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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

Due process? Tell me you’ve never read the Terms and Conditions without telling me. You don’t have a legal right to anything on Facebooks servers. Just because you invest effort and time into something doesn’t mean you have a right or ownership. You aren’t squatting on Facebook’s land. They just haven’t forced you off yet.

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In some countries you have legal rights to information collected about you. This can include information collected by social media sites. Just because Facebook has a forced arbitration agreement in their TOS doesn't mean it's valid everywhere, especially in countries that nullify those clauses. The same goes with information collection clauses. Laws supercede terms of services.

And personally, while I don't mind users being able to be banned for harassing users, I do think everyone, including trolls, should have the right to information collected about them and their account

It’s valid in the UK where this person is limited to their rights. Sure people should have right to information collected about themselves but a lot of countries don’t extend that right. Perhaps in a different reality or in 10-15 years time things will change. Not while Zuck is sucking people dry of their data and people use Facebook because they see identity as a valid reason to give up their freedoms so they can sell something to someone they’ll never communicate with again.

Perhaps in a different reality or in 10-15 years time things will change

germany is neither a different reality, nor does it live in the future. but it provides a real example of a place where things already changed.

Not for people in the UK where it matters. Yes I understand hypotheticals and navel gazing at Germany’s data laws. That doesn’t make them more real or possible for this incident.

Sounds nice but the UK doesn’t benefit in regards to laws from another country.

this person doesn't benefit, but the country does. people could demand a change based on the german example. i don't know how likely that is to happen now, but some time ago the UK used to be part of the EU, which means there was a time when such a change would have been quite likely actually.

Sure, that could have happened. I’m not going to argue whether something hypothetically probable is possible.

the german federal cartel office forced for example amazon to change their terms and conditions so that they may no longer arbitrarily close accounts. account closures also must include a reason. further german users can now sue against closures in germany.

so yes, companies can not arbitrarily ignore due process in their term and conditions

Well this person lives in the UK where such protections do not extend so I do not see such relevance to this topic. I would also be curious to find out if there is a difference between “account closed” and “account disabled indefinitely”.

the point is that it doesn't have to be that way. and the examples in other countries show that it is indeed not like that everywhere. it is a fair question to ask which way is better, and looking at other ways to respond to these cases is relevant in my opinion.

It doesn’t have to be that way but it is and won’t be anything different until many variables change. As far as this case is concerned: no there is and never will be due process for this situation nor does any UK law allow for that.

Maybe the user could make an argument in court that Facebook was hurting his business but hard to prove with a free service. No real harm has come to this person.

losing access to a number of customers is a real harm and actually quite easy to prove. the service being free has nothing to do with it.

Usually a “losing access to customers” argument is tied to loss of capital to make the argument stick. It is harder to tie a customer to loss of capital in a free service. Especially a free service that isn’t the only offering.

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