What scares me most about all these stories and personal experience, is it often seems the only way to get these actual issues resolved is to know someone that works at the company, or have enough of a platform on the internet that eventually the cost of the bad PR gets to be enough that someone notices and fixes it.
I don't know anyone that works at Facebook/Google/Uber/etc. When I have issues they just go unresolved. Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back. (Which I'm seriously considering -- even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out.)
It would be really nice if there were companies to give my money to that did have some semblance of customer support that didn't require making friends with the right people or curating a social media following.
Knowing someone inside Google is not enough. I know because I am that someone. When I tried to help a friend whose account had been locked, my internal tickets got no response whatsoever.
Maybe if you know someone in the exactly right team but even this isn't a given. Unauthorized messing with user data gets you fired.
We were spending about a million dollars a year on AdWords. Part of Google's requirements are that we give clients access to the Ad accounts as well. One client did not have Google accounts, so we registered some for them, granted them access, and provided them to them.
Of the dozen or so accounts we set up for that client (it was a group of car dealerships under one high-level umbrella, so separate but together), one got suspended almost immediately by the accounts team.
We submitted a ticket with the accounts team regarding it, and when it was still banned a few months later I finally reached out to our contact at AdWords. She submitted a follow-up ticket with the accounts team.
By the time I left that job about 4 years later, she still had not received a response.
> Unauthorized messing with user data gets you fired.
This is actually very good to know and maybe Google should even blog about it. I end up in a lot of conversations with friends in a stalemate about Google and personal information.
When I make the argument people should be paying more for the software they use and i.e. paying Google for a GSuite account is one of the best decisions people can make.
Many people do not understand when they have a contract with Google and are paying for services, Google doesn't snoop around in personal data.
Why would you trust a company based on stalking users to not do so when their bottom-line depends on it considering they have plausibly-deniable ways to do so without getting caught? (and as the Facebook phone number fiasco proved, even if they do get caught the penalty is a slap on the wrist and can be factored in as costs of doing business)
Uber would just ban his account for life if he pulls this, most likely automatically without any effort to investigate and definitely not going to any courts.
I have done it and Uber has frozen my account until I cough up the money. It has not been a fun month.
Funny thing is, I'm in a city where Uber is fighting a competition with Lyft. I've already converted six different people with my story. Clearly customer experience and retention is not their priority...
They could, but if the court says the guy did nothing wrong after all, it would look rather bad on Uber to retaliate by banning him at that point against court's opinion and potentially opens them up for another lawsuit. Personally I don't see any business sense for Uber in doing this, unlike banning for chargebacks.
It will only look bad if that person has enough clout to make the story that visible. But most people don't which is why Uber, Facebook, Google, etc. can do whatever they want with your account and offer you absolutely no recourse. The balance of power in these relationships is tilted so much to one side that nothing short of strong regulation will help the regular user.
By look rather bad, I think they mean the next lawsuit you bring against Uber would be their malicious handling of your account.
Now a typical business can probably stop doing business with you simply because they hate you (not your 'kind', just you personally), but can Uber?
They are likely embershed in so many regulatory frameworks that require them to serve the general public fairly, that they won't be able to cut off service simply because you won a lawsuit against them.
>a typical business can probably stop doing business with you
I think any private company doesn't have the legal obligation to serve you or many of the rules that apply to public/government institutions. See Cloudflare refusing to serve right-wing extremist websites, or Youtube taking down similar videos and channels. The only justification they need is that you failed to comply with the terms and conditions of the service. The leverage some have is judging them in the court of public opinion.
Only if you can prove it. And I have to wonder if clauses that force binding arbitration are considered illegal. Plenty of big companies use(d) them even on their own employees.
Tried. They refused to reverse it since Uber actually delivered both orders. Apparently there's no dispute code they can put through to MasterCard for this (or at least they're not willing to find one).
I pointed out that by that logic if a vendor I'd done business with in the past like Amazon were, at this point, to simply charge me for and ship me a thousand books of their own volition as long as they actually delivered them they're telling me there's no recourse. They stand by it.
If you have documentation of the double charge and of your attempts to get a refund, your credit card company will certainly do a chargeback and return your funds.
A company can choose to ban you from their service for this. Uber eats, probably not an issue. But imagine the inconvenience of not having Uber for the rest of your life. Or worse, Airbnb which doesn’t even have a close competitor.
