Why Is It So Hard to Figure Out What to Do When You Lose Your Account?
eff.org
eff.org
For backstory, I'd purchased an RTX3080 about a year ago at Microcenter after waiting in way-too-long lines for several mornings. I bought it as part of a new PC I intended to use for gaming, graphical work, and general use, but with all the talk of crypto miners and scalpers ruining things, I took a look at mining Ether during downtime.
It wasn't the reason I got the card, but I figured it might be an interesting way to recoup some of the cost of the card since I was already running a small space heater in that room during the winter anyway. Mined the equivalent of $200-250 and saw that I could "cash out" via Coinbase to Paypal with minimal fees and hassle, so I set up an account, took care of all the tax stuff, and transferred to Coinbase, then a few days later, to Paypal.
Almost immediately, my Paypal account was banned. No explanation. No option to have it reinstated. I can only assume it had something to do with them thinking the Coinbase stuff was shady, but Coinbase-to-Paypal seems like a legit and supported thing to do. I have never been able to contact anyone at Paypal and get an explanation. Nothing was ever "returned" to the Coinbase account. It all just went "poof!"
At this point I am over it because as far as I'm concerned, it was fake money generated by running my GPU when I wasn't on the computer. I'm only really out the added cost of electricity and some time. But it makes me wonder who ended up with those funds.
It is how I lost my FB account with absolutely no means to get it back despite googling high and low for a Facebook support on this issue.
https://santaclaraprinciples.org/
There are three of them: Numbers, Notice, and Appeal.
That is, service providers should report on the total number of moderation actions, provide clear notice to sanctioned users, and offer a meaningful appeals process.
What neither the EFF nor Santa Clara Protocols address is that niggling matter of scale which today's larger service providers face. The very largest providers serve a base of nearly half the total world population. To give an example of what this means, simply based on demographics, a provider with roughly 4 billion accounts sees some 80,000 users die every day.[1]
Based on content-moderation statistics, the maximum number of items an individual human can deal with in a typical workday is on the order of 700--800,[2] which leaves about 30 seconds per item. More complex cases take much more time. Working at maximum throughput, a team of 100 would have to be devoted to death verifications / adjudications alone. In reality, the team would likely have to be many times this size.
I don't have data available on account suspensions,[3] but across both Facebook and Instagram, there were about 3 million appealed content removals processed in 2021Q3, or roughly 33.5 thousand per day. At the rate of 800 per 8-hour shift ... that works out to a moderation team of about 15, which is less than I'd have thought. Even if my efficiency estimate is low by an order of magnitude, that's roughly three shifts of 150 moderators, or a mod team of about 500 for content appeals alone.
Total "actioned" content is closer to 1 billion items for the quarter. Manually assessing each of those issues would require a minimum of 4,600 moderators per shift, or about 14,000 total. I believe that's within hailing distance of the actual FB moderation team size. This article states it's 15,000, and should be bumped to twice as many: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/08/1002894/facebook...
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Notes:
1. Worldometers gives about 180,000 deaths per day, based on year-to-date deaths. https://www.worldometers.info/
2. NY Times moderation desk, though similar stats are available elsewhere.
3. Facebook's Transparency Centre is here: https://transparency.fb.com/data/ The Community Standards report does not include data on account suspensions, other than "fake accounts": https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce...
They evidently have absolutely no interest in account recovery process.
https://transparency.fb.com/data/community-standards-enforce...
What would convince you otherwise?
(I'm absolutely no fan of FB as my history here and elsewhere will show. I find the problem space they occupy interesting, however, and the data they provide does afford insights.)
And in all probability that one such recovery method is found (SOMEHOW), they’ll most likely ask me for my phone number.
No thanks.
You're aware of: "How do I recover an old Facebook account that I can't log in to?"
To recover an old account:
- Go to the profile of the account you'd like to recover.
Most innocent victims of VoIP phone numbers (like me) are basically S.O.O.L.
Your earlier gripes were pretty broad and vague. In particular, they didn't show much consideration for how an entity the size of FB (or even considerably smaller) might deal with the fact that distinguishing justified vs. unjustified account lockouts might be problematic.
A few months back, gwd posted this:
In superhero comic books and movies, the real superpower is certainty. The good guys always know who the bad guys are; it's just a matter of defeating them. In the real world, we have plenty of power to defeat the bad guys; it's just not always clear who the bad guys are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26619006
It's really easy to adjudicate locked-out accounts if you know for certain who's naughty and who's nice. It's a lot harder when you can't determine that easily, and many of the naughty profiles act like the nice ones.
Play with different mixes of good-faith and bad-faith actors, and the problem gets even more complicated. See the discussions of airport security testing, where the target being sought is 1 in millions or more, and the inconveniences of false positives (detained innocent passengers) and the consequences of a false negative (a hijacking or terrorist attack) are severe.
That's what account-recovery teams are dealing with.
(It's also a large part of much other present interactions, including commerce, credit, and a whole bunch else.)
It's easy to dismiss behaviour as ridiculous with a shallow understanding.
And despite my absolute lack of sympathy for Facebook, their scope and scale of the problem they're dealing with is impressive, and worth thinking through.
https://merecivilian.com/apple-broke-up-with-me/
“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” - Willaim BlackstonI've had several run-ins with Google myself. One key reason I've de-Googled myself to the maximum extent possible.
Scale is a problem created by these companies. They chose to eat the world in a winner take all game in order to maximize returns. That is not an excuse for ruining people's livelihoods without appeal. Facebook chose to create a world where certain types of commerce are done through Facebook and there are few other viable options.
Yes. These are hard problems. Maybe Facebook won't be able to make as big profits if they actually implement a just appeals process. That is Facebook's problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429896
Even admitting the inequity of privatising gains and socialising costs, looking at the scope of the scale problem remains illuminating.