Comment by krajzeg
5 years ago
I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing).
One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination.
But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".
I'm hoping they don't and Google just dies.
Please don't, the only thing worse than no response is a byzantine system that makes you think there's a path and becomes the biggest time sinkhole of your life.
Just vote with your feet and move out of their services, life on the outside is just fine.
You can't just hand wave it away like that. Having regulation on a resolution process for account recovery is absolutely needed. You can't just tell people to move away from Google where their entire digital life is on it. At the very least, it should restrict your account to a read-only state and make it possible to download your data.
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Regulation != socialism
Welfare != socialism
Got bad news for you about modern American political discourse. Just tune into one of the major right-leaning networks sometime, it's rough.
Just one random example of a high profile career lawmaker:
"The senator dismissed House Democrats proposals to boost paid sick leave and bolster safety net programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps as “wage controls and price controls and socialism.”" https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Ted-...
"Sen. Ted Cruz took aim Friday at socialism, which he blamed it for killing jobs in liberal cities.
“The blue states with high taxes, high regulation their people are fleeing because they don’t have jobs,” he said while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland’s National Harbor.
The Texas Republican said socialists effectively threw out thousands of jobs by pushed Amazon out of New York earlier this month." https://apnews.com/article/6d18da8f6b5ffc516bc23af722130a8b
Noted third-world socialist country New York, home to wall street.
> One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination
In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
> In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation.
When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself.
I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
> When the ToS are 15 pages long
You're off by at least 1 order of magnitude.
1 reply →
It needs to be enough information so that it can be either remedied (if the violation is real) or disputed (if it isn't).
I agree that currently, "you violated the ToS" is legally enough reason and enough information. I don't think it should be.
I also don't think we want the fight against bots and spam to justify taking inscrutable actions against real customers.
Kafka approves.