I would begrudgingly take the loss to continue having access to their marketplaces. These companies have notoriously terrible customer service and they don’t really have any reason to fix it.
Even on that article, the 2nd to last paragraph was:
> Even after a month of digging through public records, scouring the internet for clues, repeatedly calling Airbnb and confronting the man who called himself Patrick, I can’t say I’ll be leaving the platform, either. Dealing with Airbnb’s easily exploitable and occasionally crazy-making system is still just a bit cheaper than renting a hotel.
With another platform offering rentals but taking a 30% cut, a trick I found was to google the address or name, often they'd be listed there as well. Then I'd call them and ask if they have a room, and if they could offer me a discount (I was travelling around Iceland, many people doing the ringroad would just show up in the afternoon/evening and leave the next morning). Obviously this doesn't work with anonymous airbnb providers.
Counterpoint: I did multiple chargebacks against these monkeys for very similar reasons and they haven't banned my account yet, so maybe it works differently in the Europe or UK?
Just use a different card. There are services for the banned.
Besides get use to the horror of not ever using Uber when they close up shop or raise prices which is coming soon and would have come sooner if they could bankrupt lyft.
Uber certainly are more sophisticated in banning than just matching card numbers, their techniques have already been battle tested in outsmarting regulators where Uber was operating outside of local laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball
This is a point of view from someone who can afford alternatives. Taxis have long been the transport of last resort for the destitute/homeless and with Uber replacing taxis this does become a serious issue for many.
The ADA requires 'paratransit' service for persons whose disabilities prevent them from using accessible, non-commuter, fixed route bus service. In many cities paratransit is handed off to taxi services.
Most people - even those in the US - will never use Airbnb. Being unable to use their service because you did a chargeback or sued them when they overcharged you is not a real loss.
I don't use uber, or any other taxi app. Depends a lot on where you live and whether public taxis and public transport infrastructure is well developed. I can imagine this would be a nightmare in the USA, it was when I lived there pre-Uber days, waiting for a bus could take 45 mins. Out here in Asia, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong etc, there really isn't a big need for Uber, sure it's useful, but plenty of alternatives that are just as convenient.
Yeah this situation is what the dispute system is for. You complain to your bank, the bank sends that to the merchant’s acquiring bank via Visa or whatever, and then someone at Uber will take notice of your dispute in some fashion and you’ll likely eventually get your money back.
Tried. Since they actually delivered both orders it's not a "double charge" and according to my bank MasterCard's dispute process has no code to allow them to charge this back.
> What scares me most about all these stories and personal experience, is it often seems the only way to get these actual issues resolved is to know someone that works at the company
This is a self-inflicted problem and whoever suffers it had it coming.
It has been explained endlessly [1] why to avoid this kind of platforms due to their non-accountability. There are other free, reasonable, forms of communication. If somebody insists to keep using facebook/google, etc.; so bad! At best, their sad story will be useful to warn others against these predatory companies.
This sort of “if you aren’t eternally vigilant, it’s your fault” attitude is really not the way to go. People are busy and have stuff to do, places to be. Expecting everyone to read various essays on the ethics and practices of every single consumer service is unrealistic and has bad consequences.
This is kind of the principle upon which society is built. I should be able to trust that the food at the grocery store is safe for me to eat; I shouldn’t need to conduct deep research into the supply chain to ensure it won’t poison me.
Sure, I was not clear about that and this was not my intention. Of course a grand-mother with limited technological savvy is not at fault here.
However, a technical writer, and a developer, such as is the case, is not only supposed to know about facebook's callousness, but to be active explaining it. The fact that even developers use facebook as if it was a socially acceptable possibility is an extremely sad state of affairs.
I remember RMS using "victim co-perpetrator" in his piece about wearing ties. It looks to me like the perfect category for people who use hostile platforms which take advantage of network effects.
Uber charged me $95 out of nowhere and I've fought their customer service for a month without any satisfying resolution. I'm trying to delete my account but it's being blocked because I disputed the $95 charge.
For cases like Facebook or Google I have a friend who works there to sort things out, but I don't have any connection in Uber. It's so frustrating.
Dispute it with your card issuer. That's the only way to deal with such scum. Too many chargebacks will get them in trouble with their acquirer bank and threaten their ability to take payments.
