Seems insane. Surely every single company would fire you for doing that. If you put this in its proper term it is "corruption" and you should definitely worry about the legal implications of doing this.
These are highly skilled, highly profitable companies. If they’re not doing something, chances are they don’t wanna do it rather than incompetence
Isn't modern big tech always saying that employees should shut up and focus on the numbers / delighting users?
maximizing revenue != maximizing benefit for customer and/or society
Corporations' business model have not being long term sustainable, most of them have being off setting the hidden cost to environment, tax payers and general public for quite sometimes. Not event sure they can actually delighting users and make money at the same time.
Of course they can, they just have to settle for single-digit $billion yearly profits instead of double or triple-digit ones. Unacceptable!
The underlying issue is "it costs money to have people doing this, and we don't lose any money by not having people doing it."
My guess is that the site will see a burst of activity where corporate security departments successfully bait employees into breaking the law / company policy, and word will get around pretty fast that you will get fired and possibly charged with a crime...
...and then the companies will sue the site owner, citing all the employees they baited.
Someone who genuinely deserves the suspension (e.g. posts illegal content) will use the service. They'll get their suspension lifted because the company trusts the internal employee who filled out the form. Said person will continue to post illegal content and be suspended again. Enough true negatives like this and eventually the company will discover the employee is using their authority to let in randos. If the company is smart, they mark accounts that have been lifted by internal employees, so they will discover the first time it happens.
The best probable scenario for this is that said employee gets fired. Presumably, the company trusts said employee knows who they are vetting because they are risking their job; and I'm confident they would not be happy knowing they are using this service. But the worst is that the company stops allowing all internal employees from filling out forms for anyone.
At the very least, if this site is a joke, it should put up a disclaimer that indicates such. Not just a disclaimer to vet the rando, because I doubt an internal employee can do so any better than the customer support can. It should actively remove functionality like sending or publicing emails so that posters and developers can't actually use it to contact each other and exchange money.
But if the person is posting illegal or very graphic content, and the company knows you unbanned them, I think it would raise questions like "how do you know this person" or "what made you trust them?". Which you'll have trouble answering if all you have is their name, email, and the sparse information they gave for why they should be unbanned. You'll argue "this person hid that side of themselves from everyone" but at minimum it calls your judgment into question, and if the company is aware of this kind of service, they'll probe for more information.
Also if someone uses this service repeatedly disguising themselves as different people, it will raise questions why different internal employees kept unbanning them. That would be much more suspicious.
This absolutely happens. As an example: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/man-fired-stop-kidnapping/
"You were employed by The Home Depot until June 19, 2017 when you were fired because you assisted the police in preventing a kidnapping."
Filling out a form to request another team review an account is entirely different. No one is physically interacting, and the company clearly has a sanctioned happy path for this request.
> according to Reagan, he was at work on 12 May 2017 when a co-worker told him he saw a man attack a woman in the parking lot. Reagan said he heard the woman scream: "Somebody help me, he's kidnapping my kid, he's stealing my kid!" Reagan told us he then contacted police, who instructed him to follow the man as he left the store area: "They said, don't touch him, don't engage with him, but keep an eye on him. Let us know where he is going so we know where to go when we get there."
> Reagan said that after returning to the store he was scolded by a supervisor and was fired four weeks later.
Physical intervention didn't occur.
when the situation involves the police, I'd imagine the situation is different. Hence why he was reinstated after blowback. This isn't an employee tackling a violent customer (which should be allowed, but I digress).
If "leadership" gave no reason for the termination or simply said "you left the campus on company hours (outside of break)", they would have been slightly more in the clear (unless the employee sued, of course. That would have been an interesting lawsuit).
So yes, they got fired, but it was a mistake. Certainly drawing attention to yourself may attract more mistakes than blending in, but it works out in the end. (The difference, probably, is that FAANG employees have a little more breathing room than Home Depot employees after not getting a week's worth of pay.)
Come to think of it, a friend of mine got mistakenly fired recently. They totaled her vacation hours wrong, saw that it was over some limit, and just fired her on the spot. I told her to call HR and appeal and they admitted the mistake and rehired her. She then got a higher paying job at a competitor since she was free for interviews for a couple days. So... it happens all the time.
If someone is being kidnapped and you can help safely, take the chance!
Not to mention it is like any crime - not like murders intentionally get caught either, but they still do.
That would be a positive outcome.
The two-tier system is bullshit and creates a bubble that further insulates companies/employees from feedback about broken processes, because everyone in their social graph is exempt.
Far better they have to deal with friends telling them how bad the public appeal process is.
I don't know why you think people who deserve to be suspended would be reinstated. You act as if these people have no agency or discretion as to what accounts to reinstate.
