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Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

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Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#221

Post by CSMastermind »

prepend wrote: post #183
TekMol wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't those activities create patterns which are easy to detect? A million visitors and just one sale -> Something is wrong Mostly repeat customers -> Something is wrong How would a scammer bring in a steady stream of new customers?

> How would a scammer bring in a steady stream of new customers? Spam email campaigns. Or google ad campaigns. Twitter bot spam. There’s lots of ways to get people to click on Amazon links and make money. Especially because I think Amazon gives you the 4% of anything they buy in the next 24 hours or some period. Since a large percent of humans have Amazon accounts and buy stuff pretty recently if you can just get you…

Why not show a box to users on the website saying, "It looks like you came from xyz, we'll pay them 4% of this sale. Is it wrong? Click here to report it."

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#222

Post by junon »

unreal37 wrote: post #111
Semaphor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All big tech companies have this "trigger happy" approach to closing down accounts. After years, I made my first Instagram post last week. I got instantly banned (it was a picture of a new bag I bought). Apparently the way to get it back is to jump through some hoops and post a selfie with an OTP. I decided that’s a bit much work and I might as well let them delete my account that only follows a bunch of people I k…

If you attempt to use a credit card that you haven't used in years, the bank will similarly ask you to verify your identity. I don't think it's weird that unused valuable accounts need re-identification when you start to use them again. I don't mind anti-spam measures in cases which are common spam techniques. Hijacking unused accounts is common enough to warrant an approach like this.

There's a difference between a bank's threat model and a social media company's.

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#223

Post by JKCalhoun »

coldtea wrote: post #107
Yeri wrote: post #28

Summary: The YouTuber had his Amazon affiliate account canceled after 7 years without warning or evidence of wrongdoing. The reason given was that purchases made through his links were for personal use or made by friends and family, which he denies. He finds the timing suspicious as it came a week after he made a video criticizing Amazon for canceling a customer's account for a racist doorbell claim. He argues that t…

> The reason given was that purchases made through his links were for personal use or made by friends and family, which he denies He has 1.8 million subscribers and talks about gear. There's no way his affiliate purchases were done by "friends and family" in any significant number above 0.1% to even matter. It's just Amazon payback BS.

I don't doubt Amazon did this for retaliatory reasons but the wording of the email he received is no doubt a result of the employee tasked with shutting down his account only having a handful of "reason templates" to choose from.

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#224

Post by wahnfrieden »

jefftk wrote: post #191
NotTheDr01ds wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a separate video on his channel which is probably a better listen than this one. This one is a bit of conjecture, perhaps true. The other has been validated by multiple sources, AFAICT. Short summary - Someone had tied in most of their home automation to Alexa and found their account cancelled suddenly one day. They went through the automated recovery systems and were told to contact support, which they did. Sup…

> firing at least two people involved in the debacle The idea that after a mistake companies should fire people leads to company cultures that are overall worse for everyone, including customers/users. Demand that they apologize, even that they give compensation, but not firing.

Apologizing is useless when the power remains

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#225

Post by permo-w »

mysterydip wrote: post #206
permo-w wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

similarly, a few days ago I was working on a project with a couple of people and I had our meeting notes in a Google Doc. I went to share the doc with the people and was told that it wouldn't be possible due to "inappropriate content". after a quick scan of the text I realised that it was because the notes contained the word "imagery" - in relation to a logo. once removed, the problem went away, but it's disgusting t…

> not only has Google given themselves the right to scan your documents You agreed to it: "We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our Program Policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law." https://www.google.com/drive/terms-of-service/?hl=en Their list of policy violations is quite long: https://support.google.com/do…

yes that's why I phrased it as "given themselves the right". they don't need to put that in their content policy

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#227

Post by JKCalhoun »

mysterydip wrote: post #206
permo-w wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

similarly, a few days ago I was working on a project with a couple of people and I had our meeting notes in a Google Doc. I went to share the doc with the people and was told that it wouldn't be possible due to "inappropriate content". after a quick scan of the text I realised that it was because the notes contained the word "imagery" - in relation to a logo. once removed, the problem went away, but it's disgusting t…

> not only has Google given themselves the right to scan your documents You agreed to it: "We may review content to determine whether it is illegal or violates our Program Policies, and we may remove or refuse to display content that we reasonably believe violates our policies or the law." https://www.google.com/drive/terms-of-service/?hl=en Their list of policy violations is quite long: https://support.google.com/do…

I love this Brazil-world (the film) we have created for ourselves.

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#228

Post by SpaceNoodled »

bilalq wrote: post #172

To use Amazon's terminology here, it really feels like they're becoming a Day Two company. It took decades to cultivate the perception that Amazon cares about customers more than any other company. It takes so much less to destroy that image. Google has already started paying the price for their customer-hostile behavior. It's a meme at this point how unreliable Google is for anything. Amazon and AWS have consistentl…

It was Day Two at Amazon by the time Jassy took over, roughly the same time they began paying lip service to being the "most customer centric" company on their "leadership principles" rather than actually just doing it. It became more and more apparent every month and precipitated my exit.

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#229

Post by flir »

Fnoord wrote: post #185
flir wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skip the speech-to-text step, grab the subtitles from youtube.

Good one! Not always reliable, but pretty good (this video it does not seem to work with, says no subs). Not sure if Whisper.cpp (yes I did mean OpenAI Whisper) is better though, or has similar issues on the edge cases I encountered with YouTube subs. Here's the output by Whisper.cpp > $ whisper --verbose False --language English --output_format txt transcribe_me.wav > [...] (removed, comment too long) > $ cat transc…

Just FYI, use:

yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --sub-format json3 --sub-lang en

I don't know why automatic subs require a different flag, but they do.

What's that "mods" CLI?

Re: Amazon cancels my account after exposing account lockout for “racist doorbell” [video]

#230

Post by JKCalhoun »

phpisthebest wrote: post #153
smcl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait so if you have a "backup" card in case of emergency, the chances are it'll fail anyway? I kinda hate this stuff where we have to guess at how some company's internal mystery processes work to actually use their service :-/

I have this problem all the time with the HSA card (or did until i changed providers) I would rarely use it, but then I would try to pay for something with it and it would be declined, when I called they always said it was "suspended due to inactivity"

So Yogi Berra works in the security department, not letting you use your card because you never use your card. I love the self-reinforcing nature of it.
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