It still doesn’t mean they’re immune, it will just take a ton of chargebacks before they get kicked out. I’m sure that they are tracking the metric and even a 0.1% increase in chargebacks (which is still huge considering their volume) will raise some eyebrows and make them reconsider treating their paying customers like garbage.
But how do you get there? You have to wait for some legitimately illegitimate charge and then get banned for life by invoking the chargeback, so ... how can that be scaled to impact Uber?
The only realistic shot at this is through shaming this behavior - the ability for monoliths to lock you out of large swaths of services is a serious, serious problem.
Most of us don't have personal vendettas against Uber or similar companies and want to take them down.
But if they do treat you like shit, then it should be your right (and duty) to fight back to discourage such behaviour in the future.
The goal isn't to take them down with tons of chargebacks, simply to make the chargeback rate correlate with the bad customer service. They clearly don't care about the latter but will definitely care about the former. If it does take them down however it won't be a big loss and will clear the space for a better competitor to step in.
What about asking for a chargeback if you paid via credit card?
I won a chargeback when Uber [Jump] bikes charged me $50 for riding 0.0 miles while the bike was locked.
My guess was that their LTE provider was switching between towers right near the top of Capitol Hill [Seattle] and another tower that was not line of sight. So it just ran out the clock until it hit some kind of fail safe at 3hrs or whatever and stopped. Of course there was zero notification that I was still being charged. Hopefully this is now fixed.
> Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors
Same thing happened to me. I checked twitter and reddit and easily found various other people with the same problem, so it's nothing new, Uber just doesn’t care about fixing it and would rather torture paying customers with their atrocious customer support. I've heard contacting the Uber support twitter account works better than the in-app support, but I gave up before then and issued a chargeback.
In the same situation, I received the double order. Driver said it's not his problem and take it up with Uber. From reading online stories, if you try denying the second order after it's started you will still be charged twice.
There might be a bias that people telling these stories, the ones that make it to your eyes, are more likely to be attached to the journalism and connected community.
A few months ago, someone tried to create a fake account to impersonate my mom. And long story short, somehow we couldn't get 2FA sms token to login again(which I suspect is a bug), then the account was disabled not given a reason.
We tried the process to verify it was her account, but after being asked to submit passport photo + her photo, the ticket stops progressing for the past 2 months and it has been very frustrating for us. The account has years of my mom's photo that wasn't backed up elsewhere. If there happens to be any engineer passing by that can escalate this internally, I would be much appreciated.
Facebook's "user support" is getting to the point where Google's support is looking like a sane one. At least the automated system works when it is supposed to. I got a couple of really weird behaviors trying to unlock the account: the system asked to select an item from an empty list to send 2FA code. The initial sms 2FA code that we received when the attacker tried to login somehow got wrong encoding data (utf8 vs utf16), which shows up as non sensical Chinese character.
When these free services are funded by user data, it seems ironic that... "passport photo + her photo"... more data seems to be the currency to get free customer service.
yeah, the fact that facebook locks the accounts of people who are currently incarcerated is the most interesting part of this post to me. why is that any of their business?
I always get downvoted for saying this but ... it’s getting that way. Facebook has become the primary social and contact mechanism for a large number of people. The network effects start to transcend the point where someone unelected in an office in California should get to decide who benefits from it and who doesn’t.
It actually is that way to some extent in Germany already. There were a number of court cases against them where the court forced FB to undo a ban or restore a deleted post.
Facebook monopolization of the market is not a right, either. And I think they'll find that out the hard way - sooner rather than later, precisely because they're so clearly abusive of that monopoly position.
I agree that they should have the ability to choose who uses their service and who doesn't.
it just seems like a really weird decision - the benefits of removing people who are currently incarcerated seem minimal compared to the risk of mistakenly flagging somebody.
When a service is getting to the point of universal usage, where you can't even keep contact with your friends without it, it gets close to being a right. What if you get innocently banned and all your friends are only contactable over facebook? You can't even book a time with the hairdresser because the only contact way they use is facebook?
Even if you never mistakenly flag somebody, there's still the developer cost to create the feature and maintain it. There's the cost of slower development whenever this feature interferes with another feature. And assuming it's not 100% automated (which it sounds like it's not because it sounds like both police and Callum were asked to submit papers), there's the cost of humans to manually respond to submissions.
