[kevin_thibedeau]

This is precisely what would have happened if Apple had gotten away with their distributed image hashing scheme. Only in that case the falsely accused would be sent immediately through the justice system and forced to spend a fortune to defend themselves on the assumption that they were hiding the evidence.

[3ln00b]

Already happened with me, my Amazon account is essentially locked. I changed my phone number and don't have access to my old number anymore and the existing number is apparently associated with some other Amazon account so they can't do anything about it. I stopped using Amazon altogether, I just request my brother to order stuff I want.

[zo1]

I know it's small, but want to point out another thing Amazon bait and switched (not exactly related to your comment, but I guess it needs to be shared). We ordered Amazon Kids tablets few years back (they're actually awesome and super well-priced for 3rd-world regions) and had them shipped overseas, linked to my Amazon account, etc, all working fine.

Then after some update to the "Amazon Family Parents Centre" App, they moved all parental access control off the device itself, and onto an "app" or "website". Not only that, but they blocked access to this website to anyone not in the USA region. So now, it's impossible to make any parental changes to these devices for the kids' accounts. They essentially bricked my two, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands of Amazon Kids tablets, for anyone not blessed to have any means of setting an American address into your Amazon account.

The support people knew about this problem, were very helpful and did their darnedest to help me bypass this restriction within the realm of what they're allowed to do and say. But the end-result was basically: You need a US-based address, or phone number and to change your billing address to this USA region. I kindly told them to give feedback on their ticket/system/team-lead/whatever, and then gave up. Devices are useless now, and next purchase will be for something way more open or, at the very least, not subject to stupid region-locking rules that I thought we moved away from 15 years ago.

[lazide]

VPNs (if not detected by their system) are also very helpful for this.

[kelnos]

> I stopped using Amazon altogether, I just request my brother to order stuff I want.

So... you didn't stop using Amazon altogether.

[waihtis]

the modern consumer in a nutshell: you can effectively ban them from your platform and they will still weasel their way back through the tiniest crack in the system. That chinese counterfeit junk amazon sells is just too lucrative

[TeMPOraL]

What else can they do? Check out from life? Or bankrupt themselves on principle?

Honestly, fuck on-line platforms and their arbitrary bans. In meatspace, you can't be just banned from a store, or a store chain, not without a criminal record at least. Sure, user accounts are governed by vendors' ToS, and any store can ban you from their loyalty card program for any reason, but off-line, those are all incidentals not required for completing a purchase. On-line, identity, security, and optional marketing crap got bundled together into a single "account". It's a historical accident that needs to get corrected, possibly by regulatory means, to harmonize it with the general expectation that the store can't refuse you service for extra-legal reasons.

[waihtis]

I'd get this sentiment if it was some super critical piece of living a fulfilling life, but amazon is a junk store which makes the whole situation absurd to begin with

[TeMPOraL]

There are only so many places you can order stuff on-line locally, to save on non-food products more expensive or downright unavailable locally. Interfacing with individual vendor and their bespoke system for each purchase gets cognitively exhausting quickly - a major reason why people prefer those large marketplaces. And then, it's not just Amazon. Adopting such policies is becoming a trend parallel to centralization. Amazon alone may not be "super critical piece of living a fulfilling life", but getting banned by it and a few more large companies (Google, in particular), and you may lose some critical things (at least critical in immediate term).

[olivermuty]

I don’t get why you get downvoted on this comment. Anyone buying from Amazon should realize they are buying from Temu in a trenchcoat, filling the pockets of an immoral man who treats his warehouse workers like chattel.

I have bought from amazon exactly once in four years now, because a vendor (a chinese one!) has Amazon as the only outlet where they provide warranty because they are plagued with counterfeits and bootleggers.

I find that fact for a chinese reseller so incredibly ironic. These guys are good people tho, bunch of gamers making the pinnacle of controllers for pc gaming with mouse clicker buttons and whatnot.

Shoutout to Playdigi Apex :D (no affiliation / economic insentive)

[codetrotter]

I don’t find any Playdigi Apex, but I find Flydigi Apex. Is that the one?

https://www.amazon.com/PC-Controller-Feedback-Force-Adjustab...

And how different is it from for example this one, which under half the price and looks like it has a better rating?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY83CL2D

[olivermuty]

There you are at the crux of the issue. You can’t trust amazon ratings at all :(

But you are completely right btw, it was indeed flydigi and not playdigi. And the one you linked is unknown to me.

I bought the Flydigi one after a very in depth review by this guy: https://youtu.be/WwQ4Q1mgyik?si=knLgDsqsyELq0B_t

[aussieguy1234]

I have an esim on my phone which has its own number.

I only turn it on if some services asks for a phone number so I don't have to give my main number.

Its on a cheap yearly plan, very low data and calls included but I won't be using these.

