“Before cancelling your subscription, you must agree to the following”

https://twitter.com/apenwarr/status/1322998961704210433

by luu • 6 years ago

637 203 6 years ago

twitter.com

btilly5• 6 years ago

What service did this?

TeMPOraL• 6 years ago

Prezi.

vikramkr• 6 years ago

Is this one of those cases where the free tier has only public presentations but the paid tier lets you have private presentations?

eznzt2• 6 years ago

Exactly. So, incendiary title.

mannykannot2• 6 years ago

As the title is a direct quote - a statement of fact - it could hardly be less incendary.

Furthermore, it says that the presentations will become public, so presumably this was a paid subscription. I imagine this poison-pill was discreetly mentioned in the EULA, and maybe you think that makes it all OK, but then I wonder why anyone thinking that would regard its tweeting as incendiary.

henriquez• 6 years ago

Are they charging for the ability to host private presentations? Because this seems like it would make sense. Though they should offer the option of mass-deleting all presentations instead.

derision• 6 years ago

Either mass-delete, or make them private but unviewable.

horsawlarway6• 6 years ago

as a user, I might actually prefer to just make them public, though.

Honestly, I think the wording here is... fucking awful. But the intention itself doesn't actually seem deceptive or malicious at all once you understand the pricing model.

dustinmoris• 6 years ago

To those who say this makes sense because the free tier only allows public content:

No it does not make sense. Paying for privacy is fair, but when you stop consuming a service and cancel your subscription/membership then all your private data cannot just be made public to everyone. It should get deleted. If you cancel your bank account you also don't expect your bank to publicly disclose all your bank statements from the last decade because you stopped using their service, or are you?

Angostura• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

The wording needs to be changed to say:

"Remember, if you cancel, your content will become public - delete any presentations you want don't want public before cancelling'.

The tick box then becomes 'I understand - I have deleted any private content'.

neurostimulant• 6 years ago

What happen if my card expires or out of balance while on an extended vacation? I should just accept that my data became public when my account got downgraded automatically?

Edit: looks like if your account expires, your data is still private, which is the right thing to do here. https://support.prezi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003478894-Can...

alisonkisk3• 6 years ago

Do you have evidence that users agreed to that behavior at signups?

usrusr• 6 years ago

That would indeed become agreeable (even if still not super-nice) if they changed the cancellation form to a two-option choice between "delete all private" and "publish all private".

onlyrealcuzzo• 6 years ago

This is why we need regulations.

macspoofing• 6 years ago

I know what you're saying, but it's bad design regardless. There is no use-case where deleting an account should leave the content around. What's the point with messing around with checkboxes - they deleted their account, so delete their content along with it.

strawberrypuree• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

This is victim blaming, and it legitimizes the heinous practice of putting onerous terms behind a click-through acceptance. Please stop.

SpicyLemonZest• 6 years ago

But it just seems irresponsible to build a system where private data can automatically become public like this, whether or not your users know about it.

sp332• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

You're guessing, and I think you're making too strong a statement about something you only guessed at.

I looked through https://prezi.com/terms-of-use/201910_NL/ ("Effective September 1, 2020") and didn't see anything about this.

mdoms2• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

No, you didn't. You may have ticked a box that said you read the terms of service, but as we all know, no one is reading those documents. It's just plainly dishonest to drop something so unexpected into a ToS.

wtetzner2• 6 years ago

Even if that's true (it's not clear to me that the TOS include anything about this when you sign up), I would argue it's still unethical, even if it ends up being legal.

Barrin922• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

It may come as a surprise but not everything written in a contract is in fact enforceable. I can demand that I get your firstborn when you cancel your subscription, doesn't mean that's going to happen.

GDPR gives you the rights to delete your personal data regardless of you having a subscription so I'm pretty sure this is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

mumblemumble2• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

I miss the days when burying awful things that nobody would willingly accept in the fine print (which few people read and most people have a hard time understanding) was something we all understood to be immoral, to the point that it was a cartoon trope as something the Devil would do.

lilyball• 6 years ago

No this is still terrible. The bare minimum here must be

'If you cancel, all of your private presentations will be deleted.' with a tick box that says 'I understand - delete my private data'. I should not have to go do a bunch of extra legwork to ensure my private data doesn't become public when I cancel my subscription, and in particular, non-consensual cancellations (e.g. cancellation due to non-payment) must not make my private data public.

segmondy• 6 years ago

No, the tick box should be a radio button

(*) delete all data, () make data public.

lliamander2• 6 years ago

Companies do not have carte blanche to write whatever they want in their EULA and expect that it is legally enforceable. Often they will put in things that they know aren't enforceable because they hope people won't try to challenge it in court. There are contract laws, consumer protection laws, etc. that still must be adhered to.

hnick• 6 years ago

For their faults I do like how Mailchimp forces you to type DELETE into a text box rather than just click a button, for high risk activities. It cuts through those habits we have formed.