The plea bargain system in the US pretty much guarantees a fair amount of convicted people aren't guilty of anything other than making a very tough risk management decision.
We are talking about current prisoners, not ex-convicts. Prisoners are generally not allowed to access social media outside the US, either. Are you saying that they should be, because it would help with their rehabilitation?
Speculation: some government official asked them to provide this feature and they decided that it was in their corporate best interest to grant the request (positive relations with government are beneficial to business, especially when a low cost feature like this is all it takes). Once they offer it to one government, might as well offer it to most. It also helps deflect various government demands they don’t want to do with “we won’t do that but here is a long list of things we are doing for you...”
Why do governments ask for it? Many prisons have regulations banning social media use, even indirect use in which a friend or family member posts on the inmate’s behalf. Why do those regulations exist? Well, all it takes is some odious figure (murderer,rapist,etc) to have a social media page, then victim’s family gets upset, then tabloid media wants to exploit it, then politician promises to “do something about it”, then bureaucrat does the politician’s bidding and amends the prison regulations...
I wonder how the process is supposed to work normally. The article mentions a form for law enforcement to report incarcerated people which asks for an ID and badge number.
Obvious questions: how are these checked? What prevents someone from submitting a fake ID?
I'm sure the people responsible to check this are outsourced monkeys who aren't paid enough to care and will approve anything, so in the end Facebook created a built-in way to DoS a user's account, potentially forever unless you have a contact inside to restore your account.
I remember a couple years ago, there was some sort of public outcry over sex offenders using Facebook, and since the US already has a public sex offender registry, it is only natural that Facebook would face pressure expected to block anyone on it.
I can only assume that this is some perverse extension of the same idea; protect society from the bad people.
you're not allowed to use social media in US prisons. not sure whether facebook is cooperating with law enforcement here, or if it's some misguided attempt to prevent account hijackings. a person without access to their accounts would be particularly vulnerable to having their account hacked.
Inmates do not have first amendment rights. Courts were routinely ordering Facebook to censor them. You don’t pay lawyers and engineers to handle a stream of menial, identical work orders. You pay them to develop a structured process to be operated in a call center type environment.
>Fortunately I have some friends and ex-colleagues who work at Facebook so I reached out to them and asked for help, some of whom were kind enough to submit internal support tickets on my behalf. I wasn’t sure that was going to help so I fired off more emails and uploads of my ID but heard nothing. Thankfully 3 days later, I got a very terse email — “We unlocked your account”
This is a common refrain that I see in all these FB/Google "locked out or banned" horror stories. Unless you have some friends at high places at FB/Google, you're SOL if you ever get locked out of your FB or Gmail account.
It is. It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap. Other organizations that are smaller by multiple orders of magnitude still regularly fail at it.
I originally just down voted this comment, but I feel it warrants a response rather than a down vote. I removed my down vote so here are my thoughts.
Big tech, Google and Facebook in particular don't have "weird process gaps". What they have is a willful ignorance of any and all customer service. They are the vanguard of a new economy devoid of any and all notion of customer service. That quaint notion is too expensive in today's economy. Today, "customer service" is provided via a one way email black hole.
The only way anyone gets customer service from any unicorn is either by shaming them in a vial social media post or leveraging an internal contact. There used to be a time where one could call and talk to an actual person who actually worked for the company and might, just might be in a position to help. Those days began to end with the shift to offshore call centers and now have completely vanished thanks to canned email responses. I NEVER in my wildest dreams would have though "I wish Google had an offshore call center to support me".
Years ago, while flying British Air from Nairobi to London I had my camera equipment and dress shoes stolen by ground crew. I called up BA and explained that I had watched a person on the tarmac open my bag as it was being loaded onto the plain. I don't even know if the ground crewman was a BA employee or an Airport employee, but the BA rep on the phone told me she was mortified at what had happened and the next day they couriered a check to me. No bickering, no stonewalling, no email voids, just pure customer service.
That one great experience was snatched from the jaws of disappointment by a timely customer service rep with the authority to help and has meant that I will fly BA whenever it is possible over all other airline options. Would they do the same today? I doubt it, but they did it once and I will always be a fan as a result.
