Similar thing happened to me. I built an online Japanese - English dictionary and used AdSense to monetize it. One day I got an email saying that my domain has been permabanned because my website appears to be promoting rape and pedophilia. As an example of one of the many offending pages on my domain they sent me urls to the definition and translation of words "pedophilia" and "rape" in Japanese.
Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems.
I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.
Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their "obscene" language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are "vulgar", etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.
The crazy thing is that Google even took this action despite it also being against their interests. Sure, your business specifically is relatively inconsequential to them, but they must've made hundreds of thousands of similar mistakes. That's a fair amount of ad inventory to miss out on, surely?
Google accounts have enough worth & history associated with them that they should be able to create some kind of appeal process whereby if you jump through the right hoops proving identity and such, you could eventually reach a human who can intervene?
It feels like they're religious about the idea of having an algorithm decide everything. Works pretty well for some things, but they sure do burn some customers/clients pretty badly along the way for other things.
One possible problem is that there are always more people willing to step in. I assume that I can still find a Japanese to English dictionary by searching Google. If one, or N, such websites get taken out by algorithmic flaws or bad actors reporting competitors, then others will simply rise up and take their place (or Google will subsume their content into the instant answers section). In this way, Google may not really be losing anything even if they are constantly burning their partners - there are always new partners coming up.
It begs the question seeing as they've written a bot to determine what's offensive why don't they hook it directly to the ad servers and auto disable ads on the offending pages only?
It's that Data Scientists don't realize most of their models still simply fit a conditional expectation - and given all their power, it's going to be us, not Amazon or Google, who has to adapt to the distribution as not to repeatedly get hit as some sort of outlier.
It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck. At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.
Ha! I’m sorry but it’s already screwed. Compared to where we stood when people were actually arguing for a free and open internet and against centralization and corporatization we have arrived at almost all of their dire predictions and the last few seem to be well on their way. No one is fighting it anymore, they’re just trying to grab the scraps that fall off the table that the big five sit at and hoping they don’t get stomped into oblivion by the giants.
> I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.
The solution isn't easy, but it's simple: stop using Amazon (specially AWS), Google (specially AdSense), etc. Once they lose half their annual revenue, they'll start taking things seriously.
Happened to me for Amazon. Customer for 20+ years, wanted to sell something, account closed. No appeal, no explanation, last mail said "DONT SEND US MORE MAILS".
Happened to me in the exact same way with eBay. User (relatively inactive) for 13+ years, go to sell something (boots lol) with original pics, full description, everything set up correctly, and banned within 5 minutes. No way to appeal, and last email after they said they'd refund my $1 ad post charge, was that my account was being deleted.
I was using the Youtube API for personal access, only related to my personal account and information.
Had my API key revoked because it hadn't been used for 90 days. They provided a link to reclaim it, yielding a LONG form where most questions were only applicable to businesses and service providers.
I answered to the best of my abilities, requesting them to give me access again,also exhausting other available communication options on the matter.
That was about 6 months ago, all I got so far was automated emails telling me it's in review.
I recently got policy violation notices citing shocking content for articles about land usage in West Virginia and uneven distribution of GDP around the world. Their AI is definitely not good.
Dystopian like the movie Brazil isn't it? Arbitrary, automatous machinations lacking in human supervision, with anonymous accusations believed automatically, convicted instantly, and banishment forever.
This is the AI tyranny they warned you about. Let's say the future is fully automated AI locking you out of things for social credit score violations. There's no due process or appeals, there's no one working in customer service. They don't really care about you individually because you're just taking up space and not generating much revenue anyway.
One of the problems with very large corporations like Google is the marginal benefit of each additional customer is negligible. They have so much money that they don't really need extra business and would rather pursue other objectives. Look at all the stuff getting cancelled lately for whatever reason. The whole thing takes place extra-judicially and is not in the monetary interest of these companies. Stakeholder capitalism if you will. I think the old profit driven system was better because at least you knew what the rules were. Now, the way these big companies make decisions is largely opaque and based on secret rules and arbitrary decisions often based on nothing but whim, or worse, a "good enough" algorithm.
Adsense is Google and Google is an American company, you have to be very careful about the words in use. Usually it means a massive blocklist of words, when finding them don't display the ads on that page.
Even bigger newspapers sometimes don't have ads on the more morbid type of news pages.
This doesn't explain the fact it was only applied to one business. If it was a simple keyword matcher banning sites that use words on the naughty list then at least it would be fair and equitable stupidity. Google applying it seemingly at random so whether or not you can make an ad-driven living is mostly down to luck makes it much worse.