On topic, I think a friendlier approach would be to automatically delist or unpublish anything flagged private. The user can then go and update as needed.

himinlomax• 6 years ago

Except that you already agreed to this behaviour when you signed up.

I don't know about you, but I never agree to anything when I sign up to anything, because I never read anything before I sign up, just like everyone else (except people paid to do so.)

raxxorrax• 6 years ago

Then allow them to have a button to delete all content with a click at that point. Otherwise it is just inhibiting personal data management.

alanfranz3• 6 years ago

I think that a "better" way to do it would be a choice:

a) delete all your private content; b) make all your content public.

But the tweet is tendentious. Nothing prevents the user from deleting their content - THAT would be the problematic part.

So it's a small nuisance for the user, but they ARE telling the user. They don't make your content silently public and then say "you agreed to that in paragraph 7.9.12 when you registered."

Closi3• 6 years ago

Or better yet, your old presentations stay on the same terms, but any new presentations are public.

(This is similar to how LucidChart works)

PopeDotNinja• 6 years ago

It’d be funny (and awful) to see a television show where the contents of a private repo are auctioned off when the subscriber stops paying.

therealmocker• 6 years ago

Not sure if reference to Storage Wars or not.

tgtweak2• 6 years ago

Happens all the time in datacenters when clients don't pay their hosting.

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

I'm trying to remember who waas called in to do data recovery on a VAX that turned up in a Sauusolito garage back in the 1990s. I want to say Clifford Stoll, though I'm unsure and cant find an online reference.

McDyver3• 6 years ago

That's what you get for not reading the TOS and cancellation policy [0].

If you let it expire,you keep the privacy settings; if you cancel (downgrade to free), you lose the pricacy and everything is public.

I'm not saying i's good practice, but if these terms don't work for you, don't use the service.

[0] https://support.prezi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003478894-Can...

alisonkisk3• 6 years ago

"After your license expires, the presentations you’ve created will remain in your account and keep their privacy status."

Did that change today?

McDyver3• 6 years ago

I don't know if it changed, but could have only been an improvement; if in the previous version everything would be made public.

mherdeg• 6 years ago

August 4, 2020 text was also "After your license expires, the presentations you’ve created will remain in your account and keep their privacy status."

That seems at odds with the checkbox in the UI in the Tweet in this post ( https://twitter.com/apenwarr/status/1322998961704210433 ). Maybe they've changed the business logic but haven't updated the help site?

saagarjha• 6 years ago

You can’t just put whatever you like in a TOS and expect it to be enforceable.

McDyver3• 6 years ago

That's true, but in this case it's already stated that the terms might be abusive. Once you continue, knowing that, you know you might have your presentations made public.

Once again, I don't condone these terms.

akerl_• 6 years ago

The wording on that notice is atrocious, but it seems like the actual behavior isn’t horrible. In reality, they seem to be trying to convey:

If you cancel your subscription, any content which you still have in your account will revert to the privacy options of the free plan. If you don’t want some content to be public, delete it before making this change.

Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me.

svrtknst• 6 years ago

imo that intention was clear, but atrocious

Beltiras• 6 years ago

It's absolutely bonkers.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

Agreed, this is likely how this happened:

1. At a growing startup, nobody is incentivized to implement the necessary-but-not-initially-related-to-growth features, like a sane account closure and unsubscribe process.

2. This, the easiest path forward was essentially "we'll turn your private account into a free account, where everything is public" because implementing something where there would be a deletion or export option in the unsubscribe flow would take more work, and nobody is getting bonused on that.

londons_explore• 6 years ago

I wonder what happens if you just block the card payments? Do your presentations also suddenly become public?

codetrotter• 6 years ago

Whoever at Prezi manages this UI should definitely clean it up to actually say that, but the behavior itself doesn’t seem crazy to me.