I think this perfectly illustrates the different business models between these companies. On the one hand, a company with billions of users where no money changes hands and each interaction is worth maybe $0.01 in advertising, and on the other hand a service for which you are paying hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars each time.
Don’t forget that just last year we were watching videos of innocent passengers being violently dragged off planes that they paid to be on. Despite some feel good anecdotes, airlines are by no means a bastion of customer service nirvana. Airlines hold 2 of the top 20 spots among the “Most Hated Companies” in the US.
Good customer service, even when your ASP is tens of thousands of dollars per customer, is probably the single hardest thing for most companies.
Whether it’s Airlines, Search Engines, Phone/Computer Manufacturers, Car companies, etc., we’ve seen basically every otherwise beloved brand fall on their face when it comes to customer service at scale. (And that’s when we’re not discovering their products are faulty, dangerous, secretly crippled over time, spying on us, exploiting our personal data,...)
Of course there are weird process gaps. Here we are seeing an account being flagged for incarceration, possibly because the account is actually being attacked by someone submitting fraudulent requests in an attempt to get it closed.
I don’t have a Facebook account and I don’t want one. But if that isn’t a weird process gap I don’t know what is.
Just 3 years ago BA went above and beyond for me when I left a wallet on a plane, but didn't find out until I was in a different terminal (45 minutes later), and couldn't go back due to security/visa checkpoints. BA sent runners to the plane in the other terminal and they physically carried my wallet with all cards/cash in it to me.
I've heard a lot of well-deserved criticism of BA as well, but it does seem like many of their staff are still willing to go above and beyond.
I had a similar thing a few years back. Left my mobile phone on my seat, had already passed various gates and checkpoints and they did exactly the same thing. Within ten minutes I was re-united with my phone. I couldn't thank them enough.
Left my keys on the plane seat, and remembered once I was at baggage claim. All Delta would do is let me fill out some paperwork. I ended up having to have a locksmith come out to the airport parking lot to make a new key for my truck.
You got customer service when you were in fact a customer.
You don't get customer service from an ad platform unless you are a paying advertiser. Complaints from the eyeballs carry less weight than complaints from the money shovelers.
This sentiment is so often expressed, nobody challenges it as not making sense. Who redefined "paying" as meaning cash payment?
If you are a supplier of eyeballs, you are purchasing stuff in exchange for eyeballs. You are purchasing things, so you are a customer. Also, when you pay for an Android phone, you are a paying customer of Google, with cash, credit, or whatever. Lots of other things, but those are the first that come to mind.
“Paying” as in “cash payment” is literally the standard dictionary definition. It’s also where the top line number of any financial statement comes from. You are, in fact, the one redefining “paying” to suit your purposes.
In what way is that relevant? Which one are you providing FB for the privilege of using their service? Do you disagree that the dictionary definition of “pay” is as I described it?
It seems relevant that the idea of paying with things other than cash is pervasive and has been for longer than either of us has been alive.
I usually pay for things these days via an odd ritual in which I insert a small plastic card into a slot, and then, believe it or not, it is actually returned to me.
If I give you something in exchange for a chicken, and you maintain "I did not pay you, because a chicken is not cash", do you think the IRS will be convinced there was no transaction? Or s/chicken/bitcoin/.
So you do disagree with the dictionary definition? Is that what you’re saying? The fact the IRS wants to tax you for bartering with a chicken doesn’t change anything about the English language.
I'm not aware of disagreeing with a dictionary definition.
However, if a dictionary definition is presented to me, and it doesn't include a usage of which I am aware, that doesn't mean I disagree with it even then. It likely just means that something was left out - maybe because people still hope to sell dictionaries, or alternatively because, having given up on selling them, neither accuracy nor completeness is required to sell online ads.
I never "paid" attention to formal grammar in school, but this would seem to be the use of the word as a verb without an object.
As such, definition #13 seems applicable - "money, goods, etc." can't possibly be construed to mean "money and not goods, etc."...can it?
Definition #17 might also apply - you "pay" to use Facebook, oh how you pay...
Anyway, I don't have any particular issues with this entry, and I think the very first definition demonstrates that payment is commonly understood to include "doing something" which is an extremely broad category.
What’s debt do you owe to Facebook that you have to settle as in definition 1?
Definition 17, while fitting, is outside the scope of this current thread.
