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Want your images back? That'll be $5

lutr.dev

121–130 of 286 posts

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#121
post #19

Wow, shocker, a company will not indefinitely store your data for free.

I don't think your comment represents the situation very well. They allowed the user to upload the data and they're storing the data regardless, right?

That's fair push back. In defense, my comment was motivated by the OP's assertion (multiple times) that this is merely an example of corporate greed. I don't know what the original user-agreement was, but it seems to me that common sense would say that you have to make money some way. If this business at one point offered a free service and at some point market pressures showed them that wasn't going to work, so they needed to do something else to remain solvent. Egress is not free, so merely uploading and storing is not an argument for free retrieval.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#122

I have received the email that my photobucket account is going to be deleted, so I've logged in after who knows how many years and got offered the same thing, to subscribe. Instead I've went to close the account and in the process (or somewhere else, don't remember exactly) there was an option to first download all the data which I've used and got the images back (there were just a few as I haven't used the service r…

I predict that in the future, when you cancel an LLM subscription, they will threaten that unless you pay, to fully delete your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data. You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...

I wish there was some easy way to bet against this happening. I would put a lot of money on the side of this never happening for a multitude of reasons, but I bet I could collect a lot of money from cynics and doomers who think this stuff will happen.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#124
That's just fucking greedy. I've been working on a SaaS and it's honestly hard sometimes to not stoop to those greedy levels because the money is really there.

Our policy is a subscription grants you write access to your account, but read access will always be there even after you subscription expires. We are still working on policies around long term data retention though.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#125
post #119

This is gross, it could be a onetime fee. It's hard to remember with all the ownership changes, but the Photobucket era was really a different time, of "it's your data, you're in charge, and we give you maximal control of it" - people would upload there to post elsewhere, and I recall they ran ads to monetize. But this era had the ethic that uploading was expensive, and you'd maybe want to do it once and have control…

I, too, miss the time when I was a kid and people would give me free cookies. Now as an adult I have to buy my own cookies.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#127
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, never did a charge back in my life (I'm not from the US, charge backs aren't a big thing here). I'll give it a shot, just for fun :). I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!

I've done a couple on a debit card and it's gone pretty smoothly. I paid around £200 for an online service who they effectively ghosted me, so I submitted a chargeback to my bank, and they said they'd get in contact with the provider. I never heard back about it other than getting my money so I'm guessing they ghosted my bank too

Chargebacks are a pain and as a seller you almost always lose them, Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.

As a company there is just no point in fighting them. I even had emails of clients they made a mistake and didnt realise it was our payment, but even that wasn;t enough.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#128
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's exactly why I mentioned that in the first line of my comment. I quote directly: > (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)

So how is it a win-win then? OP only lost? The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.

It is a win-win for Photobucket users who have their images (which OP is NOT a cohort of) preserved long term and the startup who snapped up Photobucket's data and liabilities. It is fair to say that OP experienced a win-loss in this specific situation.

I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#129

Shout out to Flickr! No matter how many gigabytes you had uploaded, you can still access them. You just can’t upload more without a Flickr Pro plan.

Is this still true? I am a Flickr Pro user and the few times I've let my subscription lapse, I recall that I could only see my most recent 200 uploaded photos until I paid up again. They didn't delete them, for sure! But they were inaccessible.

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5

#130

Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.

And for an amount that low it would be automatically approved and cost photobucket a lot more. Only real way to punish companies for doing this is
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