Alexandra Ocasio Cortez triggers a violation?
https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
replies(7):
https://github.com/BlueFalconHD/apple_generative_model_safet...
"(?i)\\bAnthony\\s+Albanese\\b",
"(?i)\\bBoris\\s+Johnson\\b",
"(?i)\\bChristopher\\s+Luxon\\b",
"(?i)\\bCyril\\s+Ramaphosa\\b",
"(?i)\\bJacinda\\s+Arden\\b",
"(?i)\\bJacob\\s+Zuma\\b",
"(?i)\\bJohn\\s+Steenhuisen\\b",
"(?i)\\bJustin\\s+Trudeau\\b",
"(?i)\\bKeir\\s+Starmer\\b",
"(?i)\\bLiz\\s+Truss\\b",
"(?i)\\bMichael\\s+D\\.\\s+Higgins\\b",
"(?i)\\bRishi\\s+Sunak\\b",
Edit: I have no doubt South African news media are going to be in a frenzy when they realize Apple took notice of South African politicians. (Referring to Steenhuisen and Ramaphosa specifically)
This is Apple actively steering public thought.
No code - anywhere - should look like this. I don't care if the politicians are right, left, or authoritarian. This is wrong.
The simple fact is that people get extremely emotional about politicians, politicians both receive obscene amounts of abuse, and have repeatedly demonstrated they’re not above weaponising tools like this for their own goals.
Seems perfectly reasonable that Apple doesn’t want to be unwittingly draw into the middle of another random political pissing contest. Nobody comes out of those things uninjured.
A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong.
By all means: make distinctions. But let people know it!
If I’m denied a mortgage because my uncle is a foreign head of state, let me know that’s the reason. Let the world know that’s the reason! Please!
Cry me a river. I’ve worked in banks in the team making exactly these kinds of decisions. Trust me Nigel Farage knew exactly what happened and why. NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Commenting on the specifics details of a customer would be a horrific breach of customer privacy, and a total failure in their duty to their customers. There’s a damn good reason the NatWests CEO was fired after discussing the details of Nigel’s account with members of the public.
When you see these decisions from the inside, and you see what happens when you attempt real transparency around these types of decisions. You’ll also quickly understand why companies are so cagey about explaining their decision making. Simple fact is that support staff receive substantially less abuse, and have fewer traumatic experiences when you don’t spell out your reasoning. It sucks, but that’s the reality of the situation. I used to hold very similar views to yourself, indeed my entire team did for a while. But the general public quickly taught us a very hard lesson about cost of being transparent with the public with these types of decisions.
Are you saying that Alison Rose did not leak to the BBC? Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because she leaked false information to the press.
This isn’t a diversion. It’s exactly the problem with not being transparent. Of course Farage knew what happened, but how could he convince the public (he’s a public figure), when the bank is lying to the press?
The bank started with a lie (claiming he was exited because the account was too low), and kept lying!
These were active lies, not simply a refusal to explain their reasons.
She was forced to resign because she leaked, the content of the leak was utterly immaterial. The simple fact she leaked was an automatically fireable offence, it doesn’t matter a jot if she lied or not. Customer privacy is non-negotiable when you’re bank. Banks aren’t number 10, the basic expectation is that customer information is never handed out, except to the customer, in response to a court order, or the belief that there is an immediate threat to life.
Do you honestly think that it’s okay for banks to discuss the private banking details of their customers with the press?
When they can cover such facts, the banks are much less prone to use appropriate punishments.
Many years ago, some employee of a bank has confused my personal bank account with a company account of my employer, and she has sent a list with everything that I have bought using my personal account, during 4 months, to my employer, where the list could have been read by a few dozen people.
Despite the fact this was not only a matter of internal discipline, but violating the banking secrecy was punishable by law where I lived, the bank has tried for a long time to avoid admitting that anything wrong has happened.
However, I have pursued the matter, so they have been forced to admit the wrong doing. Despite this being something far more severe than what has happened to Farage, I did not want for the bank employee to be fired. I considered that an appropriate punishment would have been a pay cut for a few months, which would have ensured that in the future she would have better checked the account numbers for which she sends information to external entities.
In the end all I have got was a written letter where the bank greatly apologized for their mistake. I am not sure if the guilty employee has ever been punished in any way.
After that, I have moved my operations to another bank. Had they reacted rightly to what had happened, I would have stayed with them.
The high level nature of the matter was quite public at that point.
This can absolutely cripple a family, I'd be really cautious wishing that upon someone if they wronged you without malice, though I completely understand where you are coming from.
In this case at the very least, I'd want to know what went wrong and what they’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. From a software-engineer’s standpoint, there’s probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit that could have prevented this in the first place.
If all they sent was a (generic) apology letter, I'd have switched banks too.
How did you pursue the matter?
After some days had passed without seeing any consequence, I went again, this time discussing with some supervising employee, who attempted to convince me that this is some kind of minor mistake and there is no need to do anything about it.