And this is a passed down requirement, coming from the major advertisers. Google is simply enacting their will to never advertise on anything remotely related to a laundry list of taboos. I have a vague memory of something about this being in ToS (which I read ages ago, before joining the company) and I think we got smarter about this (preventing display on particular content; think like demonetising particular videos on YT).
Source: I work in Google. Not in Ads, but this topic has been discussed in TGIF at some point.
I think what we're learning from many debacles on YouTube, Amazon, and Google is this:
Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment.
Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.
Comcast has lots of humans and they suck worse than Google.
I don’t think the answer is humans or algorithms, the answer is organizations incentivized to solve customer problems. Google doesn’t care about customers, if they did, they would fix this. Customers are locked in because where else will you go.
Just like Comcast doesn’t care because there’s only one cable company, Google doesn’t really have any AdWords or Adsense competition.
I think the solution is more competition so use ddg. Once customers have mobility, Google will work to retain them.
> Comcast has lots of humans and they suck worse than Google.
It's harder to step on a landmine with Google, but Google's landmine is far more devastating.
We've already seen lots of news stories about algorithms shutting down people's Gmail accounts, developer accounts, YouTube channels, etc.
I personally went through 6 months of hell when my brother's Gmail account was locked due to "inauthentic behavior". He had become disabled and unable to log in, and when I logged in from my machine, Google's algorithm flagged it.
I went through an infuriating loop of trying to unlock it and hitting the same algorithm. There was no number to call. I would've paid $10,000 to get back into that account, which would've required 10 min with a customer support rep.
I tweeted at Google and they told me I had to log in to Twitter with his account in order to get help (obviously impossible for me). It was the most angry I have ever been at any company. It locked me out of important medical documents, family messages, social media -- everything.
I finally fixed it by asking a friend who was a marketing exec at Google to help. He said there's an internal form you can use for this situation -- only available to Google employees.
Other people have had similar experiences and had livelihoods destroyed.
Whatever you think about Comcast, they will never ignore you and let your entire digital life get locked away without any kind of recourse.
In a sense, Comcast actually has very few humans. Most of their humans are 100% policy-constrained. They are not empowered to make decisions. Their only advantage over a machine is the ability to understand human language. For all practical purposes, they are an automated system.
> Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.
I'm sure most people are generally happy to wait 2 days for something to arrive as well. Honestly, it almost feels like Amazon is trying to become an Alibaba and potentially look to take them on with the level of product quality that is now available there.
The cynic in me says that you have identified why big tech companies spend so much money funding GPT and similar research:
Soon, your appeal will be replied to by an AI, too. That way, most people will have the impression that they were reconsidered by a human and found in fault, which will likely make a large percentage of them give up. We're stonewalling real humans by building fake humans :(
And that means GPT could possibly reduce support costs for Amazon.
> The cynic in me says that you have identified why big tech companies spend so much money funding GPT and similar research
I don't think this is cynical. It's discussed openly. They want to provide the tools to enable all companies to automate customer service, which is where Facebook's big chatbot push came from.
Software jobs are being automated away, but not by AI. If you think about it, any time-saving library, service, or tool is going to reduce headcount at an efficient organization.
For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors.
That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.
Some companies would be happy to pay that AI to develop their b$ software, because once in a position to abuse you customers, why not abuse them with less costs.
AI won’t be replacing software engineers anytime soon but something to keep in mind:
While people talk up Googles ai (at least they once did) the truth is while they may put out some good research now and again most of the stuff they deploy is crap by design - they can’t afford to spend a dollar per day per customer to run a complex algorithm on your data, they can only spend fractions of a penny.
This severely limits the quality of the ai deployed by large consumer oriented megacorps.
On the other hand you look at some of the ai being deployed in the b2b space or anywhere there is a real exchange of money and you’ll see some pretty expensive and interesting ai research and deployments.
> Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable
But the market is driving more and more money/resources to those companies/services.
Let alone Amazon/Youtube/Google are very different businesses, you can say Google has non-existent customer support, but at least for consumers, so far my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative.
> my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative
I don't dispute that. But a lot of other people have issues with dropshippers, fake products, radioactive products[1], unreliable reviews, etc.
When I stopped using Amazon, I realized I was returning ~90% of all my purchases just because the product was fake, described wrong, low quality, or just not durable enough to last even a month.
