Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.

And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketplace, find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)

When I was at a medium-sized consumer-facing company whose name you’d recognize if you’re in the tech space (intentionally vague) we had some customers try this. They’d find product managers or directors on LinkedIn then start trying to contact them with phone numbers found on the internet, personal email addresses, or even doing things like finding photos their family members posted and complaining the comments.

We had to start warning them not to do it again, then following up with more drastic actions on the second violation. I remember several cases where we had to get corporate counsel involved right away and there was talk of getting law enforcement involved because some people thought implied threats would get them what they wanted.

So I can see why companies are quick to lock out customers who try these games.

Most of the companies who customers try these "games" against are places like Google and Meta that literally do not provide a way for the average customer to reach a human. None.

Those have got it coming for them, the megacorps' stance on this is despicable and far worse than the customers directly reaching execs who could instantly change this but don't because it would cut into their $72 billion per year net profit.

This is a case where laws simply did not catch up to the digital era. In the brick and mortar era it was by definition possible to reach humans.

I get that your company was smaller and probably did allow for a way to reach a human but that's not generalizable.

You only referenced two companies...

Name a major company, then try to contact customer service and interact with an actual human.

Even if they do have a contact phone number, good luck navigating the mazes of voice prompts.

Amazon isn't actually so bad about this, but I couldn't tell you if their CSR chat bot is an actual person or mid-level AI by now.