Law enforcement doesn't want to be "customer service" reps for Meta any more

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-hacked-users-draining-resources/

by carride • 2 years ago

22 33 2 years ago

freejazz• 2 years ago

Keegs• 2 years ago

“We refuse to operate as the customer service representatives of your company,” the officials add. “Proper investment in response and mitigation is mandatory.”

It’s crazy to me how tech companies pretend customer support is not a critical business function. HN and Twitter are not your contact center, and law enforcement is not your Tier 2 support. With Google in particular I keep hearing that, it isn’t that their customer service is bad, it’s that it doesn’t exist at all. Any exec should find this embarrassing.

colpabar• 2 years ago

Embarrassing? It's an accomplishment for them! They're saving the company a huge amount of money. Employees are expensive, even the ones in the third-world you can pay $2/hr.

myself248• 2 years ago

As long as it's legal for them to do this, they will.

rschneid• 2 years ago

Exactly, these diffuse international entities are merely responding to structures of incentives which are ultimately the government’s responsibility to create and enforce.

Contrary to the quote in the article, proper investment in response and mitigation has, so far, been proven to ~not~ be mandatory for making incredible amounts of cash, which is the primary objective of these behemoths.

Now that externalized costs are starting to personally affect members of government and enforcement, I hope we’ll see some meaningful regulation around accounts on private-but-essential digital platforms resembling a general bill of rights rather than letting private companies get away with nearly anything by default, as is the current state. However merely asking these pseudo-nation-states masquerading as companies to behave differently and expecting to be taken seriously is good for a laugh!

65102• 2 years ago

Oddly I thought this niche would have been the first target for LLM's.

It could seriously outperform human support for some queries.

The user claims their account was stolen, if they fill the report and attempted to log in from a known location/ip using a previously valid password you can immediately block unusual spending and use the attempt to further confirm they lost control over their account. Can quickly gather all kinds of fuzzy data, do they still control their phone/pc? Are they sending dubious messages?

The real fun begins where scammers try to do similar things simultaneously with multiple stolen accounts. If you bother to gather the data the patterns are much easier to find.

mschuster91• 2 years ago

It’s crazy to me how tech companies pretend customer support is not a critical business function.

Because at a certain point of size, it isn't. Even at 10k customers you don't care about losing a few dozen out of frustration, it's just normal attrition - much less at the billions of customers that Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other corporate chunguses have. There will always be enough fresh customers.

All hail the bottom line, because that is all that matters in a society that doesn't give a damn about externalized costs.

ToucanLoucan4• 2 years ago

Can anyone give me a downside to shutting down every social media website tomorrow? And yes I know that isn't a realistic option, it's just, what do these companies actually provide beyond pissing everyone off, enabling harassment, and surveillance?

The only business I can think of that's even more a net negative than social media is perhaps those companies selling car warranties.

vidalee• 2 years ago

The vast majority of people on social medias aren't there for following politics or corporations, but connecting with friends and communities.

surgical_fire• 2 years ago

There are actually many upsides.

UncleEntity4• 2 years ago

Can anyone give me a downside to shutting down every social media website tomorrow?

Perhaps the biggest violation of the First Amendment in the history of the US?

If that's not "abridging the freedom of speech" I don't know what is...

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

Facebook users are not customers. They are the beneficiaries of free computing resources and bandwidth. And they are free to use 2FA to secure their accounts (might even be required).

If people mishandle their login credentials, that is not Facebook’s problem. If someone is a victim of a crime, that is the judicial system’s problem.

BizarroLand• 2 years ago

Facebook users are not customers. They are the beneficiaries of free computing resources and bandwidth. And they are free to use 2FA to secure their accounts (might even be required).
If people mishandle their login credentials, that is not Facebook’s problem. If someone is a victim of a crime, that is the judicial system’s problem.

I'll reference this next time someones asks me to show them an example of something that is both legal and unethical

Ajay-p• 2 years ago

One of my great fears in life is getting locked out of a Google or Meta account. I have resolved in myself that should that occur the account is forever lost because there is no way to get support. The best that one can hope for is that a media publication takes up their plight and writes about it, or they know someone who is employed by one of those corporations. Even when customers pay for a product, Meta and Google customer service is horrible.

morgango• 2 years ago

I had similar concerns so I at least moved my email to Fastmail and then set up a google account tied to it instead of Gmail. When you create the google account, you can just choose to use an existing email address (see https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en#exist...).

Also, with fastmail if you use your own domain you can have any email address automatically forwarded to the same box. So, if your gmail account for "me@mydomain.com" gets shut down you can start a new one with "myself@mydomain.com" and you will still have access to all your customer service emails and info that may have been sent in the past. Any other provider should do, but I have liked fastmail a lot.

SSO + Gmail at the same provider = risk of permanent loss of access.

ahazred8ta• 2 years ago

Actually you CAN get real human SLA tech support from google. If you pay $20/yr for https://one.google.com storage you also get paid support for google account snafus. No joke.

bongoman42• 2 years ago

In one of the success stories of startups the founder's explicit message was 'Let some fires burn'. The fires were people complaining to customer support. The point was you can move faster if you don't bother about resolving issues for a few pesky customers.

carride• 2 years ago

This is without the Wired paywall. HN automatically changes arstechnica to stories that were originally at Wired https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/41-states-tell-m...

gnabgib• 2 years ago

HN, like search engines, uses the canonical link as the original.. it points towards the Wired article (as it should, given it was written for Wired). It's a shame they're A:B testing an alternative clickbait headline on Ars.

seydor• 2 years ago

Facebook is often doing the (investigating/spying) work for the police so it all evens out, no?

putzdown• 2 years ago

Quote: The letter notes that, while the officials cannot be “certain of any connection,” the drastic increase in complaints occurred “around the same time” as layoffs at Meta affecting roughly 11,000 employees in November 2022, around 13 percent of its staff at the time.

Interesting.

Law enforcement doesn't want to be "customer service" reps for Meta any more

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