I'm sure detractors would find plenty to criticise about a system to prioritise friends and family, but it's smart from a QA perspective. They get a corpus of issues that are falling through the cracks, coming from real people without an agenda.
While that’s useful, I suspect the real reason it exists is to discourage fix-it-yourself options, where an engineer may access sensitive user info to help a friend.
Or just keep employees on track. Imagine a company the size of FB having a barrage of Slack messages over family and friends with suspended accounts, trying to find who manages which DB.
My cynical take is that its really just there so there's less incentive for people at Facebook to push for actually functional general customer support, because Facebook would rather just ignore issues than spend money to make the user experience better.
Yes, every ticket on Oops that's found to be actionable should result in a postmortem about why the regular security & customer support channels failed.
A few of those and you'd get a mostly functioning system.
I'm glad people are helped. Something is better than nothing.
I also think that, a service that is focused on helping those with personal connections to Facebook employees dampens the most potent source of visible friction for the maintainers of a system that clearly has the potential to be arbitrary and oppressive.
I think we would all be better off in a world where each oops case was solved by changing the overall system - even if we also recognize that change on that scale is difficult for then the most well intentioned.
