[lambada]

From memory I believe FAANG etc all _claim_ that appeals you lodge are reviewed by a human.

Now if you don’t believe them then you’d need to take them to court and show why you think that’s not the case.

Which I guess means my question is why don’t you believe them and how likely is it that they are lying when they claim thy appeals are reviewed by a human?

[tyingq]

There was a recent example with Google Drive where it explicitly disabled any way to appeal. I was able to reproduce the issue where it was flagging files that consisted of a single byte, sometimes followed by \r\n or \n.

Here's the HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405

Screenshots of trying to "appeal" (Request a review) from when I recreated the issue show pretty clearly there is no human involved: https://imgur.com/a/5YHQtLi

This wasn't an account ban, so I don't know how well it fits the GDPR language. Though I'd be surprised if this was somehow the only "fully automated account action" FAANG type companies are doing.

[Someone]

I don’t see how you get from Google’s statement “Was taken down for legal reasons and cannot be appealed“ to “no human was involved”.

[kelnos]

I think the point is they, based on the file content, no human could have been involved in the decision. If there was a human involved, the files never would have been flagged.

[Someone]

The discussion isn’t about the initial flagging, it’s about the review.

That might be as simple as checking for the existence of legal documents claiming copyright infringement, or as reading a web page stating “we already removed X other copies of this file”.

Neither is a fail-safe way of doing such a review, but doing a thorough review might be expensive even for Google. Does anybody know how many such reviews they do each day?

It might also be a bug on their tooling to assist human reviewers.

[kelnos]

Right, but I believe for those cases, the (automated) email also said that the ability to appeal was not available. So there is no human review, because there's no review at all.

Regardless -- and I know this is a "how the world should be, not how it is" type thing -- I really think the initial decision should not be allowed to be made by an algorithm. At the very most, an algorithm should be allowed to flag something for human review, but no action is taken until the human has a chance to review it and decide if the flag is warranted or not.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

You're assuming the human both has agency, and gives a damn. It's more likely the human just rubber-stamps all bans, to get their KPI of number of appeals processed per day up!

[saghm]

If the human doesn't have agency, then it's not really a "human review", is it?

[rat9988]

It still is.

[foxfluff]

They are required to have agency and give a damn. Of course, it is hard to (dis)prove that they actually do.

[mdoms]

That's an automated process then.

[tyingq]

Because once a human did get involved, via noise from here and twitter, Google admitted that there was a problem.

Also, just the absurdity that a human would review a file containing only "1" and decide the decision to flag it was correct.

https://twitter.com/googledrive/status/1486038872928792576

[godelski]

What's interesting is there's another user there that followed up 2 days after the tweet noting that other numbers weren't fixed. But this is ignored.

Problems shouldn't get fixed just because they got enough likes and reshares on Twitter.

[jeffbee]

Are you suggesting that Europe has established a fundamental human right to have Google provide free static hosting services?

[gpm]

No, they're suggesting that given that Google has chosen to provide free static hosting, Europe has decided they can't moderate it with purely automated systems with no appeals process.

This is like running a restaurant in the US, and not being able to discriminate by race. You're not required to run a restaurant, and certainly aren't required to run one that gives away free food, but if you are certain obligations come attached.

I'd also argue that your use of the phrase "fundamental human right" is misleading. Europe can and does require you do things for reasons other than respecting fundamental human rights. So does pretty much every other law making authority.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The EU has established that "The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her." (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/)

[Retric]

Arguably the opposite where the EU may have in effect outlawed may free services be requiring human review of many activities.

[foxfluff]

I think reading the part where they say "I don't know how well it fits the GDPR language" would answer your question.

[CodesInChaos]

I think the better question is what a "human review" entails. I assume they have some kind of "human review" in there, but no meaningful human review.

[toomuchtodo]

> Which I guess means my question is why don’t you believe them and how likely is it that they are lying when they claim thy appeals are reviewed by a human?

Why would we believe them? It's Google's responsibility to prove their assertion, versus regulators taking them for their (not so good) word. The default should be the assumption that the corporation is being dishonest.

[ben_w]

If you’re taking them (or anyone else) to court, isn’t the burden of proof on you?

[toomuchtodo]

Highly dependent on the law or regulation in question.

[BLanen]

> Reviewed by a human

Can just mean some low-paid Amazon Mechanical Turk worker clicked on "Yes".