Furthermore, even when they get it right, people who were banned correctly come on to the internet to complain.
But sometimes they get it wrong. And the only recourse seems to be a public shaming online.
I realize it’s not entirely the same thing, but it’s also not entirely different.
That exists and it’s just as prone to abuse as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
After I grieved for some time and taken sentimental items, her house had fallen into disrepair, so I sold it at a loss to an investor, and I was mostly ready to start moving on with my life. Somehow, the death certificate provided to me by the government about a year prior to this did not indicate that the government was aware of her death, and I needed send them back a copy of that very certificate in order to make the government officially aware of what happened.
Then I was told that I would need to wait six months for the estate process to end. During that time, I was given random tasks to do at no set interval, usually with deadlines of only a couple days. Then literally one day before the six month time period was over, I was told that the government would be taking the money in the estate due to unpaid medical bills from some years before her death (the same trips to the hospital that had failed to diagnose her illness in the first place). After getting more lawyers to investigate whether this was possible and correct (it was, private creditors' time limit starts at the time of death, but government's time limit starts whenever the aforementioned paperwork is filed (also this only took me a day or so to figure out, because I do not enjoy long drawn out bureaucratic processes unlike the state government I was interacting with)), I resigned to give up and give them the money.
However, that was not an option either. It took ANOTHER six months of random tasks to actually give them the money. I honestly don't remember what most of the tasks were, because none of it made any sense, but the final task really summed up the whole process. I received a call on a Thursday afternoon: I had to mail a physical check to my lawyer to then hand-deliver to a department within seven days, but that department was only open on Mondays 10AM to noon.
All for the terrible crime of having a family member die without having memorized estate law ahead of time. I do consider what they did some unnecessary abstract form of violence/coercion, because otherwise I obviously would not have voluntarily signed up to do any of that shit. At least if they had been honest enough to tell me at the start they were planning to just take everything, I would've just declined to be the executor and let the government do what it wanted with the property. They could have had that money (probably more money, since I wouldn't have paid a third of it to an estate lawyer and the house would've been in better condition) close to two years earlier and left me alone at the same time.
No idea how any of this works, just 2am shower thoughts.
However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a private entity starts to have governmental powers.
In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in pricing" and what you experience would likely never be considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly action.
And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to collect economic rents—pure economic waste that profits eBay and hurts everyone else.
We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad politics that have developed over the past century.
To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.
eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean:
* Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up procedures and checking that they live up to them.
* Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'.
* Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its course.
* To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised which interfere with legitimate business to some extent; everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that police should just arbitrarily let this go).
In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's board which may well be excessive.
Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-esques out there. None of them would be any good at that point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to all of them.
But already go free, there is staggering ammount of fraud, counterfeit, stolen and illegal goods on Ebay.
Their system is more like "10,000 criminals who go free, 15 random people get banned and the person who wrote the algorythm get a raise and no-one measures the amount of crime or gives a shit"
I suspect most of these companies have no real idea what their false positive rate is.
As someone with almost a decade of experience in the criminal justice system in the USA, it is pretty much the exact opposite. Of the dozens of prosecutors I know, I can't think of a single one that would care if someone is innocent of the crime for which they are charged.
People go to court for murder yes but they also go for smaller things like a neighbour's tree causing property damage. The cost are different.
Companies that force users to give up the ability to sue need to provide an alt system.
"Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars"
This is not how things work outside of tv and talk radio. 1/3 of people in jail are innocent. Cops being sure doesn't make a fact true. Everyone has different priorities and cops are extremely good at jumping to simple answers because this is in their collective interest.
Selling things where you need the perfect partner are not things that sell well through an auction. An auction is 7 days where you hope to get many people interested in your unique product. An obsolete computer is better on a shelf with a price tag available all year until it sells.
If you want something old school web 1.0, https://www.car-part.com/ for junk yard parts.
> To live up to that statement, society pays. … As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'.
Aren't you describing a cost that is alleviated by (allegedly) making sure that the innocent aren't imprisoned, or, rather, a cost that would be borne if the legal system made sure to imprison those whom "the cops are 80% sure" were guilty?
I think part of the problem is that even if eBay is willing to spend a lot more money on this process, everyday buyers will blame them whenever something goes wrong and just stop using it altogether. Basically, they want to be seen as an alternative to Amazon and don't want buyers to ever think about risk. The sophisticated users are already aware of it and are very skeptical, but the newer users who never read or leave reviews make them money too.
eBay can try to make people whole who claim to be defrauded. But in addition to being expensive that creates its own perverse incentives.
In the past few years, EBay has gotten very good at being pro-buyer (which is good for me). I can think of 2 transactions in the last 3 years that were “enough not as described” for me to bother to complain. In both instances, the sellers immediately offered something reasonable and we all moved on with our lives. (I think both sellers were clueless as to the defects, being high-volume churners of resold tech.)
It might be the case that EBay is more buyer friendly than Amazon at this point.
I dislike Paypal as a company and they do a lot of shitty things but the benefit to me using their services is tangible.
Honestly even sites like Aliexpress and Banggood have always resolved issues to my satisfaction once a dispute has been filed.
Imagine if our justice system had to operate at a profit.
eBay isn't operating as a democratically endowed, taxpayer-funded operation for the public commonwealth. They're just a company trying to make a buck. It turns out, if you want to make a buck by providing market-making services to third parties, you become a huge magnet for scams and fraud. And you need to deal with that. This is how it works.
