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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

IMO there needs to be some kind of minimum allowed customer support when handling user data. If you can't provide real support for free, then remove the free plan. If everyone has to then they are all equal again.

It's just wrong to trick people in to trusting a service with their data and then yanking it with no support contact.

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Having recently dealt with what I’m assuming are a meatbag support team from Microsoft (specifically their business partnership program), I can honestly say there’s not much difference between a bunch of useless meatbags and no support whatsoever.

It took me 4 weeks to sign up for a service which requires few business details and proof of a domain by form of an invoice.

For a reason I don’t understand, it has no bearing on the rest of the registration process whatsoever, I just gave them proof of some unrelated random domain I own.

That's easy to fix. You have a government body that takes complaints and if a company receives too many complaints over their customer service, they must pay a penalty.

That’s basically the US banking system, and it’s notoriously consumer un-friendly.

On the contrary, the CFPB has rave reviews from what I have read:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/

I had a problem where my spouse’s employer’s Health Savings Account custodian (PNC bank in this case) was simply giving us the run around on charging a fee that was not on their fee schedule, which the employees of PNC even acknowledged was an error, but no one could get in touch with a person with enough power to fix the problem.

I submitted a request on the CFPB website asking them to look into it and within 48 hours I had a boss call me from PNC bank to confirm that my error was resolved and provided me her email address and phone number if there were further issues.

Trump did neuter the CPFB though, but hopefully Biden will bring it back:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-01-11/column-cfp...

And if people file these complains for doing stuff like actually hosting terrorism? For this to work you'd also need a review board to determine if TOS clauses are "fair" and not overbearing.

If a literal terrorist files a complaint then the police department can pick them up. The complaints department only needs to handle local citizen complaints.

However you feel about a company and their support policies, don't call other people "meatbags". That's gross. You're no higher tier of person than they are.

It is not insulting, its science fiction[0][1]. Many humans self identify as such[2].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=meatbag&tbm=bks

[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Meatbag

[2] https://twitter.com/amyhoy

I was differentiating between humans and bots. Claiming we’re some higher form of being than an animal is equally dehumanising to the animals.

> dehumanising to the animals

Honestly not sure if you're joking about this.

Most animals are dehuman after all.

> IMO there needs to be some kind of minimum allowed customer support when handling user data.

At least partially covered by GDPR for Europeans.

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