zlacker

>>benhur+(OP)
If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.

At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".

You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?

(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])

Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?

There's a lot of money riding on that.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...

>>AceJoh+YM1
Honestly, the answer is to charge people a fee, in order to appeal a ban. A fee that covers the cost of investigating the incident, making it revenue-neutral. This way, Google would have every incentive to investigate thoroughly all appeals, including repeated appeals by the same person.

From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free. And a 0.001% chance that you'll end up a statistic, and need to pay a nominal fee for an appeal.

Unfortunately, I don't think the above will ever happen, because it would be a PR nightmare. "Google wants to charge you money, just to appeal a ban!" It's still better than the status quo, where people have almost no recourse when they are banned. But it still sounds way better in the media, if you just pretend as though these things never happen. Hence the status quo - use automated systems to cheaply get to a 99.999% success rate, and spend as little money as possible on the remaining 0.001%

>>whack+Uw2
I completely agree.

And if companies don't want to do it, that should be easy to regulate though. Requiring a human centric appeal process even if it has a fee, and prohibiting blanket account bans (if you get banned on gmail it doesn't affect your android and play store accounts, for example)

There are other provisions that I consider important like not being able to reuse email addresses and requiring the forwarding of email for at least 6 months after any account termination (getting banned from your email address can have disastrous consequences)