Policy at scale: Policy is relative
6 July 2020
Telling stories is a dangerous thing in my line of work. But, work cannot get done without telling stories. On the one hand, you want the story to be accurate, but several really legitimate considerations mean that you can’t be so precise as to allow others to determine who is being referred to. If you…
Policy at scale: What makes an actionable complaint?
24 March 2020
Here’s something that you may not know about abuse desks: they’re busy. The further up the “food chain” that you get, the smaller the relative number of complaints that you’ll see, but almost any abuse desk is going to be dealing in at least several thousands of complaints per year. Dealing with complaints, then, is…
Policy at scale: Figuring reputational damage
19 March 2020
How important is policy? Policy not only reflects and is a product of reality. Policies are created as a reflection of what a company wants to do and how it will pursue its business. For some companies, that means “we will try to get away with doing no more than the law requires.” For others,…
Policy at scale: It both is and is not about the customer
16 March 2020
There’s an old quote sometimes (mis)attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” (Wikiquote contributors 2020). The same thing holds true when it comes to policy enforcement: A single customer can be watched carefully but hundreds or thousands of customers fall to statistics. Mass detection…
Policy at scale: The purpose of a policy is protection
12 March 2020
The purpose of a written policy is to protect the provider by protecting the customer. Stated policies — especially in written form — provide a baseline of expected behavior that other people on the Internet can look toward. So, customers, prospects, recipients, and other providers are able to see what standards apply to the use…