Why users are being kicked off Tinder and Fortnite without explanation | Hacker News Reader

Why users are being kicked off Tinder and Fortnite without explanation

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20 pointsbelter8 comments

> Getting a new Tinder account involves getting a new phone number. But when the same happens with an online videogame linked to Playstation, Xbox or Steam accounts, being kicked off can mean losing hundreds of euros in downloaded games and in-app purchases.

That is plain theft. You will have no rights in the Metaverse. That is there future if we do not regulate tech companies.

This reminds me of how American cities were designed for cars, and the ones designed for humans were dismantled. Do not let this happen to your on-line world. Tech should be human first, corporations profits are not a social goal, human well being is.

Actually that’s the entire point of blockchain NFTs. Nobody can take them from you.

If you mean that a game license can be sold as a NFT and they can verify you own it, sure.

But then, nothing stops the central hub (aka Playstation, XBox, Steam) from invalidating your license. In this case, your NFT only serves to prove you paid for it, and your access has since been revoked.

That is because you don't actually own NFTs, just a token pointing to a location where the NFT is stored (which can be removed/moved).

Check out: https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g for a fantastic discussion of NFTs/cryptocurrency etc (it is long ~2 hours but very interesting)

The mapping of that NFT to [some piece of in-game content, a game account] is entirely outside of control of any blockchain system and is wholly dictated by the developers. NFTs give no more of a guarantee to access and utilize your purchases or content than a screenshot of your receipt for buying them in the first place.

If you think of Tinder or Fortnite as your “home” as TFA suggests it’s kind of hard to sympathize.

"home" is a bad analogy. Online services can easily become central to your life:

The prime example/offender is GMail. There are numerous stories of users who were suddenly left without access to their account, with no explanation or recourse given.

Some people get lucky and manage to reach an influential Googler through offline channels, and have their access reinstated.

Average Joe on the other hand, might suddenly lose access to services linked to their GMail account, such as online banking, communications with important contacts, services that bill his credit card on a regular basis but that now Joe can't close the service or dissociate his card, due to having lost access.

How does Joe lose access to linked services? (a) if he signed up using Google SSO, or (b) passwords were saved in his Chrome account that he no longer has access to, and (c) can no longer recover passwords that were registered with the GMail address.

Yeah, Tinder/Fortnite are typically much less central to one's life, but for some people, due to social/health factors, these services are a gateway to an important part of their lives.

Number one I can think of is we're still in a pandemic, and whether because many cities are still observing lockdowns or risk-averse individuals still prefer to isolate, people are being driven towards online services that facilitate social activities such as dating or playing some variation of virtual cops & robbers.

This doesn't happen just on Tinder or Fortnite.

It happens to Google users who issue chargebacks after not getting their pixel phones in the mail and hours of work trying to contact Google customer support.

It happens to Twitter users, like a friend whose business partner ripped her and others off of +$1M and then fled the country - after she tweeted news /court document links to his new business partners.

It happens to Apple customers, at random, and they lose a decade or more of music they've purchased-but-not-purchased, because they buy too many gift cards.

There's an online game I play where someone was banned by the game publisher because a group of streamers playing together who had no idea how the game worked, discord-messaged employees at the publisher and said he was cheating. The only thing that saved him was that he was screen-recording all his games and he could prove they had no idea what they were talking about. The company never apologized, but he could have lost all the account progress (that unlocks functionality) and cosmetics he'd "bought".

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