Imagine that one day you come back from a walk and cannot open the front door of your house. Try and try, but your key won’t turn. Then you call the telephone and an answering machine answers telling you that he has breached the conditions of the contract and that he cannot enter. What conditions? it will be asked, but the machine is not there to give explanations. It refers you to a page to read the Urban Leasing Law without explaining what you have done or giving you the option to reply. She doesn’t let him go up to the house to collect his belongings or say goodbye to the neighbors. You can’t go back into that building ever again.
The repercussions may be less dramatic. But, judging by the volume of protest messages on networks and forums – because the platforms do not give figures – this is what has happened to thousands of people in the virtual world. Being banned from a video game or a social network could have been a minor issue a few years ago, but the enormous importance that they have gained in recent times in the social and economic sphere means that an expulsion can be a serious problem. Almost all the big social networks kick their users out without giving explanations or hearing reasons. In some cases, the most practical thing is to create a new account. In others, give up. The best thing, if the decision is unfair, would be to file a complaint.
Carolina has been kicked out of Tinder. This 38-year-old from Madrid found out a year ago that she had been banned from the world’s most popular dating app. “Suddenly one day I’m going to log in and I get the message that my account has been canceled for breaking the rules and I’m like… what? I haven’t broken any rules.” Carolina tried to write to Tinder, but her emails hit a wall. “They answered me with automated messages. I was outraged and pissed off, I felt totally helpless,” she recalls.
Beyond a funny anecdote to tell friends, this misadventure can be a real upheaval. Half of the couples that form today meet in virtual environments. A recent study by Stanford University put the percentage at 39% for heterosexual couples and 60% for homosexuals. One in five couples who got married in Spain in 2019 had met through one of these applications according to the portal Bodas.net. Being expelled from them greatly limits the possibilities of finding a partner or friends.
“It’s the main way to meet people. Between the pace of life, work, limitations to social life…” Carlos is 32 years old and has been out of Tinder for almost a year. “They fired me without any explanation. I talked about it with a lawyer friend and I considered filing a complaint, because it supposes a brutal legal defenselessness. In the end, you have private conversations in there, you have the contact of people you are getting to know… It’s a chore. But there is no point in getting into trouble with an American company that does not even answer your emails, I do not have time, money or desire.
That is the main reason why most users do not file a complaint, according to David Maeztu, a lawyer specializing in technology issues. But beyond the complexity of the process, Maeztu points out that we are facing an obvious clash of rights: “On the one hand we have a kind of right of admission transferred to the environment online. But this must be related to how it affects other user rights. A website or a very small game, where you could find another alternative, is not the same as projects in which, due to their size, the limitation to the user may affect their relationships with third parties”. The companies do not take this second aspect into account, explains the lawyer, they only keep the part of the right of admission and that is where it may be relevant to question the terms and conditions of the services. And there is room to denounce.
Carolina believes that some disgruntled contact has been able to report her alleged inappropriate behavior on Tinder and that is why she has been fired. A prepaid card has been purchased to re-enroll in the app with another number. Something similar suspects Carlos, who has not yet returned to the platform. Monica, 25, believes she was expelled because she wrote in her description that she was looking for a sugar daddy (older men getting involved with younger girls, usually with an implicit financial component). “I did it like a joke. But the robot that reads the descriptions did not find it funny,” he says. Raúl, 39, believes that this algorithm must have read some word or expression out of context, because he claims not to have had any bad experience in the app. They are assumptions because none of the four got an explanation by writing to the claims mail. Tinder did not want to respond to this diary.
In 2020 sexual crimes grew by 12% in the environment online according to data from Report on crimes against freedom and sexual indemnity in Spain. 60% of women experience persistent contacts on dating apps, 57% receive unsolicited sexual messages and 44% have been insulted at some time according to a Pew Research study. For this reason, Tinder has a code of conduct (whose views have increased by 57% in recent months) and a button that users can press when they are talking to someone and feel uncomfortable. At the end of 2021, Tinder announced the implementation of two new features based on Artificial Intelligence. When it detects a word or expression marked as negative, it will ask the sender: “Are you sure?” before sending it. If it does, it will ask the receiver “Does the message bother you?”. They are preventive measures, but the last and most effective one remains the same: expel users who do not comply with their rules.
“Of course they have to. The problem is not that they fire people, but how they do it”, explains Samuel Parra, a lawyer specialized in Law in the online environment. “Why not establish a dialogue between the parties? Why don’t they give the right to reply or explain the reasons? Parra answers his own questions by pointing to the sheer size of platforms like Tinder. “They would need a legion of moderators, it’s cheaper to send an automated message.”
‘Fortnite’, Instagram and the ban on other platforms
The case of Tinder is more burdensome, as the account is associated with a telephone number. Getting a new one implies buying a new number. The same thing happens in video games. online, associated with Playstation, Xbox or Steam accounts, where purchased and downloaded games are accumulated. Giving up this account means losing hundreds of euros. That’s why a ban on games like Fortnite can be a sentence, especially considering its relevance at a social level.
“For a lot of kids Fortnite It is much more than a video game. It is the social environment they have to interact with their peers. If you exclude them from that environment, it will have an impact on their lives,” explains Parra. This platform bans users for life if it suspects that they have cheated. When writing an email requesting explanations (the journalist who signed this report did so after being expelled), senders with names like Cronomeister, Alpha or Agent Leviathan respond with automatic, generalist and ambiguous messages. They do not give explanations or listen to arguments. In some cases expulsion can kill a source of income along the way. Fortnite It does not give the option to defend itself and only answers emails automatically. Its creator assures that the platform will have a relevant role in the future of the metaverse, a place yet to be built to which thousands of people have already been denied access.
The impact of being expelled could be less on social networks like Facebook or Instagram, since creating a new account only involves using a new email. But, in any case, by doing so all private information and contacts are lost. And that’s where we get into tricky terrain. Having turned our lives digitally does not mean that we have given permission to a company to manage that life. “You cannot prevent us from accessing our data without giving us explanations, it has a significance that goes beyond the use of the information itself. app. You can’t get in touch with people or even delete your data,” says Parra.
The regulations of the Data Protection Agency are above the terms and conditions of any platform. An Instagram user used this route to regain access to his Instagram account. And he got it. “He said, ‘You guys have terminated my account without notice or ability to defend myself, okay. But I have personal data in that account and they can’t deny me access to it’”, explains the lawyer. Meta, the company that owns Instagram, gave him back access to his account as soon as he received the request. “Surely they did not want the word to spread, there are many people in that situation and a sentence has a lot of repercussion. That is why there are hardly any judicial sentences in this regard, it never comes to trial.”
It also helps that no one reports. Parra believes that this attitude should change. “If we consider that our rights have been violated, let’s start fighting this where it has to be fought, which is not on Twitter, but in court.” It ensures that the acceptance of the terms and conditions of an application or game is subject to the national standard. “Just because you sign it doesn’t give them the right to do whatever they want.”
Maeztu reaches a similar conclusion. He understands that digital environments must be protected from bad practices such as harassment or cheating, but he believes that this cannot lead to users being defenseless. “That there is no dispute resolution service where claiming or counterarguing is a clear defenselessness”, sentence. A company’s unilateral decision should not become final. “Especially when that decision excludes users from an important part of their life, even if it is digital.”
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.