The point is, Facebook only cares about your experience with their service if you are paying them money. Even the IRS doesn’t care; Facebook doesn’t send you a 1099 for your use of their service, do they? The IRS doesn’t charge them tax on your data, do they? This would seem to indicate that the situation falls outside the “exchange of value for value” type definition of “pay.”
Pointing out that the IRS includes certain things in payment that you don't isn't a claim that some definition they use limits the usage of the word payment. The point is not that everybody should use the IRS definition for words. The IRS provides evidence about what people do in the world; you don't have to (nor was I asking for you to) accept them as the authority.
If I understand your dismissal of definition (1), you are implying that it is significant that definition (2) by contrast only says "money" and uses an example of dollars. I think that's too legalistic and just an artifact of the way things were edited. Dictionaries aren't written to prevent lawyers from finding loopholes, so I don't think you can count on everything being repeated absolutely uniformly. In actual legal documents, they define terms or phrases used repeatedly up front to reduce the repetition, and dictionaries don't seem to customarily do that. So again, definition (1) is evidence about how people behave in the world, not necessarily the definition we are using and from an unimpeachable authority.
No, you do not understand why definition 1 does not apply. The question was: what debt do you owe to Facebook to settle? I claim there is none. Therefore, you are not acting in accordance with definition 1 when providing information to or viewing ads from Facebook.
And if you have a g suite account, even if you're only paying a few dollars a month, you can call a "Google Support" number and get help. They say it only covers g suite services, but I've gotten help with issues with unrelated Google products through it.
In fairness, I did buy a phone directly from Google, and when it died recently, I did get actual support, at least someone to chat with who gave me an RMA. Perhaps I should have asked her my gmail questions.
Yes, google has real people in the support still. They usually ask "Is there something else I can help you with today?" That is a very open question :-)
Well, try this on for size: You aren't a customer of Facebook because you aren't paying Facebook... Facebook is paying you. For the privilege of being able to sell your eyeballs, they pay you a great deal more value in their services. They're putting down a non-trivial amount of cash on providing these services to you that you put no cash down on.
Cutting you off at the scale they are at is just no big deal to them, but you may in fact miss your payment.
What ruins HN for me is that people downvote for disagreement. The rules, last I checked, forbid that --- downvotes are for poor behavior, not because you disagree.
I've not seen any evidence that downvoting patterns have changed on HN in recent years, and the rules haven't changed either. If the community is being ruined, something else must be doing it.
Honestly I'm kind of baffled by (what I assume) is the moderation teams' stance on downvotes. I see so many seemingly reasonable comments with "edit: why am I being downvoted into oblivion". I'm not saying the site is ruined, but I can easily ask: how is that productive?
The whole point of having a downvote system is to correct people towards more productive behavior, no? If people don't know what they said wrong, how can they fix it?
If the the user can't figure out why they're being punished, and someone like me who has been on this site for a long time and is also going "why on earth did that get downvoted", then what purpose does it serve other than as a public flogging device?
Then again, considering that the site design hasn't changed to even have a up-vote button that works on mobile, I'm not exactly holding my breath that anything here could ever change.
It's not when the user falls down a weird gap in the architecture that is frustrating and dehumanizing. It's that there's almost never a way to get ahold of a human to explain what's broken. There is apparently no straightforward way to simply contact Facebook support. I'm not sure they even have support.
The frustrating thing is, if they had a support team, they'd be inundated with really simple questions. A few years ago an article discussing some new Facebook login feature became the top search result for "Facebook login". What happened next? Thousands of comments on that article in the lines of "I want to login to Facebook, why am I seeing this page instead, please give me back my Facebook!". Google started offering an open-to-the-public question and answers on search results, and some people think that's the place to book a restaurant table after googling said restaurant.
There's some article that said 90% of computer users are below proficient, they have their routines but get totally lost if something doesn't work...
OTOH, having no support isn't the answer either, especially if the issue is actually on their side, and the user is genuinely inconvenienced.
Perhaps it is time to charge for advanced support like AWS. If you want priority support for Facebook where stupid questions are entertained and your hand is held, 99 dollars a year. Considering the value of social media these days, it is not too much to ask, especially if you are an enterprise customer. For everyday customers with non-critical problems that can be solved by Namecheap-style support teams in Eastern Europe, 5 dollars a month.
