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Comment by zht | Hacker News Reader

also I'm sure many at HN know this but the same applies to the Google accounts

Yep got locked out of Google for no reason and it was impossible to get in touch with a human. Extremely rage-inducing. There needs to be far better consumer protection on a government level with big tech (mostly Google and Twitter/FB, not so much Amazon or Netflix or Apple). Some of this is just unacceptable. I was reading one case of a person who had their name/image associated with a convicted rapist on Google and they couldn't get hold of a human to have it fixed. This kind of thing just shouldn't be allowed and there needs to be large fines going out. The onus should not be on a small time individual to fork out tens of thousands of dollars on a lawsuit.

> I was reading one case of a person who had their name/image associated with a convicted rapist on Google and they couldn't get hold of a human to have it fixed.

Suing Google apparently does the trick in my country. Google fails to respond? Police shows up at their local office, arrests some executives and makes them 100% available for comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/business/global/top-googl...

I wonder why the US doesn't do this. Tarnishing an innocent person's reputation by associating them with rape they didn't commit is obviously criminal. They MUST fix it. Doesn't matter how much it costs them either.

They also get plenty of lawsuits over images in the search results. Lawsuits over celebrity nude photos have made the news before. They were removed. A local Facebook executive was also detained after the company failed to disclose the contents of encrypted WhatsApp messages to drug trafficking investigators. To me this was major proof that WhatsApp wasn't lying about its end-to-end encryption.

> The onus should not be on a small time individual to fork out tens of thousands of dollars on a lawsuit.

Agree. Government should always provide free lawyers really. Not just for murder cases. Otherwise, only the rich will ever go to court and seek justice.

> consumer protection

Last I checked Facebook/Instagram/Gmail were free. If this had happened to someone with a paying Google Workspace account I'd understand but I hardly doubt willingly signing up to a free service grants you any extensive rights.

It's not really free when I'm paying via advertising revenue. It's just indirect payment. I don't see a fundamental difference between paying $20/year and contributing $20/year in ad revenue.

Anyway the laws I was proposing wasn't so much for free account closure, it was more for things like false search results, impersonation, account hijacking. These amount to defamation and psychological abuse and these companies are allowing it to happen without providing any human customer service fix.

Am I being foolish using ‘Sign In with Apple’ on sites?

I don’t think any of us know how much risk we have due to automated rules created by these high scale tech companies with very small customer service departments.

Maybe, though by comparison to Google one of Apple's pretty well-known selling points is having actual support by real people available at all times.

The Fappening allegedly occurred in part because of lack of rate limiting of Find My iPhone API auth.

Take that as a grain of salt.

It's also a reason to assume that they've corrected that by now, if you want possible silver lining.

Yes. Apple may be more trustworthy than Google, but you're still needlessly giving them opportunity to screw you (most likely by accident or through random error). Use a password manager and set up actual accounts.

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