Yes, it's great to be able to return things, but it's a lot nicer to feel reasonably confident that the person who sold a product to me actually believes it's a good fit for what I want as a consumer.
Human-curated? Both Walmart and Target have unfortunately switched over to the same online seller marketplace business model that Amazon has. The introduction of this on Target is fairly new, but soon I believe Amazon sellers will be going multichannel and searches for products on any of those sites will return pages and pages of white-label crap.
> Human-curated? Both Walmart and Target have unfortunately switched over to the same online seller marketplace business model that Amazon has.
On both of those sites, you can change the filter to show only products that are available in stores.
Those in-store products still have whatever guarantees they did 20 years ago (selected by a human working for Target, probably going to be pulled off shelves if they result in too many returns).
Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment.
Algorithms are human judgement.
In a strict code sense an algorithm is a way of encoding a set of assumptions that you decide on when you're developing the code to run it. Even in unsupervised machine learning an algorithm is the result of human judgement because someone decided to delegate the decision making process to a machine.
Every time a computer makes a judgement call there is a human who is responsible, and should be accountable, for that process existing.
I think you're making a semantic argument that redefines "human judgment" to such a broad definition that this entire discussion becomes meaningless.
To pull it back a bit, "human judgment" in my usage meant "input processed by human using a brain" and algorithm meant "input processed by machine".
Given those premises, the argument that "algorithms are human judgment" is untrue both by definition and by observation.
For example, when I ask Google/Siri/Alexa a question like, "What is the best way to set up my router?", I will get a wildly different answer than if I ask a GeekSquad employee.
I guess they don't have to. Cell phones and IP phones have terrible voice quality compared to a land-line; median quality is far worse than the worst long-distance connection I ever got in the 90s.
People use them because they are cheap and convenient though. It's the same with algorithms. If you charge margins high enough for good customer service you will get out-competed by those that don't on price.
An important point to make imo is that algorithms will not be close to human decision making until we hit AGI. No matter how complex they get until that point you can always cheat them in absolutely ridiculous and more importantly reproducible ways. Meaning scams scale and can do way more damage than a human error.
> Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories
Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
>Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses.
I don't believe this. The reputation loss alone will cost you a lot of potential money. Stadia is basically dead because the Google brand is completely untrustworthy. B2B customers want to avoid Google as much as possible because it's just a liability that threatens to ruin their business.
In a non-dystopian world, though, the algorithms can make life way better. We could have filters that catch more scams and abuse than typical humans do... and then reasonable humans behind that are responsive and fix the carnage for where they go wrong.
Human-equivalent AGI is not sufficient for doing better than human moderation, despite all the problems with current generation AI content moderation.
The reason it isn’t sufficient to be human-level is because individual humans have all kinds of biases and blindspots which scammers design their scams around.
I’m kinda thinking it may be a necessary prerequisite, as scams could involve anything a human wants, but it isn’t enough.
It doesn’t have to displace everything else, it simply has to be regulated by law. A landlord cannot come to your physical store and remove few products. The same logic must apply here, with the platform providing sufficient means for interaction with local authorities in place of registration of the business.
> Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses
I agree with you, but what I meant by "viable" was more from a consumer perspective.
> This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
While I think you're mostly right, Amazon is eventually going to burn enough buyers that they go back to the more trustworthy brick-and-mortar stores.
Most people I personally know have already done this. They may search for something on Amazon, but they will go and buy it somewhere else.
I'm obviously part of a very specific subset, but it's going to hurt Amazon eventually, especially if the US takes a more consumer-friendly regulatory approach than it has for the past few years (which it will).
Nowadays when I want to buy anything on Amazon it takes so much effort to go through which listing is the Sponsored/ad-based listing vs organic in search. Once that hurdle is crossed, it comes to going through the reviews to see which reviews can be trusted and which can not be. And even after that hurdle, once I place order, I am not sure the item I received is counterfeit or genuine. Too much work and definitely not customer-focused experience!
I guess going to Target is much easier to get the necessary shopping done.
Amazon became almost useless for many types of articles. For any type of item, there are 10-20 resellers selling the exact same cheap item, just with different color and branding. It's essentially become an expensive dollar store.
I've abandoned Amazon because of that, until they finally add a "no third party sellers" option. And also a "don't show items we don't actually send to your country" option.
I was trying to buy a Nintendo Switch yesterday here in the UK, and it said 'Sold by Amazon' and 'Dispatched by Amazon' for the one I chose. So then I clicked that item, went through to the checkout and it said "Sold by Mila AG".