I don't want support for 99 dollars a year. I'd be happy with $1 a minute or whatever. It's fine to discourage 99% of the support calls normal companies get. Just have something for extreme situations.
Instead of a recurring support plan just charge up-front per ticket, something like 50$ or so. The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault.
This would solve the issue of monkeys wasting support's time while offering a way to get support for those who know what they're doing and are happy to put their dollars on the line.
> The fee is refunded if the issue is on Facebook's fault.
Does this model actually work? I'm sure there are some reputable companies that could make it work, but I'm not sure I know anyone who would trust Facebook to get this right.
That’s true, but look, nobody made them get that big. They worked really hard to make it happen. And good for them, but scale is not a get out of responsibility free card.
It's very hard, to the point of impossibility, to ensure that not a single one of Facebook's 2.4 billion users will fall into a weird process gap.
So Facebook should just admit it doesn't scale, and work on doing things smaller and better.
If it was a startup, the HN crowd would be all about "doesn't scale!" But since it's a FAANG, it's, "Sure! Just keep on going and hurting society. Am I vested yet?"
If it's "too big to care", then perhaps it should be trimmed down to size? Industries where you have many different companies competing for customers somehow manage to have decent customer support.
If those gaps are that rare, then how hard could it be to employ a few human beings who are empowered to help the vanishingly-few users who fall through the cracks?
Either the gaps are not that rare, or FB doesn't give a shit. There are no other options.
Your intuition for the size of the problem here is off. If "vanishingly few" means that a tenth of a percent fall through some crack each year, that's 2 million cases annually. In practice, I bet Facebook does even better than that, but I would be very surprised if it were a workload that could be handled by just a few extra people.
Assuming 200 working days a year and that 1 CSR can handle 10 cases a day, that means 1000 people can handle the case load. Given Facebook has ~43k employees right now, and assuming they actually have nobody to handle these cases, they would need to hire 2% more employees.
I’m not sure if that meets the definition of “a few extra people,” but FB could easily do it if they wanted to. 1000 people being paid $60k apiece plus $60k worth of additional carrying costs (benefits, etc.), that amounts to $120M in additional expenses. Naively subtracting that number from their 2018 net income of $6.88B leaves $6.76B (actually more due to the additional expenses being tax deductible).
So, basically, we see that FB cares less about user support than making an additional 1.7% profit. Yeah, they don’t give a shit.
No, that would be considered shockingly low. There are about 300 million cars in the US, and it's hard to find good statistics on cars breaking down, but AAA makes about 30 million service calls a year. So AAA alone gets the number to 10%, two orders of magnitude higher. (But I don't mean to exaggerate the difference - Facebook accounts must be significantly easier to keep running than cars.)
I think your math is wrong. 30 million a year means about 82,000 a day ("in the morning"). So that's about 2.7 hundredths of a percent. Another way to independently estimate, is that I've been driving for about 7,300 days and had an alternator failure twice that prevented my car from starting. That's...just about 2.7 hundredths of a percent as well. So I think that 0.1% is 3-4 times higher than normal.
Would you please not be a jerk on HN? This was gratuitous.
We've had to ask you many times about this kind of thing—for years already. Continuing to break the site guidelines is eventually going to get you banned. I'd rather not have to do that, so if you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Do they? They get moderately annoyed, certainly, and they have every right to. But the DMV issues mistaken suspensions all the time, and I don't think many people see that as either a critically important issue or proof that the government is evil.
I think people do, the idea of being stuck in a bad situation due to a heartless bureaucracy with no way out is something people obsess over, and are disturbed by it happening to even a single person. Have you ever seen "Brazil"? Read something by Kafka? Talked to a (US-style) libertarian or conservative, particularly about the early Soviet Union?
Or that a human working for FB can make a mistake and put someone else "in jail".
No, thought the dev team, this mistake would never happen, the only way to "get out of jail" is to show us your release papers!
It's pervasive, isn't it. Babies or seniors being checked by TSA because the machine beeped, so they might be a terrorist. What I realized once was, the TSA agent doesn't want or isn't allowed to think and make decisions, because making decisions mean being responsible for those decisions...
I’m reminded of the old comic where it shows that Facebook’s users are the product. The advertisers are the only customers. Why should they care to deal with one billionth of their product if it is accidentally marked bad?
