A BBC investigation reveals that Microsoft is permanently banning Palestinians in the U.S. and other countries who use Skype to call relatives in Gaza.
Reportedly, Microsoft has been banning and wiping the accounts of users who have leveraged Skype to contact relatives in Gaza. In some cases, email accounts over a decade old have been locked, destroying access to banking accounts, OneDrive storage, and beyond.
United States resident Salah Elsadi lost his account of over 15 years in the dragnet. “I’ve had this Hotmail for 15 years. They banned me for no reason, saying I have violated their terms — what terms? Tell me. I’ve filled out about 50 forms and called them many many times.” Eiad Hametto from Saudi Arabia echoed the report, “We are civilians with no political background who just wanted to check on our families. They’ve suspended my email account that I’ve had for nearly 20 years. It was connected to all my work. They killed my life online.”
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas
This is what I fear the most with these platforms. They have these shitty automated moderation systems that can just decide to delete everything you have there on a whim. Already common on places like youtube and facebook, but it just keeps getting worse. Every site is pushing users into signing in with their google/microsoft/whatever accounts.
Remember the guy who lost access to his smart home when amazon banned him for no reason?
It isn’t even on a whim. They get pressured to act on “anti semitism” and define that to mean anything that offends Zionists.
Not under their new owner, since he’s the one that pushed for the definition change in the first place, among many other blatantly biased changes to the ADL in the past decade.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different, but i agree with your sentiment.
if you are depending on a platform where you are the goods being sold, not the customer, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are taken of the shelf on a moment’s notice.
everyone has a choice.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
The accusation was completely false, and even if the guy actually were a racist pos, remotely disabling devices he paid for and owns is not a good road to go on.
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
ok, that doesn’t even make sense, but it shows how wildly different and random the “reasons” can be.
i was thinking about the case where guy took a photo of some rash on his son’s penis to send it to a doctor and some automated system flagged it as child pornography.
I use Gmail, and am concerned about the same thing. But of the alternatives I don’t know any that have wide support for social logins, which are damn convient.
it doesn’t have to be clean cut.
i have my personal and important mails in my private mailbox, on my own domain. i use gmail as a backup and spam mail, i use it everywhere where i assume the mail can go to some spam database sooner or later.
so if i lost access to it one day, i would lose history of some confirmations from various eshops and shit like that, but nothing that would really cripple me.
i would definitely not put my family photos there and hope they stay there forever.
which are damn convient
and that’s how they get us…
