18 ms·
“Before cancelling your subscription, you must agree to the following”
- btilly 6y agoWhat service did this?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoPrezi.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vikramkr 6y agoIs this one of those cases where the free tier has only public presentations but the paid tier lets you have private presentations?
- eznzt 6y agoExactly. So, incendiary title.
- mannykannot 6y agoAs 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.
- horsawlarway 6y agoI mean... I think the tweet leaves out a lot of context. It's incendiary through omission, because the checkbox could have just as easily said something like: "Reminder - Our free plan only supports public content. Please delete any private content you don't want made public before cancelling [ ] - I have deleted private content I don't want shared " And then absolutely no one would be having this conversation at all.
- alisonkisk 6y agoNo, it's absolutely terrible that private content would be made public instead of locked or deleted. Publicizing private content as a side effect of something other action is halfway to revenge porn.
- horsawlarway 6y agoOk, so in the interest of a genuine conversation here, what gives you such a strong reaction to this? I see this as basically identical to having paid for a storage unit or a safety deposit box. I paid to store things there. When I stopped paying they got dumped out. I don't genuinely believe it would have much impact. Basically no one views the content I really try to make public, so who's going to hunt down those docs? The company isn't saying "When you cancel we'll send an email to your spouse, boss, and parents with all your private documents". They're just saying - "Hey, we're tossing your documents in the bin over there because you stopped paying to store things" Why is that anywhere close to as bad as revenge porn?
- mannykannot 6y agoPoint taken - a case of "never attribute to malice...", though I think the burden of clarity rests mostly on the party making the stipulation in the first place. Even if the intended message was as you suggest, it is an informative case of how not to get your message across.
- horsawlarway 6y agoYeah, completely agree with you there. I think the wording is straight up terrible. I can sort of understand how this gets implemented this way - Making an excellent experience for the users who are no longer interested in paying you is a great way to go out of business when you have other, more important, problems to solve. That said, who ever wrote the copy for that button should no longer by allowed to write copy (at least not in english...)
- tsimionescu 6y agoExcept that their terms of service (at least now) say exactly the opposite: > In the event your paid Prezi account reverts to a free Prezi Public account, any content you previously created with a paid Prezi account and designated as Private User Content will remain Private User Content, but you will not be able to edit such content. New content you create with such an account will become Public User Content, which means any new content you create from that point forward is going to be public.
- eznzt 6y ago>As the title is a direct quote - a statement of fact - it could hardly be less incendary. A quote completely taken out of context is incendiary.
- henriquez 6y agoAre 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 6y agoEither mass-delete, or make them private but unviewable.
- horsawlarway 6y agoas 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.
- cma 6y agoMake them private but unviewable, and allow you to toggle them to public.
- horsawlarway 6y agoHow is this different? If I can't view it, how do I know if I would consider it safe to make public? I'd have to basically make it public, look at it, then choose to keep or delete. Which is pretty much exactly what they're doing right now.
- criddell 6y agoYou always had that option to make them public. What was created as a private document should never be flipped to public without the user explicitly choosing to do that.
- horsawlarway 6y agoSure, but that's exactly what this prompt is (and I'm 100% with you that the wording and language is unclear and needs improvement). It's saying - Go delete things you don't want public before you hit cancel, because otherwise they become public.
- dustinmoris 6y agoTo 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 6y agoExcept 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'.
- strawberrypuree 6y 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.
- rossjudson 6y agoDon't be ridiculous; this isn't victim-blaming. Consider reserving that term for when it's appropriate, rather than diluting it. It's simply making an argument...to which you can just change your response to read "The real problem is the heinous practice of putting..." And then I agree with you 100%. Or 99%, anyway.
- nick_kline 6y agoTerms of service that hurt the end user are a bad idea, unacceptable, like dark patterns that cause people to opt in to things they don't want. It's not a crime, but it's immoral.
