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0 pointswnsire7y ago0 comments

> Often times companies are legally barred from disclosing this information.

You are talking specifically about the financial and banking industry. Working in the banking industry , compliance regulation prevents banks from communicating about why your funds are frozen so the SEC can investigate and determine whether are not a fraud or suspicious activity were committed.

Such thing does not exist in the IT Industry. Microsoft ran their in house auditing tools , determined the account was suspiscious , set a flag "is_suspicious" as "true" in their database and the next day a batch ran and suspsended their account.

IT Audit for GAFA is 100% automated , there is no human interaction unlike Banking , Insurance and Finance.

Hence, the fact that BFA must communicate after the investigation about what fraud you committed to properly charge you in court and banned you from the services( You can even be banned in an entire country from owning a bank account depending on the severity ) but they must tell you why.

That is not the case for tech, it is completely unregulated which is why it's making me this upset.

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stouset7y ago

Microsoft is a large company with many services, and some of them may intersect with this type of regulation through law enforcement. The financial sector isn’t the only area of business that have these types of restrictions, and it’s often significantly easier from a business and engineering perspective to block an account entirely than to cherry pick which services can and cannot be used.

This is particularly true when products frequently gain new features or integrations with other company-provided services, as changes in one system might allow an account that’s partially suspended to be able to perform legally-forbidden actions in another (think: something like iMessage gaining Apple Pay support). Yes, you can solve these things with engineering, but not only can that easily cost more than it’s worth, but you also open yourself to massive company risk if you fuck it up and regulators catch wind.

splonk7y ago

> The financial sector isn’t the only area of business that have these types of restrictions, and it’s often significantly easier from a business and engineering perspective to block an account entirely than to cherry pick which services can and cannot be used.

Yeah, I used to work on a fraud detection team for another company, where some guy got some traction online complaining about how his payment account got shut down. All sorts of bluster about how he scrupulously followed the terms and conditions and how he couldn't possibly be doing anything fraudulent and how we were stealing his money, and lots of bad publicity in threads like this.

Turns out the FBI was investigating the guy for hosting child porn on another service using the same account, and we weren't allowed to respond in any way to his complaining online. So we shut down all his accounts and couldn't really do anything to defend ourselves against his complaints.

In my experience, like 90+% of the loudest complainers of account shutdowns are completely full of it, and are guilty of very obvious violations that they somehow fail to mention when blogging about it. I'm not going to say that false positives from machine learning systems never happen, but people who loudly complain about their accounts being frozen don't have a good track record, and since most companies aren't going to discuss exactly why they got shut down in the open, the prevailing narrative seems to be that the large faceless corporation doesn't care.

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