"Personally knows an employee of the company" is a strong signal that a person is not a bot, and may be more likely to be a decent person, because they are capable of maintaining enough of a relationship with an employee that the employee is willing to do something for them. The employee has already been vetted as trustworthy.
So that signal will apply to the first few people applying through this service.
Then some employees will get fired, the signal/noise ratio of internal requests changes, and employees can no longer get accounts reinstated via internal forms like this.
Basically this service will cause a brief spike in illegitimate accounts being reactivated, and then we will arrive at a new status quo that is strictly worse than the current one.
The existing problem is that moderators aren't given enough time to investigate whether suspensions are legitimate, so there are enormous false positives. You can't expect much accuracy out of a decision made under excessive time pressure.
If someone is instead receiving e.g. hundreds of dollars, they can spend more time to get it right. Meanwhile getting it wrong could get them in trouble at work, so they have the incentive to be careful.
Companies could do this themselves -- charge a fee for appeals -- except that it would be bad PR to make innocent people pay a non-trivial sum of money to fix the company's mistake.
This would give the company a way to launder the fee through a third party while still reducing their other PR problem when they ruin peoples' lives through false positives.
If not, why do you think this will be the first one?
That feels like a good outcome to me. "I know a guy" should not be a reason to get preferential treatment. As much as I'm sure it absolutely sucks to lose an account on most of these services, I'd rather they stay lost for everyone, rather than get reinstated for people who happen to have connections.
I.e. a practice universally frowned upon?
I imagine they're aware of this. The FAQ section states that employees are kept anonymous, but also says they verify if it's really a Google employee by sending an email to their google.com email address, which Google can of course see.
"What's really your favorite band, then?"
"Beatles, I guess."
Bonus points for sending similar emails to random @company.com addresses so receiving the email alone doesn’t suggest involvement.
If you're salary, then that doesn't enter into the equation.
On the other hand, after I left, I once needed help with a developer-facing page that was broken. For the life of me I could not figure out how to get in touch with a human, so reached out to an ex-colleague and the issue was resolved within a few days. I don't love having to resort to this for many reasons.
I.e. improving documentation, drawing attention to edge cases, etc.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/14/facebook-oops-special-employ...
Accessing anyone other than yourself's personal data, including immediate family, is also grounds for immediate dismissal. After all, stalking and domestic abuse occur primarily within the family.
It's effectively a black market that formed because the official channels abdicated from their responsibilities or provide a terrible service even to paying customers, at least SMBs who aren't big enough for a Google to care.
Yep. Absurd and completely common. There is pretty much no one to reach out to otherwise. Lost an account with several thousand dollars in it this way. I consider this straight up theft, and it's been like this for a long time.
I’m not trying to be dismissive, but just go search online for google support threads of people dealing with the exact same issue I had - it’s common and no amount of lol law is going to deal with it short of serious consequences. A thousand individuals suing for a thousand dollars isn’t going to move that needle, like at all.
This is strange to me in that you're implying there is actually staff. Are you actually having a human employed by Google acting in the role of support that cannot help solve the issue?
That is exactly what happened to my coworker.
She bought a Pixel phone from the Google Store and it got lost in shipping. Shipment tracking showed it arriving at the carrier's hub and never leaving for a month.
She called customer service and the first tier workers followed a script that was essentially "apologize and ask the customer to check back later".
After many missed "it should start moving again by $DATE" promises, she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 2 workers. They said they had the ability to create a replacement order, but there was no available inventory in the phone color she had originally ordered. They also had no answer about how to prevent a possible replacement order from shipping the same way and potentially getting stuck.
Finally she was able to get the case escalated to Tier 3 support. The tier 3 worker created a replacement order with an upgraded phone compared to the original order and ensured it would ship from a different warehouse than the original order that got lost.
All this took six weeks and many frustrating hours on the phone for her. And this was for an order directly from the Google Store website.
of which party in this problem? seems like contacting the carrier would have been more productive. contacting Googs about a delayed package seems like the wrong direction to follow. i realize this verges on victim blaming, but just trying to suggest other methods of problem solving.
They did not choose how the package would be shipped, which carrier would be used, or pay the carrier to ship it.
All of those decisions and the payment to the carrier were made by the seller (Google), not the customer. Thus Google had all responsibility in ensuring the shipment reached the customer.
If Google had failed to pay the carrier the correct shipping cost, or had packed the box poorly such that the item was damaged in transit, would it be the customer's fault?
Similarly, if the carrier mishandled the package and it was lost or arrived damaged, would it be the customer's fault?
The customer deals with the seller whom they paid, not with third-parties. If the seller took the money they ensure the customer gets what they paid for or they lose reputation and go out of business.
The capitalist way of looking at that would be they maximally decreased the market price of their service, and the bribery is simply accounting for externalities that you weren't paying for in that market price.