If you really got what you seem to want, it would be a government-regulated online market. And... let's be honest, that would probably be much worse for the buyers (who are the targets of fraud, remember) than eBay ever has been.
It is absolutely the same thing.
Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true techniques never come into question.
And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence against you.
eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.
So it returns back to the evidence being hidden and parallel construction being used to present the court case.
If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug, you can't even get that far.
[admittedly that challenge happened in a different state than the guesstimation state. I don't even bother to challenge in the guesstimation state because you're basically fucked no matter what.]
The judge's explanation to me was that any offense without possible jail time are held to preponderance of the evidence and constitutional rights such as 5th amendment are revoked.
I've also been called to show up in a 'Mayors court' for speeding where the mayor who is the cousin of the cop oversees your case. Good luck with that; the ACLU has actually done a pretty extensive documentation on Mayor's courts and the corruption involved there.
As is probably intuitive, the process that is "due" for taking property, which is less than is "due" for taking liberty, which is still somewhat less than is "due" for taking life. (This latter hasn't always been the case, but read Brennan's concurrence in Furman v. Georgia and progeny cases establishing the death-is-different axiom of American criminal jurisprudence.)
A property interest that doesn't implicate any liberty interest may be taken with a bare minimum of due process, often just notice and an opportunity to be heard. If a hearing is granted, the standard is a preponderance (not beyond a reasonable doubt).
I assume the penalty for your speeding ticket was a fine only, yes?
Personally I disagree that property doesn't implicate liberty. I toiled for hours, perhaps days to pay these fines. I was deprived of liberty for however long I was forced to labor to pay the fine. Also it's worth noting the citation itself was filed against me specifically, not my property. This is in contrast to something like 'US vs $500 on a dashboard.'
But yes I do understand the legal system treats these cases distinctly.
So just think of the fine as a forced liquidation, so it's back to property again.
Companies can give the exact reason for a ban at least, without disclosing the methods of deduction. There is absolutely no reason to hide this information.
Such a behavior of companies is a big "f*ck you" to democracy and justice, not to criminals. It's exactly how totalitarianism looks like.
Ofcourse it does, a corporation is a totalitarian organisation by design - I don't understand why anyone is surprised to learn this. Any disobedience or herecy and you are removed with prejudice.
Anti-fraud is basically all smoke and mirrors; if you reveal the methods it doesn't work any more.
If Ebay gave a credit report-style summary saying "you're banned because you're associated with this IP range" or something, then indeed this becomes information that would be exploited by fraudsters. If OP is actually innocent then their being banned is considered an acceptable risk.... one can only hope that in future model training though that this ban would be considered a false positive.
> Yep. OP's only real recourse is to just try again in 6 months or a year or whatever and hope that their ML algorithm evaluates their data differently.
And what change their identity? They already have their PII and banned them for life.
I would like to dispute this. Of course, there is a cat-and-mouse game between popular online services and fraudsters, but the argument "if we show you the methods we use to spot them, they won't become effective" is a flawed argument. Sure, it helps a little, but after some time many of these just become public knowledge anyway.
I know if I like too many photos on Instagram, they will block me temporarily, and if I repeat it within certain period, they can ban me for a few days and so on. Having these thresholds and other rules spelled out would be helpful to users. They would know what to avoid, and if they misbehave, they can be rightfully punished. Giving blows out of the thin air is simply unfair.
At least in your IG example the ban is finite. I don't want the law to be used so bluntly but I'd really prefer if all bans had to be time limited, even if only technically where due to exponential scaling for repeat offenses the time exceeds expected human lifespans.
It would be far more helpful to spammers, who could then set all their bots to send threshold - 1 likes and invitations than the average user who rarely ever considers liking enough stuff to trigger it (and is able to take the hint and just not like stuff as much if they do get a warning). Plus in practice it's probably not just a simple threshold, but a function weighted by timing and topics and relatedness of accounts and which is completely unintelligible to the average person (but potentially informative to more advanced spambot developers).
Before bug bounty programs this was the reason given for not disclosing security issues. All it did was keep the issues underground not fixed and allowed security bugs to exist forever.
Doesn't this argument apply to the criminal justice system?
What your proposing is to screw consumers overall in order to provide fairer treatment for the unlucky few due to ebay having to charge much higher fees in order to cover the cost of fraudsters.
Since buying and selling goods and services online is not a constitutional right, or any right anywhere as far as I know, a proposal to force such a change does not seem like it will pass muster in a serious court of law.
I'm not a lawyer but even to my untrained eye you will need far better arguments to get any traction.
1) It's a private company, they can refuse service to anyone for any reason - this is spelled out in the TOS:
> If we believe you are abusing eBay and/or our Services in any way, we may, in our sole discretion and without limiting other remedies, limit, suspend, or terminate your user account(s) and access to our Services, delay or remove hosted content, remove any special status associated with your account(s), remove, not display, and/or demote listings, reduce or eliminate any discounts, and take technical and/or legal steps to prevent you from using our Services.
> Additionally, we reserve the right to refuse, modify, or terminate all or part of our Services to anyone for any reason at our discretion.
2) There is a mandatory arbitration clause in the TOS so you can't take them to court.
> You and eBay each agree that any and all disputes or claims that have arisen, or may arise, between you and eBay (or any related third parties) that relate in any way to or arise out of this or previous versions of the User Agreement, your use of or access to our Services, the actions of eBay or its agents, or any products or services sold, offered, or purchased through our Services shall be resolved exclusively through final and binding arbitration, rather than in court.
I don't like it but that's how it is. For some reason no one - right, left or center - seems interested in regulating these things.