Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as it's less than $250 per instance that sounds fine...?
As in "not illegal, but still gonna get you fired?"
They'll just submit a request themselves so another employee reinstates them.
Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
211–220 of 423 posts
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
For now, I'm verifying them via their work email. So far, I've gotten decent feedback from my former colleagues and friends in big tech. Most of them take some sort of compensation for helping restore Insta / ad accounts - this is just a more direct way.
Got it, you are friends with corrupt big tech employees. This site is an absolutely terrible idea. Anyone that thinks this is acceptable should not be working for these companies. Your friends and former colleagues are, quite frankly, stupid. If they sell access to recovery they will be caught and fired, or worse. It would be trivial for the insider risk people at said companies to find out who you have communicated…
The terms of employment are in many cases also a form of corruption. You just don't recognize it because you're trained to see the established law and order as morally right (probably). Something something Kohlberg's stages.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#213So it costs Cheap!
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#214This is great news for employers! They get a highly motivated workforce focused on solving client problems and improving retention, all for free. No need to hire customer service reps and waste all that money when the invisible hand will take care of your customers for you.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#215On one hand: an action virtually guaranteed to get you fired. On the other: $150 I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. I can’t imagine risking that for what is essentially an hours pay for most tech roles there.
> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help: When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day. A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help…
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Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#216This is commercial bribery in most places. >California Code, Penal Code - PEN § 641.3 >(a) Any employee who solicits, accepts, or agrees to accept money or any thing of value from a person other than his or her employer, other than in trust for the employer, corruptly and without the knowledge or consent of the employer, in return for using or agreeing to use his or her position for the benefit of that other person,…
As long as it's less than $250 per instance that sounds fine...?
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Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#217Not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#218I fully understand why this is considered unethical. I fully understand that employees will get fired for taking the bounties. But what actual law is being broken here? I suspect it is legally a bribe, because it is facilitating a non-routine action. But only because of that non-routine bit. Would it be possible to prosecute this, going into court and admitting that your suspension appeals process is non-routine? And…
My employment contracts have all required at minimum that I inform them of any commercial work I am doing outside my employment for them, and sometimes required that I get approval from them before beginning. Having some undisclosed second employment would definitely be grounds for firing, if they wanted.
OK sure, but is it illegal?
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#219This is a clever hack to solve the problem. It’s essentially an underground market for customer support, converting company employees into clandestine customer service reps. Better than nothing, but think about how silly that sounds. Tech companies know customer support doesn’t scale and they don’t have a strong enough incentive to hire customer service people. Automating away these “cost centers” of labor is largely…
It’s not clever at all. It doesn’t solve the core issue, which is identity / ownership verification. You’re conflating clever with “something I’d find personally useful”.
It’s clever in that it potentially helps with the problem of “I’ve been banned and there’s no customer support to help me” by incentivizing employees to perform contractually dubious customer support.
The problem you’re talking about is a different one. I’m not claiming that any of these problems are being solved entirely nor ideally with this clever hack.
My point is that hacks like these are symptoms of a larger problem in incentives for tech companies. We’ve exchanged humans being paid to help humans for a few tech companies that rule our lives via automated decisions.
Re: Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, as someone who works for one of these companies, no fucking way would it be worth the risk to me.
Here's my question not to you specifically but the royal you of any bigTech employees reading this forum or similar: why do the employees not stand up at all hands meetings and raise this issue as a serious problem. Of course I know the answer in they just don't care and their personal paychecks are too high for them to risk becoming a squeaky wheel. However, it is obvious that management does not intend to fix this…
Because when you're dealing with a billion users, a one-in-a-million mistake still screws a thousand users, and everyone realizes that getting the rate of mistakes anywhere near that low is impossible.
At the same time, you're dealing with actual bad actors that genuinely need to be banned, and there is a lot of this abuse. Mistakes will happen. You can't stop banning users. The bad actors will file appeals (in some cases including public escalations - see the various cases where someone complained about being unfairly banned from a game for cheating, and after a bit of a shitstorm, the company posted the evidence of him cheating). The appeal processes often work, sometimes don't - the public shitstorms are often cases where multiple things went wrong.
There is no easy solution, and at the scale these companies operate it's obvious to everyone involved that "just having a highly skilled human review every case" is completely impractical (not just "too expensive for the company to want to pay for it"). Because for each genuine user affected you have many abusers.
The pay-for-support proposals have several issues (PR impact from "screwing customers then extorting them to pay", stolen credit cards, engineering required to make it happen).
Abuse teams are (understandably) rather tight-lipped, and also tend to insist that telling the user what they did wrong would enable abusers to dodge the protections - this is something I don't understand (the abuser presumably knows what they did, while a user wrongfully accused does not), but it seems to be consistently said by abuse teams from many different companies.
All this combined makes it very hard to push for improvement, because there is no clear path towards a solution. You can ask a question at an all-hand generally raising the problem, but you'll get the usual "our abuse teams are working very hard on this, it's a hard problem" non-answer.
At the same time, yes, genuine users are absolutely getting screwed, and for the individual affected user, the consequences can be pretty severe.