Or in other words, bribery is their support-funding model.
If you [say] didn't buy the passport it is only fair to put you in prison? $20 000 is much more value for money than you think!
Microsoft at its worst had insanely good enterprise level support.
Even small business owners had access to paid premium support options, and if the issue you reported turned out to be a product bug, the support costs were refunded.
For your vision to be a reality there needs to be significant tax on monopolies and no company should be allowed to become a trillion dollar company. Taxes & Regulations FTW.
you have 5 equal companies producing widgets. One of the companies has their building near a freeway, and one day a fully loaded truck crashes through a railing and impacts their building, causing a fire and lots of damage. Sure, they have insurance or whatever, but that company's customers don't care about that, they needed those widgets this week. Luckily one of the other four companies has them in stock and they can fill their order elsewhere. That company they filled the order with now has more capital, perhaps they hire a new employee or buy additional tools or machines. Now they can out-compete the other four, for whatever reason, QC, price, etc. The former company might be unable to keep up with the 3+1 other companies on the same playing field, so may sell to one of the other four, but only the latter company in the above example may have the money available to buy.
This is all simplified and nitpicking what i am saying is futile, because the point is - it doesn't matter how many companies are competing, nothing is in equilibrium, and this doesn't even get in to active sabotage or espionage. A lucky company will buy an unlucky company. Eventually you'll end up with 3 or fewer companies when there used to be dozens or even hundreds.
The end goal of a company is to be like Samsung, General Electric, Sony, etc - make everything, sell everything, own everything. A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!
I don't have a solution, because there is a compelling argument to be made for huge companies being able to provide superior quality, price, whatever because of scales of economy, and it just takes one bright lawyer at a multinational to say "but if you break us up it will accelerate climate change because of x, y, z issues we have solved by fact of owning everything!"
Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this, but that would require global cooperation. I think the upside that things would gradually become more affordable would be a good selling point - if all companies are operating with the understanding the shareholders, owners, etc have a hard ceiling on how much value they can extract from the endeavor...
Your assumption is that companies can be destroyed but not created, which isn't true. The way prevent monopolies, then, is to make it as easy as possible to create new companies. There is no monopoly if five new companies are created for every two the incumbent buys or destroys.
> Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this
This has really nothing to do with it. Google is a public company. It could easily be just as big without any single individual owning more than $10M in shares.
> A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!
and i disagree that a company can get as big as google if everyone involved was wealthcapped at $10mm. There'd be no real reason to seek ever-higher profits, especially if every company was forced to abide these rules.
as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits? I don't actually think it's weird. It is telling. I bet it's supply and demand, though.
As it is many of these companies are predominantly owned by index funds and pension funds, i.e. the retirement savings of ordinary people, with a net worth of e.g. $200,000 rather than $10,000,000. But they'd rather it be $250,000, wouldn't they? So the incentive remains.
> as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits?
That's not weird, it's how supply and demand works. When demand is higher than supply, anyone who can provide supply makes a lot of money. That's the incentive for anyone who can to increase the amount of supply they can provide, until the price comes back down and increasing supply is no longer profitable.
But OPEC is a cartel, and cartels artificially constrain supply. This is why monopolies are bad.
The market incentive is that everyone other than the monopolist will want to take the monopolist's market share. The monopolist, in turn, captures the government and uses "Taxes & Regulations" to ensure that random small businesses can't enter the market and take their market share.
We have progressive taxation. That doesn't matter because fixed costs are fixed.
If it costs $30,000/year to live, someone who makes $30,000/year will accumulate no wealth even if you tax them at 0%, because all of their income is going to food and rent and utilities. Whereas someone who makes a billion dollars a year will accumulate wealth even if you tax them at 90%, because the remaining 10% is still a hundred million dollars and after you subtract out $30,000, or even $250,000, there is still nearly the entire hundred million dollars left. Then that hundred million dollars collects interest every year going forward.
Trying to use taxation also ignores that the problem isn't actually billionaires. Corporations have more money than any individual, but the largest ones are publicly traded, so that would still be the case even if no individual shareholder had a lot of wealth. Because the corporation would, and its executives would thereby be in control of those resources and use them to capture the government.
It also ignores that you don't have to be a single entity to capture the government. For example, many professional licensing requirements purposely take a long time to satisfy (e.g. multi-year apprenticeship requirements) to create barriers to entering those trades. Not because General Electric wants to limit the supply of electricians, but because local electricians do, and together they represent a significant voting block. Landlords and homeowners capture zoning boards to inhibit housing construction, not because any of them individually have a monopoly, but because they all want housing prices to go up at the expense of people outside the local jurisdiction who have been priced out of the local area by the zoning restrictions and thereby don't get a vote.
