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Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

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Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#231

Post by mattdesl »

kmonsen wrote: post #202
teux wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: this is not my domain. But wouldn’t the blockchain give a decentralised record of ownership that was protected from corruption? If a single entity owns this database, how does it fare against attacks/bad actors, or highly capitalists companies like EA going in and editing it in their best interests. You need a truly good organisation to host that single DB and I’m not sure I tryst any of them at the momen…

The issue is that you need to talk to EA servers to play the game, or whatever the movie is hosted etc, and at that time they can choose to accept whatever token you have. Or they can reject it. So unless the content is also decentralized you are not better off. Easy example is that nft tokens are decentralized, but the servers hosting the actual pictures are not. So you own the token but the picture itself can go mi…

Not the case with an on-chain game! See Dark Forest.

Also not really the case with on-chain NFTs or those hosted by IPFS (where as long as 1 user has the file on disk it can be recovered and re-seeded).

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#232

Post by candu »

patmcc wrote: post #200
r3trohack3r wrote: post #107

Honestly, the top comment is more concerning: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accide... Account stolen. Obvious fraudulent charges. EA refuses to make it right. Customer rightfully disputes the charges. EA closes their account locking them out of an entire catalogue of content THEY HAD PAID for. This whole “you don’t really own digital content” ruse needs to be popped. A company shouldn’t be abl…

It's totally ridiculous. Imagine Walmart tried to do the same thing with physical goods; say any shoplifter Walmart catches immediately gets all their Walmart purchases taken back. We'd never allow it. Even if they were conflicted of theft, we wouldn't say "oh, sure, Walmart can come in and take your desk". Why have we allowed it with digital goods?

More accurate comparison: you return a purchase to Walmart for a refund - which, unlike shoplifting, is entirely legal - and they then seize all your previous Walmart purchases and ban you from the premises.

After all, disputing a charge on your credit card isn't some shady underhanded process; it's a right you have under law [1]. The real issue here is that, under digital distribution models, you have no real ownership of things you've purchased; in some sense, you're just renting or licensing them.

Merchant wants to ban your account for issuing a chargeback? Fine, but they should be required to preserve your access to purchased digital goods, or to otherwise compensate you for those goods. Consumer protection laws need to catch up to reality, and fast.

[1] https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/using-credit-cards-disputi...

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#233

Post by rsync »

gus_massa wrote: post #83
coddle-hark wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just don’t use gmail. Email is way too important to me (and most people) to risk losing because an automated system thought I broke the TOS of an unrelated Google product. Even if you keep separate accounts, there’s nothing to stop them correlating those accounts and banning you anyway. Don’t use gmail as your primary email provider.

Most services ask for a confirmation via SMS. I have a few account in gmail (personal, work, another part of work, side project, ...). If they ban one of them, can they ban all of them?

Each nym you establish should have its own, unique, 2FA mule.

Voice and sms only SIM card is only $6/mo from tello…

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#234

Post by theturtletalks »

dang wrote: post #218

This title is breaking the HN guideline about titles: " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. " - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In fact it is doing all three things we ask people not to do: it's editorialized, it's linkbait (sensational/indignant), and it's arguably misleading because it's making a general claim while the linked article is the narra…

The original title is a TIFU post and I don't think those are allowed on HN.

The title is not misleading since most companies will ban you if you do a chargeback. The thing to note here is that a chargeback was done against the Google Store and the Gmail account was banned.

My goal wasn't to editorialize, I just wanted to let people know that their Gmail account was at risk if they did a chargeback against any of Google's services. This was new information to me and a lot of people on this thread.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#235

Post by soco »

vineyardmike wrote: post #207
thrashh wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS is an open network. Putting it on there would be like putting it on a public FTP server, which would be way simpler Your solution is equivalent to letting customers download their game installer after logging in and giving them a license key to unlock with, something we already can do, except your idea includes 10,000 more steps

> IPFS is an open network. Putting it on there would be like putting it on a public FTP server, which would be way simpler Not that I agree this is a good idea but IPFS decentralizes storage and provision of the content. A centralized server means the company can still arbitrarily block you.