However, I pointed to the precise law paragraphs condemning what they have done and I threatened with legal action. This escalation resulted in me being invited to a bigger branch of the bank, to a discussion with someone in a management position. This time they were extremely ass-kissing, I was shown also the guilty employee, who apologized herself, and eventually I let it go, though there were no clear guarantees that they will change their behavior to prevent such mistakes in the future.
Apparently the origin of the mistake had been a badly formulated database query, which had returned a set of accounts for which the transactions had to be reported to my employer. I had been receiving during the same time interval some money from my employer into my private account, corresponding to salary and travel expenses, and somehow those transactions were matched by the bad database query, grouping my private account with the company accounts. Then the set of account numbers was used to generate reports, without further verification of the account ownership.
Because they want to perform political censorship without us knowing about it? You'll forgive me if I'm not too sympathetic to that.
I happen to be familiar with that case, and that is exactly what happened. The Coutts report explicitly found that he met the economic criteria for retention [0], but was dropped due to political reasons, among others his friendship with Novak Djokovic, and re-tweeting an allegedly transphobic joke by Ricky Gervais ("old fashioned women. You know, the ones with wombs.") [1].
To top it off, the BBC did their best to aid in this deception, reporting: Farage says he was effectively "de-banked" for his political views and that he is "far from alone" [2]
Contrary to the BBC's portrayal, this was not an unsupported opinion coming from Farage - he directly quoted what the bank itself wrote in their internal discussions on this matter, that he obtained through a subject access request.
Further, in their apology for getting the story wrong, the BBC wrote: "On 4 July, the BBC reported Mr Farage no longer met the financial requirements for Coutts, citing a source familiar with the matter. The former UKIP leader later obtained a Coutts report which indicated his political views were also considered." [3]
This is misleading past the point of deceit. The BBC tried to give the impression that financial requirements were the primary reason for the account closure, and his politics were just an at-best secondary "also". But the Coutts report explicitly said that he “meets the EC [economic contribution] criteria for commercial retention”, so his politics were the primary and only reason.
Most of this information is absent in the BBC's reporting, which uses only vague, anodyne phrases like "political views" and "politically exposed person", avoids specifics, but does find time to cite Labour MP accusations that it is hypocritical how quickly the government reacted to banks trying to financially deplatform the enemy political faction, when the government hasn't yet rid itself of corruption.
So yes, you sure present a difficult "dilemma": Do we want powerful commercial and media interests to team up and lie to us, or do we want at least some degree of transparency and honesty in their dealings? Really there are no easy answers, and the choice would keep anyone up at night...
[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/18/nigel-farage-cou... (Ignore Farage's hyperbole that collecting information posted to public Twitter accounts is "Stasi-style")
Do you think the mistake would have happened if a machine checked the numbers vs the address? How about if a 2nd person looked it over? How about both?
In this case a computer could have easily flagged an address mismatch between your account number and the receiver (your work).
Punishing employees for making honest mistakes, where appropriate process should have prevented error, is a horrific way to handle mistakes like this. It would be equivalent to personally punishing engineers every time they deployed code that contained bugs. Nobody would ever think that’s an acceptable thing to do, why on earth would think it’s acceptable to punish customer service staff in a similar manner?
It was completely reckless behavior, even if the guilt was distributed both on the employee who has not checked whether the information sent to external parties is information to which access is permitted for them and on the employees who did not implement a system that would check automatically for such mistakes.
Moreover, the attempt made by multiple bank employees to hide the incident, instead of taking responsibility for it, has amply demonstrated that only a financial punishment that would have affected them personally would have caused them to act carefully in the future.
Also, the guilty bank employee was not some poor customer service staff, but she appeared to have a senior position, handling the accounts of a very big multinational company, which was my employer at the time.
I have little doubt that trying to hide such incidents is the normal behavior for banks, unlike the poster to which I have replied said, i.e. they take seriously things like banking secrecy only if they are caught.
It was an unlikely occurrence that I happened to also have access to the documents where my personal information was included, so I could discover what the bank has done. In most such cases it is likely that the account owner never becomes aware that the bank has leaked confidential information.
I have no idea why you think inflicting financial penalties on employees would result in better outcomes. You only need to look at some highly avoidable transit disasters in Japan to understand why a model of punishment produces worse outcomes, not better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
There is a reason we have regulators (or at least we do in the UK). I can assure you that if this had happened in the UK, and the complaint raised to the Financial Ombudsman (FOS), there would have been hefty financial punishment for the bank. If there were repeated infractions, the FCA would step in to investigate, and possibly personally punish C-suite leaders for failing to build the needed processes and culture to both prevent, and learn from mistakes like this.
And I’m not speaking about theory, I’m speaking from personal experience. I know exactly what it’s like to be on the pointy end of both the FOS and FCAs gaze. It’s not a comfortable position for any team in any bank, and even less comfortable for senior leaders.