[hypercube33]

I'd like to know more. My partner and I were discussing how online bans are unjust and permanent now everywhere. Just feels weird when the Internet we grew up with basically anything went and bans were maybe hours. I get the motivation for it but also feels like the world didn't learn lessons thousands of years old as well.

[lazide]

It’s not that they couldn’t learn those lessons, it’s that the system makes learning those lessons a bad idea (in the short term).

It’s the same thing that happened with ‘08, etc. The market can stay irrational far longer than you can stay solvent, so in most cases it makes (short term) sense to just be irrational with everyone else.

[aussieguy1234]

Its with a different partner to my main one, one of the cheapest phone providers in Australia.

I simply signed up and scanned the QR code they gave me to set up the esim. In settings I have it turned off all the time to save battery and its only turned on if its needed to sign up for services.

[seanthemon]

History rhymes

[unixhero]

But get a burner phone and set up a new account then???

[3ln00b]

That was a burner phone number and they're illegal in my country now.

[esperent]

I travel quite a bit and in most countries I'm required to show my passport to get a sim card. However, in several countries I've bought at least 4 or 5 sim cards by now (non tourist sims I mean) so there doesn't seem to be a limit on how many numbers you can have, they just want each number to be linked to a real person.

Of course it may be different in some countries, but it's worth checking to be sure.

[literalAardvark]

No they're not.

Like, sure, you might need to register your name on it, but that doesn't influence the outcome of signing up for Amazon with it.

[theshrike79]

Nope, Apple's system was based on a list of KNOWN CSAM hashes, not some AI algorithm.

Also it mathematically required multiple local hits before anything would've been sent to Apple.

And even at that point an actual human would've checked the image(s) (reduced quality versions) before any action is taken.

So even if you would've managed to trigger the system multiple times on someone's phone with hash collisions that actually are pictures of kittens, the most you've done is slightly inconvenience a low-paid image checker in a cheap call center.

[BlueTemplar]

What do you mean ?

And in the actual justice system, there's a presumption of innocence.

As for platforms, that's why in the EU big ones must engage with mediators. (Though IMHO it's better to just avoid them.)

[agilob]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

[yapyap]

google actually has done this with google images & a man who needed to text his doctor (sensitive) images

[scblock]

Citation needed.

[ketzo]

The NYT published a very well-reported case (two cases, actually) of Google doing this more than two years ago. This is not a hypothetical -- this is already happening.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

[alexey-salmin]

A possibility of loosing access to a 20 years old Google account is quite disturbing. I know it's possible to setup a sync of Google drive to a local NAS, I wonder if the same can be done with Gmail archives. Then there's a problem of loosing access to all linked accounts on other services. What can be done about those, switching them to Proton mail.preemptively? Life without SSO is annoying.

[dotancohen]

I personally access my Gmail account through Thunderbird. My entire history, dating to April 2004, is in there.

[lazide]

Google.com/takeout

It will dump your Gmail data into a mbox file, which is reasonably well supported.

[romwell]

> I wonder if the same can be done with Gmail archives.

That's called "using an email client" to access email.

The way it originally worked, you know, and still does[1].

I use Vivaldi browser, which has a built-in mail client[2]. You can use Mozilla Thunderbird[3], or (gasp) Outlook.

All of them allow you to maintain a complete, offline, up-to-date copy of your mailbox, which you can export and back up if needs be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protoc...

[2] https://vivaldi.com/features/mail/

[3] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

[pbhjpbhj]

When my account was closed by an ISP, Thunderbird (unexpectedly for me) mirrored the lack of access to the IMAP folders and deleted all my local mail. Fortunately this was a temporary issue that I was able to recover from.

Apps like imap-backup (https://github.com/joeyates/imap-backup) allow retaining IMAP data.

In short, don't rely on TB to retain IMAP data, (like Dropbox) it is not a backup and IME will sync data losses, deleting local data if it is no longer accessible on the server.

Take care.

[romwell]

>When my account was closed by an ISP, Thunderbird (unexpectedly for me) mirrored the lack of access to the IMAP folders and deleted all my local mail. Fortunately this was a temporary issue that I was able to recover from.

This is absolutely ridiculous of Thunderbird.

That said:

1. As you said, like Dropbox, it's a local mirror, not a backup. Someone gaining access to your email and mass-deleting everything would delete your local copy too. A an actual backup of Thunderbird mail files would accomplish a backup.

2. Did your ISP somehow allow Thunderbird to log into the mailbox and gave it empty content? Or did they delete content before killing IMAP sessions? If so, it's outright malicious. Otherwise, Thunderbird shouldn't have deleted anything.

3. Having an always-on desktop box with a mail client that gets all email once a week is a lazy way to decrease the chances of being affected by something like that. Having a script that copies mailbox data into another folder (named according to date) is, well, an actual backup.

[calgoo]

You can setup a forwarder that sends the email to another account, or just use a sync / download script/app.