Writing the letter that gets it looked at
The practical skill
Everything in this module converges on one question: an automated decision has gone against you or someone you are helping, and you want it reconsidered by a person. This lesson is the procedure. It requires no lawyer, no money and about forty minutes.
Before you write
Preserve the evidence, today. Screenshots of the decision, the exact wording, any reference number, the date and time, the account name. Systems and interfaces change; your screenshots do not. Save them somewhere that is not the account in question, in case access is lost.
Find the deadline. Internal appeal windows are often short — fourteen or thirty days is common — and a missed internal deadline can close off the external route later. Look for it before doing anything else.
Identify the right recipient. For a company in a jurisdiction with data protection law, look for a data protection officer or privacy contact, usually named in the privacy policy. For a regulated sector — banking, insurance, telecoms, energy — there is usually a formal complaints function whose response times are set by the regulator, and an ombudsman above it. For a public body, there is a statutory appeal route that is often better than the informal one.
The letter
Six short paragraphs. Plain, factual, unemotional. The tone that works is that of someone who expects the matter to be resolved.
- Identify yourself and the decision. Account or reference number, date, exactly what was decided.
- State what you are asking for. Reinstatement, reconsideration, correction. Say it in one sentence at the top, not at the end.
- Ask whether the decision was made solely by automated means. Direct question. Their answer, or their refusal to answer, is useful either way.
- Request human review by a person who was not involved in the original decision, and ask for that person's determination in writing.
- Make the two data requests. What personal data about you was used, and what would have had to be different for the outcome to change.
- State the facts you dispute, specifically. One numbered line each: my address from March 2022 was X, not Y. Attach evidence. Do not argue about fairness in general; contest particular facts, because particular facts are what a reviewer can act on.
Close by asking for a response within their published timeframe or the statutory one, and say you will otherwise refer the matter onward. Keep the whole thing under a page.
What to do with the reply
If they say a human reviewed it, ask what information that person had and what they were able to change. "Reviewed and upheld" within four minutes of an automated flag is a rubber stamp, and saying so plainly, once, is often effective.
If they give you the counterfactual, you may have a straightforward correction on your hands — a wrong address, a mismatched record, a duplicate account.
If they refuse or ignore you, escalate. The order is: the organisation's formal complaints process, then the sectoral regulator or ombudsman, then the data protection authority, then the small-claims or consumer forum. In India the consumer commissions and the RBI's ombudsman schemes are the usual routes; in the EU each country's data protection authority accepts complaints online; in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office and the Financial Ombudsman Service are the common destinations. Most of these are free.
If the decision came from a data broker or bureau rather than the company, correct it at the source, or the same error will reject you again at the next organisation.
Two realities worth stating
This does not always work. Individual complaints against large automated systems have a low success rate, and the process costs time that people in precarious situations do not have. Nobody should pretend otherwise.
But two things reliably follow from doing it. The organisation now has a written record with dates, which changes what a regulator or a court can see later. And collective versions of exactly this letter — a hundred people asking the same question in the same month — have been the single most effective tool in this area, from platform-worker data requests to consumer group complaints. The individual letter is the unit that collective action is made of.
The one thing to keep
A one-page letter that asks whether the decision was solely automated, requests human review by an uninvolved person, asks what would have had to differ, and disputes specific facts is the free procedure that starts statutory clocks and creates a record.
Before you move on
Which element of the appeal letter is most likely to produce a change in the outcome rather than only a record?
Pick the one you would defend. Nobody sees your answer.