozen" but I think you mean "stolen". When someone offers to forward money to me in exchange for a small fee, we sign a contract, then they keep all the money that's at best fraud but in reality theft.

Now all I need to do is hire a US legal firm to sue paypal and get my money. Even if it was $100,000 it still wouldn't be worth it. Paypal know this.

At least they chose the heaviest & most metalish place to dispose of the ashes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiKz7r86aT8

I miss that show!

I smell the irony

"The data protection law establishes that you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated means, if the decision produces legal effects concerning you or significantly affects you in a similar way."

One of the clauses of the GDPR gives EU residents the right to appeal certain automated decisions that might affect them.

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

I'm sorry I didn't see your comment earlier, or I would have linked to yours from mine

While I was researching some substantiation for my comment, I noticed that Wikipedia has a citation saying "Why a Right to Explanation of Automated Decision-Making Does Not Exist in the General Data Protection Regulation" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula... ) -- any idea if the footnote is outdated, or perhaps the actual statute is more nuanced than one might think?

> you have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated means

Sounds like traffic lights are illegal in the EU.

Well no, because its a general regulation which can be overridden by other more specific laws. But besides that, I think that the scope of the regulation probably doesn't encompass traffic lights (no personal data involved). But I didn't look it up :D

How does that follow? Traffic lights aren't the subject of copyright claims.

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