The companies will block you usually by deactivating your license key - which you always have to check online with their licensing server.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#236

Post by tlogan »

MrYellowP wrote: post #5

I thought all companies are doing that by default?

Yes - they do.

In general companies will disable the account and the amount might be sold to collection agency (so you will receive unpleasant news when apply for mortgage or something like that).

But majority of companies do email you and do have email address for support so I never run into issues like this.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#237

Post by foobazgt »

Retric wrote: post #211
foobazgt wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a sore underestimation of the support costs Google would have to cover. It looks like support costs average around $4/call. ( https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+the+average+su... ). Google has approximately 4 billion users ( https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+users+does+Google+h... ). So, if you allowed for one single support call per user per year, Google would be footing $16B annuall…

That’s at 98 cents per minute, I suspect at google’s scale they would have massive cost savings.

Savings from scale usually comes from automation, and people are generally looking to talk to humans, not bots. This is the exact reason Google avoids human support in the first place - there are no massive cost savings, because it does not scale well.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#238

Post by itishappy »

mattdesl wrote: post #214
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So time to play the same old game: does block chain provide any value here that a separate centralized DB doesn't? Let's see, can't you solve the exact same problem by simply having a centralized organization have a database of digital content ownership? Essentially a title record DB? Seems like it. And how does your blockchain solution solve the problem of someone is hacking the game and needs to be banned? Can the…

A centralized organization like EA, you mean? That is what parent is pointing out: you don’t own the assets under license. If you want to see an example of decentralization in the context of a game, look at Dark Forest. https://www.designboom.com/technology/dark-forest-one-of-a-k...

Neat game and tech, but I'm still left wondering what benefit blockchain actually offers here. This looks like a run-of-the-mill Facebook/Zynga space exploration game from 15 years ago. Now, I'm no fan of either of those companies, but to my knowledge a lack of trust in the centralized server was never an issue.

What benefit justifies the drastically increased costs and reduced speeds from moving this on-chain?

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#239

Post by vlunkr »

patmcc wrote: post #200
r3trohack3r wrote: post #107

Honestly, the top comment is more concerning: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accide... Account stolen. Obvious fraudulent charges. EA refuses to make it right. Customer rightfully disputes the charges. EA closes their account locking them out of an entire catalogue of content THEY HAD PAID for. This whole “you don’t really own digital content” ruse needs to be popped. A company shouldn’t be abl…

It's totally ridiculous. Imagine Walmart tried to do the same thing with physical goods; say any shoplifter Walmart catches immediately gets all their Walmart purchases taken back. We'd never allow it. Even if they were conflicted of theft, we wouldn't say "oh, sure, Walmart can come in and take your desk". Why have we allowed it with digital goods?

It all comes down to DRM. The media you get to download cannot work on it's own, so you're forever tied to the store that provided it to you. Otherwise you could just store it on your own.

Meanwhile the pirates still always find their way around it, so it's the paying customers who deal with the fallout.

Re: Tell HN: Doing a chargeback against Google will get your account banned

#240

Post by cwmma »

deweller wrote: post #138
r3trohack3r wrote: post #107

Honestly, the top comment is more concerning: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/zndbku/tifu_by_accide... Account stolen. Obvious fraudulent charges. EA refuses to make it right. Customer rightfully disputes the charges. EA closes their account locking them out of an entire catalogue of content THEY HAD PAID for. This whole “you don’t really own digital content” ruse needs to be popped. A company shouldn’t be abl…

This is a use case that public blockchains could solve for us. Having a decentralized proof of digital rights ownership on a public blockchain could separate the content provider (Amazon / Google / EA) from the actual media they provide by storing it on IPFS or some other decentralized file store. There would need to be a lot of work done to make this happen and big companies would have to get on board. It doesn't se…

The hard part isn't the prove who owns what, it's coordinating with the actual providers to have them all agree to the same database and actually honor it
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