alt Hacker News"Right to Human Verification" is something I have actually thought about a lot.
I want to able to verify my identity against a system. I also want to be able to not do that.
So for instance, on Twitter/X, I could verify myself and filter only other verified people / filter those goverments that have validated the identities of the users. I want to be able to do that. But I also want to be able to log in into Twitter anonymously.
I would love a "Right to Anonymity and Right to Human Verification"
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Technically EU already has this as a right in the recent DSA legislation to be able to appeal any automated moderation that online platforms hand out.
"computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision." - IBM, 1979
You just fed the 2036 prediction.
I tried to place an order on amazon for the first time last week. After creating an account and going through all the steps including paying with a non-refundable payment method (iDeal, similar to bank transfer), I went to bed, only to notice later that it was immediately cancelled "to protect the their systems and their customer" (they thought I was somehow defrauding them by giving them money for a product being offered)
I was welcome to go through human verification, send my passport to some third party, wait three working days, and then they'd review the case... it would never arrive in time for the person's birthday anymore
Human review sounds good but if this is the sort of hoops you have to jump through, you're still screwed if the algorithms hates you because they're everywhere: from trying to use paypal to paying for a translator with stripe to trying to rescue food with "too good to go" using credit cards. Blocked, blocked, blocked. Not that I could get a credit card because the algorithm at the bank didn't like me, but a shared card (where the other person is also responsible for any debt) was okay, so now I need to continuously pay my partner 50% of what I buy with it for myself. You'd think I'm not creditworthy but I never had debts or needed any loan. I don't know why algorithms keep blocking me trying to give other people money
Requiring that any fraud algorithm is fair and transparent would probably go a much longer way than codifying a right to appeal. Appeal processes will either just consist of a human clicking confirm on the algorithm's choice, or have a bunch of extra hoops to jump through. If the algorithm were required to be fair to begin with, you could have them fix the root cause instead by demonstrating that it blocks you for no discernable reason and they need to figure out on their end how to make that not happen