> If you look away for a second, there is going to be some corporation trying to re-write the tax code or do away with regulations.
Why is it that the largest corporations and most corrupt organizations are the ones asking for regulations? DMCA 1201 wasn't enacted out of popular demand. The National Association of Realtors hasn't been lobbying to relax zoning rules. The telcos are the ones who want those laws prohibiting anybody from competing with them. Certificate of Need laws don't exist for the benefit of the public.
Corrupt regulations don't exist because of oversized corporations, oversized corporations exist because of corrupt regulations. If the megacorps didn't exist, all it would take is for some small organization with contacts to a powerful legislator to get something snuck into a bill, and soon the small organization is a megacorp with the power to keep those laws on the books. There were no trillion dollar corporations in 1913 or 1791, but there was Congress, so we don't have to wonder which came first.
What you need is to constrain the legislators from passing those laws to begin with, regardless of whether they start off at the behest of a billionaire or a trade organization or just the Senator's brother-in-law.
In the US it stops at ~35. Lets go all the way to 100%.
> Then that hundred million dollars collects interest every year going forward.
The progressive capital gains taxes also need to go up to 100%.
>Corporations have more money than any individual, but the largest ones are publicly traded, so that would still be the case even if no individual shareholder had a lot of wealth. Because the corporation would, and its executives would thereby be in control of those resources and use them to capture the government.
That is why we have monopoly laws. The point isn't that corporations should not accumulate wealth, the point is that the state should not have a rival in terms of power.
>Why is it that the largest corporations and most corrupt organizations are the ones asking for regulations?
Sure, they want regulations that build a moat, they don't want regulations that reduce their wealth. I'm talking about the latter.
>What you need is to constrain the legislators from passing those laws to begin with, regardless of whether they start off at the behest of a billionaire or a trade organization or just the Senator's brother-in-law.
Yes, and campaign finance reform would reduce some of this donor/lobby culture. Fixed amount of ad-spend per candidate, no PACs, etc.
What do you think the result of that would be? Anyone who can provide value to someone else in that tax bracket couldn't be paid for it, so they'd arrange to be compensated in some other way.
The most likely way is favors. That is not likely to reduce corruption.
> The progressive capital gains taxes also need to go up to 100%.
So now you're doing one of two things. If unrealized capital gains aren't taxed until the shares are sold (as is the case now), nobody would ever sell, because all of the money would be taken as tax. If they are, you have all the problems with trying to value a capital asset which is not being traded, and on top of that then people would establish their companies as a non-profit (since they can't keep the profits anyway) and we're back to compensation as favors.
> That is why we have monopoly laws.
But how do you enforce them once there is an incumbent monopolist using its power to corrupt the system? That is the problem already, you need some solution to it.
> The point isn't that corporations should not accumulate wealth, the point is that the state should not have a rival in terms of power.
That seems like a bad thing. Then what is the check on the state if it becomes authoritarian? All concentrated power is bad, not just corporations.
> Sure, they want regulations that build a moat, they don't want regulations that reduce their wealth. I'm talking about the latter.
They're more than willing to pay their lawyers to draft something which claims to be the latter and is actually the former. That is how the majority of such regulations are enacted. They don't call it the "reduce competition in telecommunications act" now do they?
> Yes, and campaign finance reform would reduce some of this donor/lobby culture. Fixed amount of ad-spend per candidate, no PACs, etc.
This was never really the problem. The reason politicians are beholden to Google or Apple isn't just that the company buys ads, it's that the company buys ad networks, and YouTube, and chooses which apps to evict which controls what constituents see and hear. A corporation can spend money lobbying but it can just as well spend money buying a major media outlet or social media site.
What you need to do is constrain the government from having the power to pass laws that constrain competition. Because otherwise they will. Politicians will never be angels, the best they can be is the subjects of the people instead of their rulers.
The direct compensation to the employee does look a little bad, but then this isn't bribery if the employee is just doing their job. It has the appearance of impropriety but maybe not the legal force of a bribery charge, tortious interference, or similar.
It's going to be quite hard to spin this as "just doing my job" rather than "just fraudulently misusing company resources for personal gain".
Wait, no, not like that
you seem to only be thinking about one side of this, the company side. what about the endless amount of normal end users that got caught by some god awful AI, and ignored by a huge tech company and its basically non existing customer service?
No, a good company would realize that AI-based false positive account suspensions is a problem, is killing small businesses and creators in droves, and should hire more human paid employees people to take care of account suspension appeals and help reduce the false positives of the AI algorithms.
Hand an additional bonus to the employees who were willing to be the first iteration of this additional human labor and helping improve the quality of the platform.
Tongue in cheek. I like how it highlights the enshittification brought by both 1. lack of customer support and 2. by gig economy.