I'm a technically proficient developer who's very careful about where I spend money online. If you're not very internet savvy, it'd have been really easy to miss that. In the end I've ordered from a national chain retailer which are doing click and collect nearby.
I too have recently surprised myself by shopping at Target.com after being unable to find a trustable product on Amazon (latex pillow). The experience was worse but I trust their merchandising more.
The most infuriating is that the search barely works. It will happily ignore keywords so you get hundreds or thousands results only 10 of which have all of the keywords that you mentioned (and they aren't the first 10). There is also no support for negative matches.
With a combo of AdBlock Plus and uBlock Origin and kill all the carousels (for many years now). Since then my shopping in Amazon is a breeze. They do make changes every now and then and I have to block 'this new carousel' that just appeared, but overall my eyes get polluted less.
FYI. On a related note - I was downvoted a couple of days back for an almost similar comment on the ABP uBO combo.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26058260
It seems ABP is shady that they let some businesses bypass their blocker.
Maybe it depends on the Amazon ( i've never gotten a counterfeit or seen what appear to be counterfeit products on .fr). In any case, you know you can return and report if it's indeed a counterfeit.
> i've never gotten a counterfeit or seen what appear to be counterfeit products on .fr
That you know of. There's really no way to know. Counterfeit products could even be manufactured at the official facility, just with no (or even failed) quality control.
In the US you certainly can't for some items. We ordered a food product from amazon and what arrived was not what was described. Amazon said they won't take returns of food items. That finally convinced my wife to de-amazon our purchases (I'd been pushing in that direction for a while).
Yup, I'm increasingly straying away from Amazon. If I need a new set of cooking utensils, do I wade through the hundreds of Chinese no-name entries on Amazon with hundreds of questionable reviews all across the spectrum, or do I just pay a little extra and get the quality ones from Williams-Sonoma?
Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It's monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there's nothing we can do because they are so dominant.
Amazon and other FAANG companies have to be broken up by anti trust rules.
The existing anti trust rules are enough to push these monopolies to stop the anti competitive activities. Just like anti trust rules were used against Microsoft many years ago, which opened door to online competition like Amazon, Google, Apple etc.
I have zero faith that regulation here will realistically have any effect other than inching Amazon a bit closer to being a quasi-state service, and I also have zero faith in that improving customer service at all.
EU (and UK) citizens have the right that automated decision making that affects individuals must:
* be documented, and individuals must be informed about it.
* include simple ways to request human intervention or challenge decisions.
* be regularly checked to ensure it's working as intended.
This applies to anything with "legal or similarly significant effect on individuals". As examples, the ICO there has "automatic refusal of an online credit application" and "e-recruiting practices without human intervention".
IANAL, but I imagine this would cover the OP's situation if they were EU-based, and most similar complaints (Apple unilaterally pulled my app down incorrectly and won't answer my emails, Google wrongly closed my Gmail account). If a lawsuits & penalties start appearing under that umbrella, it might help change the monopolies positions.
Doesn't help in the US of course, but hopefully they'll follow suit in the coming years, which would apply quite a bit more pressure here.
Amazon's automation and lack of accountability towards sellers is mind-deranging. I have a popular product on Amazon US that had a QC issue in 2017. Despite having it been resolved later that year, I am still banned from selling my product in multiple marketplaces (AU, EU, etc). (Which makes little sense, since at the time of the QC issue, I was only in the US anyways). I've had other marketplaces (JP, IN, etc) accept the product, and whenever I can get support people in those locales to answer my emails, they promptly enable my account, citing it having been blocked due to a technical issue.
But other important Amazon marketplaces just won't respond, or don't follow up. I Had the UK tell me if I got a VAT they would enable my account; I did the months of work required to get VAT registered and then responded to UK support that I was ready to go, and have had all of my emails (~1 a month) ignored for over a year now. Why tell me to get VAT and then just pretend I don't exist? They just don't care. Even worse Amazon will INVITE me to join certain marketplaces, which I have to pay to join, to only later then find that I'm randomly blocked in that marketplace as well. Oh yeah, no refunds either.
I've escalated to jeff@amazon and had multiple people there tell me they're in the middle of unblocking the account everywhere, and weeks go by and nothing happens, and then they too just stop responding my emails. At this point jeff@amazon doesn't respond anymore either, even though I made certain to not repeat my request more frequently than once a month. It is like hair-rippingly frustrating and it is the biggest stress point for my business currently. The worst part is this is my main source of income so I'm just relying on their support people who are wholly unaccountable.
