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I like to believe this person’s email thread is at least partly to thank — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24
by cdubzzz 6y ago
I like to believe this person’s email thread is at least partly to thank — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
- ksec 6y agoThank You for pointing this out. I was about to write a comment believing they reacted in Good Faith. Acting in line with their Time to Play Fair ( Against Apple App Store ) Campaign. So it looks like actually has nothing to do with Good Faith. And people often tell me I am cynical, turns out I am still too naive.
- HenryBemis 6y agoCompany that does things for profit does not operate in Good Faith. Especially if it facilitates the exit of clients. If it wasn't for GDPR in Europe, they would fight this tooth and nail. I would not be surprised if they enable this ONLY for Europe, because they absolutely-have-to and ignore in other locations. I am in EU, so I cannot test, I would like to ask someone from Africa, America(s), Asia, Oceania to let us know if this is also enabled/available in their country/regions.
- andrewshadura 6y agoAll companies do things for profit, that's their primary raison d'être.
- Rygian 6y agoIn this case, "profit" being an accurate euphemism for "avoid GDPR fines".
- Fnoord 6y agoKeeping customers satisfied leads to a good name. A good name leads to more customers, and both that and satisfied customers leads to long term profit. It appears some companies focus too much on short term profit.
- dontcarethrow2 6y agoIn this case shareholders and investors are the main customers, with short term profits keeping them happy, execs get good bonuses, more money is poured in from market/vc to keep the gravy flowing. No incentive for the deicision makers to keep the product users(sometimes called just the products) happy, for the giants atleast.
- Fnoord 6y agoAn accurate description of the toxicity of publicly owned companies, accelerated by VC and startup culture. In this case, users are both product and paying customer. Ads is one thing, but GDPR request showed they log every action related to the account.
- marcinzm 6y ago>Ads is one thing, but GDPR request showed they log every action related to the account. People praise Spotify for how good their recommendations are, where do you think they get data for things like that?
- Retric 6y agoExecs might get good bonuses in the short term, but may be left in the lurch over time. Global wealth and population has been rapidly increasing for a long time which has propped up a lot of terrible decisions.
- nicoburns 6y agoSome people eat to live and some people live to eat. And it is the same with companies. Some companies carry out their business in order to profit from it, and some companies generate profits in order to sustain their business.
- colinmhayes 6y agoMaybe for private companies, but public companies sole purpose is to generate profit. If they are not doing it to the best of their ability shareholders will replace the executive team.
- nicoburns 6y agoAnd this is why I think public companies are a terrible model.
- klyrs 6y agoThis is a myth. Stop perpetuating it. https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_law_institute/corporations-and-society/Common-Misunderstandings-About-Corporations.cfm https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
- colinmhayes 6y ago>Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors. Your link agrees with me. If shareholders believe decisions are being made which lead to less profits leadership will be removed.
- klyrs 6y agoYour conclusion that the "sole purpose" is profit is erroneous. See sibling comment regarding Ben & Jerry's, for example.
- sbuttgereit 6y ago
- muro 6y agoGoogle has had takeout for many, many years.
- jeromegv 6y agoTakeout doesn't allow you to take your email directly from one service to the other.
- dheera 6y agoRun a loop on all the takeout e-mail and send them to your new e-mail address, spoofing the headers for each e-mail?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y agoIf you do it yourself it's not service to service. You could have done that with the Spotify json takeout.
- tzs 6y ago> If it wasn't for GDPR in Europe, they would fight this tooth and nail. I would not be surprised if they enable this ONLY for Europe, because they absolutely-have-to and ignore in other locations. They have to follow GDPR everywhere in the universe except possibly the United States, because they are in an EU country. GDPR applies if either the user is in the EU or the processor or controller is in the EU. According to their site, Spotify service in the USA is supplied by Spotify USA, Inc. and Spotify service everywhere else is provided by Spotify AB, so I can’t tell if GDPR applies to US users of their service.
- richardwhiuk 6y agoThe CCPA in California is similar in thrust.
- finnthehuman 6y ago>And people often tell me I am cynical, turns out I am still too naive. The final stage of cynicism is understanding that to fit in socially you have to indulge other people's desires for cute narratives over simpler and more roust explanations of behavior.
- nwienert 6y agoNo you don’t. You just have to be better at delivering medicine.
- finnthehuman 6y agoc'mon mate, even a wisecrack that the lawyers made them do it can be enough to ruin flow and be a total buzzkill. Nobody wants to be the weird guy correcting banter.
