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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

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Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#831

Post by dhimes »

spullara wrote: post #718
shakezula wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get v…

For better or for worse, that is good customer support with clear remediation procedures.

I think the bar for remediation procedures needs to be higher than "clear" to qualify as good customer support.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#832

Post by jsmith45 »

newswasboring wrote: post #748
nvahalik wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Google and Facebook are not public utilities, nor should they be.

Why not? The qualification being for public utility should be "is this basic infrastructure humans need to live now?". And the answer is yes. Facebook controls most of the big public speaking forums and google controls so much and in so many spaces that it would be foolish for me to even try listing. I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities…

> I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.

Water/Sewage and Trash are typically run by the city/county government, although it is common for the actual work to be handled by a contracted company.

Power, natural gas, phone, and most others is almost always a private company.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#833

Post by dang »

Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it), so to see the rest of the comments you need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4

(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#834

Post by AceJohnny2 »

judge2020 wrote: post #767
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #734

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 t…

> You can't even trust phone companies to do their job right and ensure the secure verification code is sent to the right phone! You provided some more secure ways for users to authenticate themselves, For those that don't know, phone companies are easily susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212 Edit: looks like OP c…

Yeah sorry, I thought the original version was overly flowery, and the same point could be made more succintly.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#835

Post by belorn »

Swizec wrote: post #773
sethammons wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.

Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs. You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it? (not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)

It would raise some flags if my bank representative or doctor ask for a photo copy of my passport. Asking to simply see it, given that they have a specific reason to do so, would not.

Online however there is no such thing to simply see something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any purpose.

A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn streaming site with a large number of people getting their passports leaked. It was reported as a major disaster for those involved.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#836

Post by tjalfi »

falcolas wrote: post #698
remus wrote: post #684

While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid. There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there…

> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users Who cares? No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc…

> No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).

It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.

"The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from Innocence is Irrelevant [1]

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#837

Post by rkalla »

shakezula wrote: post #672
jennyyang wrote: post #658

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow v…

I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get v…

They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force) people to upload high res pics of their PII information to have on file.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#838

Post by grawprog »

moksly wrote: post #645
ssully wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have been pleasantly surprised with how good Amazon's customer support is. In contrast I've had a Google wifi and home device stop working on me, and it was nearly impossible to get in touch with a customer support rep from Google. At this point, I refuse to purchase Google device because I don't know what to do if I have a problem with it.

In the public sector in Europe we’ve long liked Microsoft because they actually sell support. When they decided to push 365 additions as enabled by default and no easy way to turn it off, we suddenly had a couple of thousand employees trying this new teams thing out. After a few hours on the phone with Seattle, it was possible to disable, and later Microsoft changed policy to let their enterprise customers decided wh…

Not a big Microsoft fan in general, but I will say, I can agree with their support being great for commercial customers.

A couple years ago, there was an update that affected a bunch of embedded devices and caused some machines to go down. Luckily our machines were on an older version, but another shop we worked with got hit by it.

Within an hour of Microsoft being alerted to the issue they'd begun working on the problem and within two hours machines were back up and running again after Microsoft pushed an update.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#839

Post by gsich »

gumby wrote: post #729

As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things). For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small custo…

>As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things).

Airlines and ISPs usually have support you can either call or mail. I don't know how to reach anyone at Google. By anyone I mean a real human, not a markov chain.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#840

Post by AceJohnny2 »

orlp wrote: post #759
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #734

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 t…

> But 0.001% of billions or users is still millions of accounts... Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50 billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.

Oops, quite right. I multiplied by 0.001 when it should've been 0.00001 (because percent) >_Fixed
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