I wish I had options as to otherwise but Amazon is such a behemoth now that most of the customers who were purchasing through my own ecommerce store a few years ago now demand to purchase on Amazon or not buy at all. I'm losing a ton of money because of this and have absolutely no way to get help. I cannot even use words to convey how frustrating it has been..
The countries you listed have very strong consumer laws that might make it a higher risk for Amazon. And while you are likely very honest and truthful there are probably a 100 less scrupulous people for every one of you.
Some people seem to think no web market is better and we should go back to brick and mortar mega corps like Target and Walmart, but good luck getting shelf space there.
I wouldn't have a problem with that, but the messaging that they're sending me should be consistent. They should tell me that my account is banned in these marketplaces for the QC issue years past and leave it at that. Instead what they do is string me along, have me pay fees, tell me to submit paperwork, and then I hear nothing. This leads me to believe that there's nothing really wrong with my account, they are just disorganized. What a waste of so many days of my life I've spent trying to resolve it.
Having even a quite high false positive rate would be totally acceptable, if the process involved humans on the Large Faceless Company side.
You'd get an email, "Hello, there might be a problem, here are the details" and if you made some good faith attempt to reply, be able to talk to an actual person, who could potentially escalate your issue.
I agree with you in this instance, you make a good point. 99% accuracy sounds great on paper, but that's a very painful 1% remainder - and in this case, there's no way a rational human would have acted in the same disastrous way the AI did.
That said, in many other applications of AI, a 1% error rate is probably a huge success. AI does not need to be perfect to be considered successful, it only needs to do better than a human. In this example, AI failed miserably at that, but there are plenty of applications where AI errs far less frequently than humans do at the same task.
The problem here is you need two algorithms. Their current algorithm might be 99% sensitive to detecting fraud. But they need a 99.99999999% algorithm that’s specific to not fraud. So by running then positives through the second one, they can detect the false positives and lessen these episodes.
I work at a medical simulator training device company - we’re quite small, just 20~ people making these devices in-house. We’ve been grappling Amazon’s Seller Central for quite a while now. Because our simulators look medical in use they keep taking them down and banning them. It’s like playing whack-a-mole and it’s been basically impossible to reach a real life person to explain the issue.
As someone who used to work in the same industry (2011-2015 as a programmer at Surgical Science) I'm curious which company you're working for.
I know our salespeople had constant troubles with the U.S. customs because we always had to declare whether our devices were medical equipment or not and different TSA agents had different opinions on how it should have been filled in. They often got upset regardless of how the form was filled in.
Legally speaking it is not a medical device, but some agents disputed that because it was used in the medical field at hospitals. Other agents were upset for wasting their time if you did declare it as medical equipment.
In my experiences, most of the times when "TSA agents" get annoyed, is because they're part of the $10/hr contractor service. As long as it's not the gun they use to test them on a regular basis, they don't appear to care one bit.
The real TSA agents however, do appear to care. And I'd also argue they're also quite competent. But Snowden was indeed correct that 95% of the people you deal with at the "federal government" are contractors - of varying quality.
Oh wow yeah Surgical Science - their LapSim mentor simulators for laparoscopy are certainly our direct competitors. I’m at Laparo Medical Simulators - we specialize just in laparoscopy and we’re working on delivering an enterprise VR simulator (no goggles), though our main market currently is simpler box trainers which undercut the competition on price.
What you’re describing is something we run into with the US specifically quite often. It’s kinda crazy, but the US has really become a stagnant market; nationalistic economically, and difficult to do business with unless someone gets to take a big piece of the slice, and very conservative when it comes to innovation.
I would really like to talk more if you’re up for it.
Readit News
Of course none of my competitors using the exact same data set had any such problems.
I tried for YEARS to appeal it. There are simply no humans working at Google and nobody reads your emails.
Edit: Actually, I did get a response a couple times but it was obviously automated. They just said to remove the ads from the pages where such words are displayed. So I added a simple rule and a column in the database to hide ads for those keywords. That just triggered the bot to move down the list of their "obscene" language. Next it was the names of various sexual positions, acts and fetishes (Japanese does have a very rich vocabulary in that topic), then manga slang, even silly sounding onomatopoeias that when explained in plain English are "vulgar", etc.. It seems once your website is flagged there is simply no way get clean.
Google accounts have enough worth & history associated with them that they should be able to create some kind of appeal process whereby if you jump through the right hoops proving identity and such, you could eventually reach a human who can intervene?
