You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer. Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become unsuspended any quicker.
Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
(I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)
It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one without having to request it.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
We've heard this excuse countless times, but it's simply not acceptable. The foundation of our legal system is that it's better to let a criminal go than to punish an innocent person. How many innocents have to get caught in the crossfire before we start protecting them?
E.g. if a spammer can pretend they're 10 million different people, and each of those "people" requests an explanation, the whole system grinds to a halt.
This is the reason behind a push for more KYC-like verification on these platforms (e.g. asking for IDs). But this comes at a huge privacy cost for legitimate users. So one way or another people who are real, legitimate and with good intentions somehow pay the cost of the harm that is being done on the internet. This is a hard problem.
Source: am thinking/working on this sort of stuff; not representing my employer, my opinions are my own etc. etc.
Again, it's not a "request".
If spam detection and account suspension can be automated, then suspension notifications can also be automated.
I'm not sure I understand where the 10 million number is coming from. Are you suggesting that 1 spammer can create 10 million accounts on your system (which appears to be Facebook)?
Regardless, no spammer has the time to get on the phone and personally dispute 10 million account suspensions — disputes which are unlikely to succeed if there is good evidence — so I'm not sure how the system grinds to a halt.
> Again, it's not a "request" [..] suspension notifications can also be automated.
Can you clarify what you mean by "protecting" them? I'm not sure suspension notifications qualify as meaningful protection
Except for the part where someone has to answer phone calls, it could be automated if the account suspension itself is automated.
I'll also point out my later comment: "I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063399
And to forestall any replies that providing information to suspended accounts would help the spammers, I've already responded to that point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063660
Temporary account suspensions that you can quickly reverse on appeal are annoying but could be justified to fight abuse, as long as they don't happen too often. On the other hand, indefinite account suspensions that are impossible to reverse, such as the case of Andrew Spinks of Terraria, are simply indefensible, there's no justification whatsoever for that.
This is absolutely spot on, with the caveat that you do need to disaggregate from accounts to people, which is the hard problem. Having people call a phone number is definitely not going to work as a way of achieving this disaggregation. I'm pretty sure I could create a system to bring that call center to a halt with fairly minimal cost in less than a week of coding.
As an attacker, you can also hire people in call centers to make phone calls at scale for you.
I think we may be talking about different things? I was just talking about a scaling problem of providing legal notifications of account suspensions and providing a means on getting them unsuspended. I wasn't talking about DoS attacks.
Lots of companies have call centers, so I'm not sure what you're envisioning here, or what financial gain there would be for spammers to DoS the call center. After all, their accounts are already getting suspended by the algorithms, regardless of whether innocent consumers have any appeal to this, and DoSing the call center won't help spammers get their accounts unsuspended.