IMO they ought to change it from a single checkbox to a pair of radio buttons, and give something along the following as options:

“You are about to cancel your subscription. However, you have x private presentations in your account. Private presentations are not available without a paid subscription. How would you like to handle this?”

(_) Delete all x of my private presentations

(_) Make all x of my private presentations public

And then have a button or link as well where you can go if you wish to review your private presentations in order to delete any of them prior to making the remainder public.

Also, in the listing of private presentations, provide a button or link that allows you to download a copy of each of them before you delete them.

antsar5• 6 years ago

They could just email the user a zipfile of all their presentations, and then delete them. No need for radio buttons, and IMHO this is the most user-friendly/intuitive option because it doesn't force you to make any hard choices but still leaves you in control. Want to re-subscribe later? Cool, you can re-import those presentations. Need the data for archiving? You've got it. Privacy? Preserved.

Let's be real, there's no benefit to involving the private/public setting here other than making the service more sticky / difficult to leave.

bentcorner• 6 years ago

A more user friendly approach would be to not need the user to make a choice at all, and keep their private presentations private (maybe make them read only, or hidden until the user makes a choice after cancellation). Although maybe this doesn't provide enough incentive to subscribe.

muststopmyths2• 6 years ago

Call me crazy, but if I was running this service, I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan.

Otherwise it's hard not to impute a malicious motive to suddenly making private data public.

Then just say If you don't want your content to be deleted, pay us (with a side of "entitled freeloaders can fuck right off")

Kinda what Flickr does now. Which I dislike (finally cancelled my Pro yesterday), but I respect that they can't keep providing the old service for free.

whakim• 6 years ago

In my experience of working at startups, I disagree that they probably had a malicious motive when designing this feature. While I think they should allow you to delete the data, the genesis of this experience was probably (1) it took less work to build; and (2) no strong advocacy for user privacy on the product/engineering teams responsible.

As others have mentioned, I think "keep the content and make it read-only" would be the best possible experience, but I also understand (1) that would probably require even more work; and (2) sometimes you need to make business decisions to keep people from unsubscribing.

anonymousab• 6 years ago

I would delete all your past data if you reverted from a paid to a free plan.

Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost.

I think the safest option would be to force the user, when they unsubscribe, to select between "keep everything but on the public free plan" vs. "unsubscribe and then delete everything."

duxup• 6 years ago

A checkbox to just delete that content along with it would be nice ....

nemetroid• 6 years ago

The behaviour is still crazy. If you were OK with having your content public, you likely would want your content to already be public, and you would have acted to make it public from within your paid-for account.

james_pm• 6 years ago

They won't say it in a way that makes sense because then users will a) go do just what was suggested and then cancel, or b) do a) and also complain that there isn't a way to easily do that.

jnxx• 6 years ago

Brilliant business model. Let's hope that Google never needs more money.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

Well legally speaking, it says "before" cancelling, but they don't specify a frame of reference so they might as well fuck off.

onion2k• 6 years ago

This could be a really useful feature. If you had some compromising evidence on someone you could just create a Prezi account with a private presentation, and should anything happen to you that means you stop paying the bills (death, prison, etc) Prezi would very helpfully make it public for you. It's like a deadman's switch for presentation content.

Izkata• 6 years ago

From what others are saying, in that situation it would remain private and inaccessible. It's only when manually reverting to the free account that it becomes public.

morpheuskafka• 6 years ago

I don't see what the issue is. You can either delete them while you still have the subscription, or you can make them public and keep them after you switch to the free plan.

The checkbox clearly informs you of this fact. If there wasn't a checkbox like this, people could be confused either way--some will think it that everything is deleted and be surprised when it becomes public, but others would expect everything to stay and be shocked when it is deleted.

Also, if you wanted to stop using the service entirely, you would go to the page for deleting your account entirely, rather than just downgrading to the free plan.

andrewjl2• 6 years ago

The issue is that for all the customer-centric rhetoric today, actions like these speak far louder than words.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

What a nuclear way to bomb your company, wow. I'm dumbstruck how anyone would approve this feature.

sfg• 6 years ago

When the subscription is cancelled 'freeze' the existing private data.