It feels like they're religious about the idea of having an algorithm decide everything. Works pretty well for some things, but they sure do burn some customers/clients pretty badly along the way for other things.
:(
I realize it's complicated, but there are things that make me worry the future of the internet might not be so great.
It's that Data Scientists don't realize most of their models still simply fit a conditional expectation - and given all their power, it's going to be us, not Amazon or Google, who has to adapt to the distribution as not to repeatedly get hit as some sort of outlier.
It's a dystopia where AI works because of us trying to conform to it, because otherwise we are out of luck. At some point, we self select into Amazon-humans, Google-humans etc.
The solution isn't easy, but it's simple: stop using Amazon (specially AWS), Google (specially AdSense), etc. Once they lose half their annual revenue, they'll start taking things seriously.
No humans, just AI (ML) decisions.
Had my API key revoked because it hadn't been used for 90 days. They provided a link to reclaim it, yielding a LONG form where most questions were only applicable to businesses and service providers.
I answered to the best of my abilities, requesting them to give me access again,also exhausting other available communication options on the matter.
That was about 6 months ago, all I got so far was automated emails telling me it's in review.
Skynet's greatest achievement was to make you think it's not real.
Some folks here are in touch with it though. Perhaps you'll have a better luck using HN as the google support channel.
Deleted Comment
One of the problems with very large corporations like Google is the marginal benefit of each additional customer is negligible. They have so much money that they don't really need extra business and would rather pursue other objectives. Look at all the stuff getting cancelled lately for whatever reason. The whole thing takes place extra-judicially and is not in the monetary interest of these companies. Stakeholder capitalism if you will. I think the old profit driven system was better because at least you knew what the rules were. Now, the way these big companies make decisions is largely opaque and based on secret rules and arbitrary decisions often based on nothing but whim, or worse, a "good enough" algorithm.
Even bigger newspapers sometimes don't have ads on the more morbid type of news pages.
That puritanical, prudish attitude has done so much damage already, we should stop accepting it as "Americans gonna American".
Source: I work in Google. Not in Ads, but this topic has been discussed in TGIF at some point.
Algorithms are not even close to substituting for human customer service, human moderation, and human judgment.
Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories, and I don't really miss the millions of extra products Amazon has.
I don’t think the answer is humans or algorithms, the answer is organizations incentivized to solve customer problems. Google doesn’t care about customers, if they did, they would fix this. Customers are locked in because where else will you go.
Just like Comcast doesn’t care because there’s only one cable company, Google doesn’t really have any AdWords or Adsense competition.
I think the solution is more competition so use ddg. Once customers have mobility, Google will work to retain them.
It's harder to step on a landmine with Google, but Google's landmine is far more devastating.
We've already seen lots of news stories about algorithms shutting down people's Gmail accounts, developer accounts, YouTube channels, etc.
I personally went through 6 months of hell when my brother's Gmail account was locked due to "inauthentic behavior". He had become disabled and unable to log in, and when I logged in from my machine, Google's algorithm flagged it.
I went through an infuriating loop of trying to unlock it and hitting the same algorithm. There was no number to call. I would've paid $10,000 to get back into that account, which would've required 10 min with a customer support rep.
I tweeted at Google and they told me I had to log in to Twitter with his account in order to get help (obviously impossible for me). It was the most angry I have ever been at any company. It locked me out of important medical documents, family messages, social media -- everything.
I finally fixed it by asking a friend who was a marketing exec at Google to help. He said there's an internal form you can use for this situation -- only available to Google employees.
Other people have had similar experiences and had livelihoods destroyed.
Whatever you think about Comcast, they will never ignore you and let your entire digital life get locked away without any kind of recourse.
I'm sure most people are generally happy to wait 2 days for something to arrive as well. Honestly, it almost feels like Amazon is trying to become an Alibaba and potentially look to take them on with the level of product quality that is now available there.
Half the results on any given product I search point straight back to Alibaba if I image search.
Sometimes I check if Aliexpress has it too, and if I'm not in a hurry I get it there for a huge savings.
Soon, your appeal will be replied to by an AI, too. That way, most people will have the impression that they were reconsidered by a human and found in fault, which will likely make a large percentage of them give up. We're stonewalling real humans by building fake humans :(
And that means GPT could possibly reduce support costs for Amazon.
I don't think this is cynical. It's discussed openly. They want to provide the tools to enable all companies to automate customer service, which is where Facebook's big chatbot push came from.
