| It feels really crummy to be accused and convicted of an "offense" by an algorithm, especially without any recourse. I once had my account with a major cloud provider terminated for "violating our terms of service". After contacting support, they then claimed that someone had gained access to my credentials. What evidence did they have? None. I just updated a VM's metadata too frequently (about once a minute). This tripped an ML model, which caused them to automatically terminate my account and send an automated email saying that I had been a bad boy. This took down a key part of my business for about 5 hours (while I navigated my way through layers of customer support and ultimately temporarily moved this functionality to another cloud provider). Customers were not happy. It took about 2 weeks and multiple support tickets for the full story to come out. I got them to refund a few months of charges (amounted to several hundred dollars at the time) and restore my account. There was never any recognition that they made a mistake. I get that companies need to resort to automated means to handle fraud or abuse. But they should also own up to it, add some humility in their automated outreach to customers ("our automated system has detected possible X" instead of "you are guilty"), provide clear escalation paths to talk to a human, and provide a way to "shield" your account (identity verification, upfront deposit of $X, etc) that forces them to contact you before any enforcement action. In my case, I upgraded to a paid support plan ($100+ per month) in the hopes that their system will be a little less trigger happy with my account in the future. I don't use support at all, it's purely a lame form of insurance that may or may not actually protect against anything. |
With respect to Facebook: I posted a shop vac last April for $50. I got a message that I was banned from using marketplace for "violating community guidelines."
However, if you believe this happened in error, you could request a review.
So I did! And was denied. I did this process a few more times and each time was denied. Once I requested a review for the third (or fourth?) time, I received a message that said "Unfortunately, your account cannot be reinstated due to violating community guidelines. The review is final."
I have no idea what happened.
So now, I can't use Facebook Marketplace because of some stupid error in their algorithm that can't be ever appealed. Which is a bummer, because I've legitimately found some good electronic finds on there (and have been able to offload things I don't have use for).
Meanwhile, their algorithms for advertising and marketing useless stuff to us are just perfect. A passage from Yuval Noah Harari's book, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" highlights this:
> A recent study commissioned by Google’s nemesis – Facebook – has indicated that already today the Facebook algorithm is a better judge of human personalities and dispositions than even people’s friends, parents and spouses. The study was conducted on 86,220 volunteers who have a Facebook account and who completed a hundred-item personality questionnaire.
> The Facebook algorithm predicted the volunteers’ answers based on monitoring their Facebook Likes – which webpages, images and clips they tagged with the Like button. The more Likes, the more accurate the predictions. The algorithm’s predictions were compared with those of work colleagues, friends, family members and spouses.
> Amazingly, the algorithm needed a set of only ten Likes in order to outperform the predictions of work colleagues. It needed seventy Likes to outperform friends, 150 Likes to outperform family members and 300 Likes to outperform spouses. In other words, if you happen to have clicked 300 Likes on your Facebook account, the Facebook algorithm can predict your opinions and desires better than your husband or wife!