This is something people always repeat, but it's nonsense. Facebook (and similar companies) is a middleman between users and advertisers. Neither party is uniquely a "customer" versus the other, and advertisers have basically the same problem of being a very small part of the business and therefore unimportant and without leverage.
I didn't realize Facebook had this policy and I'm curious if other services do.
I would have assumed that an incarcerated person could give their credentials to a trusted person outside to manage their account for them and relay information.
> My best guess though is that it was the same person who seems to be trying to get access to my account with weekly password reset requests and offers to purchase it.
Not much more to say I am afraid. I get frequent (weekly, sometimes more) emails from Facebook containing password reset instructions "as per my request". At least two people have begged me to give up my account name (just my first name) that I seem to have got years ago - not sure it's even used or relevant anymore.
My initial assumption was that if they can't get the account, they would just try and mess it up for me.
On reflection it's probably unrelated and just one of those things.. I guess if they're reading this post, I'll find out soon :)
I vaguely recall reading something similar, within the last couple years. Probably on HN, but not for sure. In that case, the victim did temporarily lose a domain. And the exploit involved taking over their email.
Maybe use two-factor authentication with a third-party app? I don't know specifics, though.
I get password reset emails on my account weekly too. What’s strange is it’s not a common email either, but one I use under my own domain.
Not sure what the angle is? Like, I don’t see how requesting a password reset would help them exploit the account. Maybe they are just testing for flaws in FB’s system, still weird though.
Maybe a new version of the directory harvest attack[0]?
For example, if someone has an email address (or list of email addresses) from somewhere else, one can easily tell if you (or they) have a Facebook account by simply requesting a password reset against it (them). If there's no throttling on password reset requests, one could process a large list rather quickly.
Oh - that sounds entirely likely. I'd be surprised if Facebook allowed unthrottled password resets but the bad people are so clever these day, who knows. Thanks for insight.
> I get password reset emails on my account weekly too. What’s strange is it’s not a common email either, but one I use under my own domain.
Interesting, thanks for letting me know - I'd assumed the same - hoping I'd click on the reset link perhaps and that would help them access my account.
I find it weird that Facebook even does this. It's like pile-on in a justice system that's supposedly already dished its punishment. What right does FB have to punish someone for something they did outside of FB? And jesus, have some pity. But the fact that you can 'accidentally' be marked as incarcerated is also really strange.
The author raises the point that his account could have been marked due to fake information submitted via their law enforcement request form.
It occurs to me that companies don't run bug bounties and authorised pentesting programs for process flaws - I assume that would be deemed out-of-scope "social engineering" even if it doesn't involve any psychological trickery and just involves uploading a forged official document and seeing if they even try to validate it at all.
I was locked out of my FB account for no reason a couple months back. The option I had was to send myself a text message but after a dozen tries over a couple weeks and never receiving the message I gave up for awhile. I didn't want to upload my ID to some unknown person. 3 weeks later I tried again and this time I got the SMS message and was able to get back in. I took a back up of my account as well just in case.
Allowing insiders to shepherd tickets is a ticking legal time bomb for these companies.
Given how bad their dispute resolution is, and the huge dollar value of getting your account back in an emergency, insider support channels are highly valuable.
If I were in an AG's office I'd find a case of quid pro quo and research a bribery suit. These companies operate internationally, so there are FCPA implications as well
Of course now a lot of people will moan when they read this because they think my alternative is living in a hut in the forest but what I want to say is that these companies have that kind of power because we gave it to them by exclusively using their services because it was so convenient when they lured us in.
Using other services or even building them on your own is more effort but it could be worth the extra time when I look at scenes like this one.
Yeah. I’m sure this guy was not at all doing something sketchy for Facebook to shut down the account. This is a one-sided view designed to spark outrage from all the people who are like “I don’t even own a Facebook!”. The perfect clickbait for the ultra-paranoid viewer...
I don't know anyone that works at Facebook/Google/Uber/etc. When I have issues they just go unresolved. Uber Eats double-submitted my order after throwing up a bundle of internal server errors and literally my only recourse at this point is apparently to sue them to get my $26 back. (Which I'm seriously considering -- even if I don't get my $26 back, it will certainly cost them more than $26 just to respond so at least the cosmic accounting will balance out.)
It would be really nice if there were companies to give my money to that did have some semblance of customer support that didn't require making friends with the right people or curating a social media following.