And that's by design. They don't want to talk to you and help you. You're going to buy there anyway and we all know it.
For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors.
That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.
If your human support team made a mistake, there was an appeal process. If your AI makes a mistake, sorry, bad robot, deal with it.
While people talk up Googles ai (at least they once did) the truth is while they may put out some good research now and again most of the stuff they deploy is crap by design - they can’t afford to spend a dollar per day per customer to run a complex algorithm on your data, they can only spend fractions of a penny.
This severely limits the quality of the ai deployed by large consumer oriented megacorps.
On the other hand you look at some of the ai being deployed in the b2b space or anywhere there is a real exchange of money and you’ll see some pretty expensive and interesting ai research and deployments.
But the market is driving more and more money/resources to those companies/services.
Let alone Amazon/Youtube/Google are very different businesses, you can say Google has non-existent customer support, but at least for consumers, so far my experience with Amazon is more positive than negative.
I don't dispute that. But a lot of other people have issues with dropshippers, fake products, radioactive products[1], unreliable reviews, etc.
When I stopped using Amazon, I realized I was returning ~90% of all my purchases just because the product was fake, described wrong, low quality, or just not durable enough to last even a month.
Yes, it's great to be able to return things, but it's a lot nicer to feel reasonably confident that the person who sold a product to me actually believes it's a good fit for what I want as a consumer.
1. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/09/20/business/nuclea...
On both of those sites, you can change the filter to show only products that are available in stores.
Those in-store products still have whatever guarantees they did 20 years ago (selected by a human working for Target, probably going to be pulled off shelves if they result in too many returns).
Algorithms are human judgement.
In a strict code sense an algorithm is a way of encoding a set of assumptions that you decide on when you're developing the code to run it. Even in unsupervised machine learning an algorithm is the result of human judgement because someone decided to delegate the decision making process to a machine.
Every time a computer makes a judgement call there is a human who is responsible, and should be accountable, for that process existing.
To pull it back a bit, "human judgment" in my usage meant "input processed by human using a brain" and algorithm meant "input processed by machine".
Given those premises, the argument that "algorithms are human judgment" is untrue both by definition and by observation.
For example, when I ask Google/Siri/Alexa a question like, "What is the best way to set up my router?", I will get a wildly different answer than if I ask a GeekSquad employee.
They may be great for 80% or even 99.9%, but they cannot be 100%.
People use them because they are cheap and convenient though. It's the same with algorithms. If you charge margins high enough for good customer service you will get out-competed by those that don't on price.
> Maybe this means web-scale sites like Amazon's marketplace aren't viable. I'm fine with that implication. Stores like Target and Walmart seem to have the same prices with human-curated inventories
Not only are they viable, they are hugely more profitable without the human expenses. This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
I don't believe this. The reputation loss alone will cost you a lot of potential money. Stadia is basically dead because the Google brand is completely untrustworthy. B2B customers want to avoid Google as much as possible because it's just a liability that threatens to ruin their business.
Of course, that's not what we've got...
The reason it isn’t sufficient to be human-level is because individual humans have all kinds of biases and blindspots which scammers design their scams around.
I’m kinda thinking it may be a necessary prerequisite, as scams could involve anything a human wants, but it isn’t enough.
Given that's possible with human moderation too (cf tax codes), what makes you think AGI will solve the problem?
I agree with you, but what I meant by "viable" was more from a consumer perspective.
> This inhuman model - yes, I think that is exactly what it is - will displace everything else that simply can't compete in runaway capitalism.
While I think you're mostly right, Amazon is eventually going to burn enough buyers that they go back to the more trustworthy brick-and-mortar stores.
Most people I personally know have already done this. They may search for something on Amazon, but they will go and buy it somewhere else.
I'm obviously part of a very specific subset, but it's going to hurt Amazon eventually, especially if the US takes a more consumer-friendly regulatory approach than it has for the past few years (which it will).
I guess going to Target is much easier to get the necessary shopping done.
Salomon, Nike, and Garmin all got direct purchases from me recently because of what you describe.
I've abandoned Amazon because of that, until they finally add a "no third party sellers" option. And also a "don't show items we don't actually send to your country" option.
I'm a technically proficient developer who's very careful about where I spend money online. If you're not very internet savvy, it'd have been really easy to miss that. In the end I've ordered from a national chain retailer which are doing click and collect nearby.
- Buy shoes from the Addidas website and you can have your name printed on your shoes for free,
- Buy from Quantas or Ibis instead of a price comparator and you’ll have free cancellations or rebooking for a period.
