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Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

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Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#51

Post by fencepost »

maz1b wrote: post #36
cschneid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that this is not cancelling, and some companies can and will sell your bad debt to collection agencies. You don't get out of contracts just by ghosting on them.

Can you expand further on this?

If you have a contract for a service, quite often simply stopping paying does not end the contract - it just builds up charges and past-due fees. If you stop paying your electricity bill, the utility doesn't cut you off immediately - they keep providing service (availability of electricity, even if you're not using any because you flipped the circuit breakers) and charges keep accruing.

Eventually services will be cut off, but contractually you're likely responsible for charges up to that point and the companies involved may end up selling that debt to collection agencies (often for pennies on the dollar).

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#53

Post by saghm »

fencepost wrote: post #42
saghm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A statement under penalty of perjury that all information in your request is truthful and that this is your User Account or that you have the authorization to make the request on behalf of the owner of the User Account That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.

Their concern is probably someone deleting somebody else's account, along with all record of courses completed, etc. Is it possible to have an Udacity account if you're not actually paying them? If so, "account removed" and "unpaid account" are very different things and the transition between them is one-way.

> Their concern is probably someone deleting somebody else's account

Yes, that's what I meant. If some stranger deleted my account, I don't think I would be angry enough to attempt to press criminal perjury charges against them.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#54

Post by crysin »

Annoying sure. "Very" hard? No, not in the slightest and is disingenuous to title it that way. Sure their confirmation buttons were the primary action color, and they really drag the process but it was straight forward, just involved reading to make sure the button you were clicking was the right one. It's a bad process definitely, but not very hard or even moderately hard.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#55

Post by jonas21 »

saghm wrote: post #35
sambucini wrote: post #22

Retain with pain.. The other day I tried to delete my udacity account. No button in settings, I mailed support, they asked my to mail legal (apparently they don't fwd mail..). From legal I received the following response: Hello, We are in receipt of your request to delete your account. We are sorry you want to leave the Udacity family; you will be missed. Before we can proceed with fully processing your request, we n…

> A statement under penalty of perjury that all information in your request is truthful and that this is your User Account or that you have the authorization to make the request on behalf of the owner of the User Account That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.

If I had a nanodegree and was listing it on my resume or mentioning it in job interviews, I'd be pretty upset if someone came in and deleted all proof that I had completed it.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#56

Post by bduerst »

maz1b wrote: post #36
cschneid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that this is not cancelling, and some companies can and will sell your bad debt to collection agencies. You don't get out of contracts just by ghosting on them.

Can you expand further on this?

Bad debt lists are sold for pennies on the dollar to collection agencies, who can and do make a profit on then collecting a percentage of it.

Planet Money had a good podcast episode on it: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/08/354591198/epis...

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#57

Post by iamjaredwalters »

jonas21 wrote: post #55
saghm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A statement under penalty of perjury that all information in your request is truthful and that this is your User Account or that you have the authorization to make the request on behalf of the owner of the User Account That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.

If I had a nanodegree and was listing it on my resume or mentioning it in job interviews, I'd be pretty upset if someone came in and deleted all proof that I had completed it.

Do employers often depend on "nanodegrees" (first I've heard the term) such as Udacity?

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#59

Post by distances »

kuschku wrote: post #43
mrspeaker wrote: post #8

If it's harder to leave than it is to join, then I'm not using your stuff. It's mildly condescending and very transparent and so I don't want/need to deal with it. If you believed in your product, you wouldn't do it. I subscribed to the New York Times with a simple one-step "put in your credit card deets". One year later I was going to leave the country so tried to cancel it. After several steps of forms you get the…

If it’s harder to leave than to join, then it’s also illegal in the EU. You have to be able to cancel through the same medium through which you can subscribe (so if you can subscribe through email, then unsubscribing only through snail mailing a letter is illegal), and it can’t be an unreasonable effort. I’m very interested what the consumer protection agencies in the EU have to say about this.

This is definitely not the case in Germany, unless there has been a very recent change in legislation. There are lots of scummy companies in Germany that make you fax/email copies of official ID to unsubscribe, even if joining was possible with a click of a button.

Re: Cancelling Dropbox Pro is hard

#60

Post by saghm »

jonas21 wrote: post #55
saghm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A statement under penalty of perjury that all information in your request is truthful and that this is your User Account or that you have the authorization to make the request on behalf of the owner of the User Account That strikes me as really extreme. If I had an Udacity account and someone tried to delete it, I would be annoyed, but I wouldn't seek to press criminal charges against them.

If I had a nanodegree and was listing it on my resume or mentioning it in job interviews, I'd be pretty upset if someone came in and deleted all proof that I had completed it.

Yeah, I'd definitely be pretty upset if someone wiped the record of my college degree, but (I hope) Udacity courses don't cost nearly as much as I had to pay.
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