- nwienert 6y agoWho said anything about correcting banter
- birdyrooster 6y agoWho is Good Faith?
- black_puppydog 6y agoI cannot upvote this person enough. Such clear expression, and insistence on their right. Love everything about this thread, even if we'll never know whether this was actually what made the difference. <3 <3 <3
- appleflaxen 6y agoThat entire email exchange is a thing of beauty. Massive, massive gratitude and goodwill toward u/confiks. You, sir/madam, have executed a brilliant maneuver. Thank you, original linker, for pointing this out.
- zeristor 6y agoI suppose it could act as inspiration for others to tackle other companies to task to provide personal data portability and simple integration with third parties.
- croon 6y agoI think it was key to the argument that the integration with third parties had previously worked. Without that others could probably engineer a defense around technical infeasibility.
- rozab 6y agoWow! Big ups to Confiks, they achieved something great here. I'll be sure to emulate this in the future.
- scrollaway 6y agoReally need to save this one for the future "GDPR is useless bureaucracy" naysayers. (Hi you, I know you're here reading this thread and mentally blocking this out already) GDPR has created fertile grounds for the rights of users to their data. This is exactly the sort of interaction where laws are putting power in the hands of citizens they can use when companies either don't give a shit, or don't realize what they're doing is immoral.
- aviraldg 6y agoI don't understand GDPR too well -- does this mean every company must build APIs that would be sufficient to allow competitors to import user data from them?
- mjburgess 6y agoIt does seem onerous. I wonder if, "so, we will email SongShift directly" etc., would do. I guess the law doesn't say "for free" ? So perhaps they could charge a fee for each API use... It otherwise seems unreasonable to require data-holders (/"controllers") to pay the costs of this "direct transfer", esp. re building and maintaining an API. They have in their possession an object which the user owns -- their data -- would we, in analogous cases, require stores to do anything other than "hand it back" ? This seems quite an odd law. EDIT: given downvotes, let me clarify: I like the law. It is useful. I just want to understand the moral/legal/economic logic. This law imposes costs somewhere, and prevents some services being offered.
- Nullabillity 6y ago> It otherwise seems unreasonable to require data-holders (/"controllers") to pay the costs of this "direct transfer", esp. re building and maintaining an API. Consider it a cost of collecting the data in the first place.
- mjburgess 6y agoYou're assuming that they are deriving additional value from it. That isn't universal, but the law is. Eg., consider me uploading some image files for processing and then downloading them. The website keeps those images only insofar as I wish, and never analyses them or derives value from them beyond what I permit -- and suppose the default is to permit nothing. Then it seems odd. Since this is more like taking my shoes to be repaired. It would be onerous to require repair shops to send them elsehwere.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
- neves 6y agoWhich service/software works well for moving playlists between Music Services? I'm trying to move from Google Music to Spotify. Moving my playlists has been my greatest pain. They usually don't find a lot of my musics, or worse, choose a different version of the music. Usually a live version of the music is chosen, full with annoying cheers of the audience.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI gave up on that, when I realized that Google's spin-down of the music service has meant MOST of the songs in my playlists are now gone. When Google de-licenses the music, it vanishes from playlists. I'm still amazed Spotify never built enough of a Google Music client to help users login and gather their playlists.
- vvillena 6y agoI stopped paying for Google Play Music years ago, once I found out about this behavior. Playlists carefully built over time, suddenly changing and shifting. Music is huge to me, and here was Google, playing with my memories. Not being able to listen to some songs is bad enough, but entirely remoing them from the lists felt like gaslighting. My memories were being played with, and Google was telling me "here's your playlist", but that wasn't my playlist anymore.
- neves 6y agoI've never noticed it. Another great reason to uploading my own music.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoI've used tunemymusic.com for a few different migrations (Spotify to Apple Music, Apple Music to the trial of Youtube Music). It pretty good although you need to do some manual verification because it messes up around 1% of the time, especially with the more obscure stuff. Sometimes it'll transfer the song as a live version or even someone else's cover so a bit of manual verification is helpful.
- Kaze404 6y agoWhat a legend. I love seeing people be so adamant in getting through bullshit corporate talk, and seeing it actually result in something for once is even more incredible.
- dawnerd 6y agoIt's amazing what you can do with some persistence and threats of legal action - especially when you mention using a lawyer and recouping costs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]