When frozen it is kept private, but the user can only delete it, or make it public (maybe allow read-only viewing, with this possibly limited to the first few slides (or whatever makes sense)). Once public, it is like any other public data in the free tier.

This way account status changes neither destroy privacy, nor allow people to take advantage of a loop hole to get free private data.

jpambrun• 6 years ago

Why not just prevent you from creating new private presentations and keep those read only? After all, these were created when you had the subscription.

theonemind• 6 years ago

Cancelling Backblaze had some hoop jumping involved. They make you clear out the object storage. I'm trying to cancel the account. Orphan the objects and let them get garbage collected. It seems a bit passive-aggressive to turn me into a digital janitor so that I can cancel the account.

theginger• 6 years ago

This looks like bad user experience to me. From what I can see you can both delete your presentations, and delete your account. If there was warning saying all your presentations will be made public if you do not delete them, with a checkbox to acknowledge the warning, rather than agree to it a condition no one would be getting upset. Obviously they could improve it further by giving you the option to choose what to delete / keep and the option to cancel the subscription and delete the whole account in one go. There docs say you must cancel the subscription before deleting you account or you will continue to be charged, which is just awful.

koonsolo• 6 years ago

Why don't they just ask for money? "Please cancel for $50" ;D

k__• 6 years ago

Reminds me a bit of something I read here once.

The gist was:

Your data is super safe in S3, as long as you pay the bill. If you stop, it's gone.

tgtweak2• 6 years ago

I kind of prefer that to providers keeping it around indefinitely.

admax88q4• 6 years ago

What has become of HN. Why are so many people defending this practice because "You agreed to this when you signed up."

Are so many unscrupulous people now members of HN?

Even if this practice is legal, which is questionable, it's very likely immoral, and very obviously a jerk move.

It's both amazing and alarming to me how the overton window on HN has changed. Obviously unscrupulous and questionable practices are defended on the grounds of "yeah but its not actually _illegal_"

Maybe I'm just out of touch with the state of the industry, might be time to move on from HN in general.

teddyh• 6 years ago

What has become of HN. Why are so many people defending this practice […]

I think people on HN increasingly have FAANG (or even more murky) jobs.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

— Upton Sinclair

If these people were to admit to themselves that the place they work is deeply unethical, they would have to either face unpleasant truths about themselves, or face the prospect of abandoning their job. Neither alternative is attractive to say the least, so cognitive dissonance sets in, and an illusion is created is their minds that this behavior is, in fact, ethical.

chillacy8• 6 years ago

Prezi is more a startup in "growth hacking" phase than a FAANG

Also, people often have different and mutually exclusive ethical values from each other, there are plenty of defense contractors who believe they are the good guys, privacy activists who think they're doing good, anti abortion activists who believe they are saving lives, pro choice activists who think they're protecting rights, etc. How can we know which is the illusory position?

I can't expect to believe that all of my positions just happen to be right. Everyone on the planet believes they're right--the right values, the right religions... I'm not aware of an objective answer to morality.

chillacy8• 6 years ago

HN is associated with a startup incubator, and every startup I've seen has engaged in some measure of shady growth hacking. Once you start blurring the lines, you open yourself to stuff like this.

That said though I can see how this specific case happened just looking at incentives. Startups are strapped for people, and offboarding is sadly one of the first things to get dropped, because it doesn't directly increase revenue (and may even decrease retention).

Even more cynically I wouldn't be surprised if there was a time where this warning wasn't even shown at all and presentations just went back to being public because the has_active_subscription field returned false.

admax88q4• 6 years ago

This is more malicious than just not focusing on offboarding. The easiest implementation would be to just delete the user account and abandon the data, slightly more effort would be to delete the data. Making it public with the legal disclaimers and all that takes effort and commitment.

shaggyfrog• 6 years ago

Are so many unscrupulous people now members of HN?

Probably the same people who recently suggested re-colonization of Africa and downvoted my horrified responses to oblivion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893411)

Is this just a recent spike in abject immortality or is this an Eternal September?

syndacks2• 6 years ago

Or the same people who defend Holocaust denial.

I don't know what's going on either but there certainly seems to be an uptick in some straight up embarrassing thinking on this site.

lovehashbrowns• 6 years ago

I've noticed the trend on here shift towards the more "libertarian" views. Most Google/Microsoft/Apple/Giant-Corporation threads have a ton of "just stop using their service" replies that ignore the practicality of such a solution.