- McDyver 6y agoThat'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-Canceling-a-subscription https://support.prezi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003478894-Can...
- alisonkisk 6y ago"After your license expires, the presentations you’ve created will remain in your account and keep their privacy status." Did that change today?
- McDyver 6y agoI don't know if it changed, but could have only been an improvement; if in the previous version everything would be made public.
- mherdeg 6y agoAugust 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 https://twitter.com/apenwarr/status/1322998961704210433 ). Maybe they've changed the business logic but haven't updated the help site?
- saagarjha 6y agoYou can’t just put whatever you like in a TOS and expect it to be enforceable.
- McDyver 6y agoThat'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_ 6y agoThe 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 6y agoimo that intention was clear, but atrocious
- Beltiras 6y agoIt's absolutely bonkers.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoAgreed, 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 6y agoI wonder what happens if you just block the card payments? Do your presentations also suddenly become public?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- codetrotter 6y 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.
- jnxx 6y agoBrilliant business model. Let's hope that Google never needs more money.
- mtgx 6y agoGoogle has been destroying their own culture and user experience little by little in order to make more money the following quarter for quite a while now. So I don't know about it "needing" more money, but they certainly seem willing to do whatever it takes and cross whatever line to make more money every quarter.
- cblconfederate 6y agoWell legally speaking, it says "before" cancelling, but they don't specify a frame of reference so they might as well fuck off.
- JimBrimble35 6y agoIf you want to find a group of people who will be consistently sympathetic of ethically dubious business and UI decisions, look no further than Hacker News. I come to the comments looking for outrage, a sign that ultimately decency is the dominant force in our industry. In our world. No one lets me down better than HN (*sorry I can't reply, I'm taking a luxurious bubble bath in your downvotes)
- thoughtleader31 6y agoOf course they put themselves in the shoes of the guys holding your privacy in contempt as, in the best of case, a measure to save at worst a few days of engineering hours. They imagine that lowering the bar for privacy benefits them and their future imaginary startups, or may save them from uninteresting work at their current jobs.
- onion2k 6y agoThis 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 6y agoFrom 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 6y agoI 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.
- andrewjl 6y agoThe issue is that for all the customer-centric rhetoric today, actions like these speak far louder than words.
- sergiotapia 6y agoWhat a nuclear way to bomb your company, wow. I'm dumbstruck how anyone would approve this feature.
- sfg 6y agoWhen 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 6y agoWhy 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 6y agoCancelling 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 6y agoThis 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 6y agoWhy don't they just ask for money? "Please cancel for $50" ;D
- k__ 6y agoReminds 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.
- tgtweak 6y agoI kind of prefer that to providers keeping it around indefinitely.
- admax88q 6y agoWhat 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 6y 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.
- chillacy 6y agoPrezi 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.
- na85 6y ago>Everyone on the planet believes they're right--the right values, the right religions... I'm not aware of an objective answer to morality. Moral relativism is the most insidious means to reduce legitimate concerns—whether they be ethical, political, or otherwise—to inconsequential. It's easy to assuage your own feelings of shame/guilt by pointing out that $repugnant_behaviour occurs else where and that's so much worse. At some point it's required that people actually take a stand rather than participate in the race to the ethical bottom.
- neya 6y agoProbably 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.
- andrewjl 6y agoTextbook 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 6y agoOfficial 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 6y agoPrezi 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 6y agoHm, 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 6y agoI think I more or less understand but what exactly does the word 'copy' mean in this context?
- syndacks 6y agoCopy 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.
- __david__ 6y agoIt's also what's referred to by the word "copyright". IE, the rights to the copy (noun), not the right to copy (verb).
- amingilani 6y agoPrezi 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 https://twitter.com/prezi/status/1323372206357962752
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoMy 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.
- lliamander 6y agoIANAL, 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 6y agoIf 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 6y agoclickbait 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 6y agoThere 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 6y agoOh 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