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That you know of. There's really no way to know. Counterfeit products could even be manufactured at the official facility, just with no (or even failed) quality control.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/count...
The existing anti trust rules are enough to push these monopolies to stop the anti competitive activities. Just like anti trust rules were used against Microsoft many years ago, which opened door to online competition like Amazon, Google, Apple etc.
I am a bit down because I’m not aware of any success in fixing this kind of problem through regulation.
I’m trying to think of a regulated industry or company that has service as good as even Walmart and can’t come up with anything.
The hope would be that at least they have some bank level of regulation where they at least have to respond by snail mail and stuff.
EU (and UK) citizens have the right that automated decision making that affects individuals must:
* be documented, and individuals must be informed about it.
* include simple ways to request human intervention or challenge decisions.
* be regularly checked to ensure it's working as intended.
This applies to anything with "legal or similarly significant effect on individuals". As examples, the ICO there has "automatic refusal of an online credit application" and "e-recruiting practices without human intervention".
IANAL, but I imagine this would cover the OP's situation if they were EU-based, and most similar complaints (Apple unilaterally pulled my app down incorrectly and won't answer my emails, Google wrongly closed my Gmail account). If a lawsuits & penalties start appearing under that umbrella, it might help change the monopolies positions.
Doesn't help in the US of course, but hopefully they'll follow suit in the coming years, which would apply quite a bit more pressure here.
https://stratechery.com/2020/the-anti-amazon-alliance/
But other important Amazon marketplaces just won't respond, or don't follow up. I Had the UK tell me if I got a VAT they would enable my account; I did the months of work required to get VAT registered and then responded to UK support that I was ready to go, and have had all of my emails (~1 a month) ignored for over a year now. Why tell me to get VAT and then just pretend I don't exist? They just don't care. Even worse Amazon will INVITE me to join certain marketplaces, which I have to pay to join, to only later then find that I'm randomly blocked in that marketplace as well. Oh yeah, no refunds either.
I've escalated to jeff@amazon and had multiple people there tell me they're in the middle of unblocking the account everywhere, and weeks go by and nothing happens, and then they too just stop responding my emails. At this point jeff@amazon doesn't respond anymore either, even though I made certain to not repeat my request more frequently than once a month. It is like hair-rippingly frustrating and it is the biggest stress point for my business currently. The worst part is this is my main source of income so I'm just relying on their support people who are wholly unaccountable.
I wish I had options as to otherwise but Amazon is such a behemoth now that most of the customers who were purchasing through my own ecommerce store a few years ago now demand to purchase on Amazon or not buy at all. I'm losing a ton of money because of this and have absolutely no way to get help. I cannot even use words to convey how frustrating it has been..
Some people seem to think no web market is better and we should go back to brick and mortar mega corps like Target and Walmart, but good luck getting shelf space there.
p.s. Can’t wait to try the drugs.
It probably *is* 99% accurate - there is a lot of fraudulent activity online.
That 1% false positive rate really hurts though, destroying people's livelihoods.
I think that people developing machine learning models sometimes don't think about the consequences of the false positives enough.
There is a great section in David Spiegelhalter's book The Art of Statistics which got me thinking about this.
You'd get an email, "Hello, there might be a problem, here are the details" and if you made some good faith attempt to reply, be able to talk to an actual person, who could potentially escalate your issue.
That said, in many other applications of AI, a 1% error rate is probably a huge success. AI does not need to be perfect to be considered successful, it only needs to do better than a human. In this example, AI failed miserably at that, but there are plenty of applications where AI errs far less frequently than humans do at the same task.
I know our salespeople had constant troubles with the U.S. customs because we always had to declare whether our devices were medical equipment or not and different TSA agents had different opinions on how it should have been filled in. They often got upset regardless of how the form was filled in.
Legally speaking it is not a medical device, but some agents disputed that because it was used in the medical field at hospitals. Other agents were upset for wasting their time if you did declare it as medical equipment.
The real TSA agents however, do appear to care. And I'd also argue they're also quite competent. But Snowden was indeed correct that 95% of the people you deal with at the "federal government" are contractors - of varying quality.
What you’re describing is something we run into with the US specifically quite often. It’s kinda crazy, but the US has really become a stagnant market; nationalistic economically, and difficult to do business with unless someone gets to take a big piece of the slice, and very conservative when it comes to innovation.
I would really like to talk more if you’re up for it.