I did notice that this all reversed when TikTok was going to be banned, and a lot of people were happy that the US government was going through with it.

One thing I do question is if there was an actual shift in the trend and I noticed it or if this libertarian-ism was always present in tech circles and I'm noticing it more now.

neya• 6 years ago

Probably one of those hipster types labeling this sort of hostile user behavior in a management meeting as a "growth hack that will skyrocket our customer lifetime value"

What you don't know is you though may have forced me to extend my subscription, it's only just enough to delete all my files and never ever look at your slimy business nor recommend it to anyone around me ever again.

andrewjl2• 6 years ago

Textbook shortsightedness. IIRC before the change to collaborator-based billing, the GitHub model was that the private repos would be frozen if one stopped subscribing. Yet still remain private. That's a much better customer experience with the same incentives.

darekkay• 6 years ago

Official response:

This copy does not reflect our policy - thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’re currently fixing the mistake. Any private presentations created during your trial or paid subscription will remain private unless you change the privacy settings.
Prezi offers free licenses, and when you cancel your trial or subscription, you’ll have the option to downgrade to a free license. After that, any new presentations created from the free license will be public.

hota_mazi• 6 years ago

Prezi is fixing it:

Hi @apenwarr This copy does not reflect our policy - thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’re currently fixing the mistake. Any private presentations created during your trial or paid subscription will remain private unless you change the privacy settings. (1/2)

usmannk• 6 years ago

Hm, just seems like really bad copy. They seem to have meant that any new presentations will be public.

Prezi's response in linked thread:

This copy does not reflect our policy - thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’re currently fixing the mistake. Any private presentations created during your trial or paid subscription will remain private unless you change the privacy settings. (1/2)

Prezi offers free licenses, and when you cancel your trial or subscription, you’ll have the option to downgrade to a free license. After that, any new presentations created from the free license will be public. (2/2)

contravariant• 6 years ago

I think I more or less understand but what exactly does the word 'copy' mean in this context?

syndacks2• 6 years ago

Copy is a term for the words on a page/site. The writing. The sentences and the construction of their words, purportedly to advance whatever cause the page is trying to push.

I think it's a vestige from the days of the printing press.

amingilani• 6 years ago

Prezi responded:

This copy does not reflect our policy - thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’re currently fixing the mistake. Any private presentations created during your trial or paid subscription will remain private unless you change the privacy settings. (1/2)
Prezi offers free licenses, and when you cancel your trial or subscription, you’ll have the option to downgrade to a free license. After that, any new presentations created from the free license will be public. (2/2)

Link: https://twitter.com/prezi/status/1323372206357962752

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

My favorite was eTrade, demanding $80 to close my account. Huh. So I withdrew all my money from the account, and never paid the fee again. Guess what? They closed my account.

lliamander2• 6 years ago

IANAL, but this is a reminder that something being in a TOS/EULA doesn't necessarily mean it's enforceable. There are contract laws and consumer protection laws that make certain conditions illegal and not enforceable. Sometimes companies include these things out of ignorance, and sometimes deliberately under the assumption that consumers don't know what their rights are. If you are suddenly surprised by terms you think are unfair and may cause you harm, then ask a lawyer.

Also, as some people of pointed out, this isn't actually part of Prezi's TOS, so I'm very doubtful that this would stand up in arbitration/court.

zzo38computer• 6 years ago

If you are allowed to delete the presentations, then that would be reasonable, although it should perhaps give you that option on the cancellation menu.

ccvannorman• 6 years ago

clickbait and resolved. From Presi corporate:

Hi @apenwarr, This copy does not reflect our policy - thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’re currently fixing the mistake. Any private presentations created during your trial or paid subscription will remain private unless you change the privacy settings. (1/2)

rrauenza• 6 years ago

There was an update to the Twitter thread a couple of hours ago:

“Hi @apenwarr, This copy does not reflect our policy - thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we’re currently fixing the mistake. Any private presentations created during your trial or paid subscription will remain private unless you change the privacy settings. (1/2)”

xkcd-sucks• 6 years ago

Oh wow, a while ago I was researching some crap for pre sales / integration planning and found a whole bunch of very useful, very internal presentations from a big pharma company on Prezi. Now I wonder if they were just not intended to be made public

“Before cancelling your subscription, you must agree to the following”

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