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>At the very least it’d be useful to know the frequency at which this kind of thing happens before making a judgment call on it.

Why is that? Is there a number like 1 in 1000 where is acceptable for Big corporation to screw people and "steal" their accounts? Think about average Joe story that does not appear in news-papers and HN. Laws seem very obvious here, if you want to close a customer account you need to do some minimum stuff:

1 tell the customer what they did wrong, in the same way if you would show to a judge the evidence that this customer did X and X is illegal or against the TOS you show the customer what he did wrong. I understand that this might make your giant corporations anti-spam/anti-fraud job harder but we don't want to optimize for lazy developers and lazy corporations.

2 Offer the customer a simple way to download his account data

3 If the customer bought media and games you have to either refund the customer or find a way to transfer the media to the customer. You would say that this is a hard problem, the answer is again let's not optimize for making things easy for super rich corporation and super hard for regular people. Maybe some innovation would come out of this , like maybe some kind of way where I can buy a book or game and I can sell/donate it like any physical object I buy.

The issue is that now people are excusing that is would be hard for super rich company to do a decent job so is OK if they do a terrible job as long as I, the HN reader don't care about the poor guys affected.

Also from what I noticed from YouTube it seems that simple obvious solutions are not even explored, you treat a 10 years old account with a good reputation the same as a 1 day old account, are all the developers working on ad targeting and polishing the next version of some shit framework? Is there any Google product that you were impressed by their overall quality?



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