It sounds like a potential GDPR violation, maybe you can open a case with the EU?
Maybe not OP, but someone in the EU should definitely send in a request.
Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
11–20 of 207 posts
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#12You should not only point out that withholding your data is not a nice to have feature, but also that it is illegal.
A lot of gates open up once companies smell the power of the law, and anyone from their support likely _has to_ escalate any issue where a lawyer is plausibly mentioned.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#13Something tells me that the fix is about to skyrocket to the top of their priority list.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#14You know what we should do? Sign up for Notion, add some data, and then ask to export it.
If so many people on Hackernews do that, it would be like hitting them with a GDPR denial of service attack and they’ll be forced to push out this feature ASAP.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#15> Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with in the meantime.
This is the part where you ask for them to generate the export on their end and send you a link manually.
It’s “normal” for a feature to stop working, but their support must be able to provide a workaround even if it takes them hours of manually zipping things. If they don’t, you should at the very least receive a refund.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#16While it’s definitely not ideal it looks like they have a beta API... can you use it to extract your data? Or at least extract the most important data? If you still have the founders’ contact info in your email somewhere another option is to contact them directly and ask for help. Any good founder would quickly task someone with making a miffed but loyal paying customer happy again.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#17No data export feature is pretty damning. Many organizations, especially government, have strict record-keeping requirements (e.g. for US federal agencies/departments, it's required by law). Data export isn't nice-to-have, it's critical functionality.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#18I'm not a Notion customer, but frankly with a response like this I would never, ever be one. It's one thing to make a new feature request and have the response be "sorry, we'll get to it when we get to it." It's quite another to have a bug in an advertised, previously working feature, with no workaround, and say "sorry, our engineers have a big backlog." Imagine if a bank said "sorry, we know the withdrawal feature t…
> Imagine if a bank said "sorry, we know the withdrawal feature to get your money is broken, but our engineers have a big backlog." Unbelievable!
The Mt. Gox story.
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#19I'm not a Notion customer, but frankly with a response like this I would never, ever be one. It's one thing to make a new feature request and have the response be "sorry, we'll get to it when we get to it." It's quite another to have a bug in an advertised, previously working feature, with no workaround, and say "sorry, our engineers have a big backlog." Imagine if a bank said "sorry, we know the withdrawal feature t…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
#20Joplin is a great note taking app with complete authority over your data and has a good subset of the features that Notion provides.