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?

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'.

I miss the days when burying awful things that nobody would willingly accept in the fine print (which few people read and most people have a hard time understanding) was something we all understood to be immoral, to the point that it was a cartoon trope as something the Devil would do.

EDIT: with that said they did a great job fixing my phone with an hour or two.

(IANAL, could be wrong)

The real underlying strategy here is to leverage people's general ignorance of contract law in order to intimidate them into thinking that they are contractually bound when in fact they are not, at least not legally. As a practical matter, the need to pay a lawyer often trumps the actual law (another lesson I learned the hard way).

This is so they can reuse the parts as “genuine” to do the next customer. The watch repair industry is notorious for this. They replace more than they need to, using aftermarket parts, and keep the originals for their own stock.

I was naive but I couldn’t conceive of that happening, going through a legitimate and large jewelry business.

The receipt was really long and not like a normal checkout receipt.

Also part of the profitability of uBreak was selling broken components removed from devices (like good LCDs with broken glass) back to OEMs to be refurbished, so that's why they don't let you have the old parts back.

She told me that it was a policy of Samsung...

We certainly didn't tell them it was some company policy, and LCD replacement was cheaper if your LCD was in good shape so its pretty transparent

Could the phrasing be better? Of course. One option is "I have deleted all private content on this account. I understand that anything remaining will be made public as part of our 'Free Tier.' Click here to delete your presentations if you have not done so already."

But calling it immoral to screw up in the manner of highlighting the issue seems a bit much to me.

Friendliest way to do this would be to keep content for a month after cancelling, but only let -you- see it if you renew or decide to make it public.

A) delete a lot of their stuff, or

B) make all their stuff public

Either could be really, really bad.

You could let the user pick between the two options, I guess. But really, most everyone cancelling something like this needs to go through their stuff and decide for each item: "Keep, but make public" or "Delete".

If both options are likely to be extremely undesirable to a substantive fraction of canceling users, that's the best option.

If there was a most-likely-safe option from the user perspective, choosing that by default and having it confirmed would arguably be better UX, but I don't think "keep everything that used to be private and make it public" is really a "clearly-safer option". Nor, even in the cases where it is safer, do I think that this presents the confirmation well.

> But really, most everyone cancelling something like this needs to go through their stuff and decide for each item: "Keep, but make public" or "Delete".

Some people do, but I bet lots of people have collections that very easily fall into either "Delete all" or "Keep all and make public" by the time they cancel (if only because they are only canceling after everything to which that decision wouldn't apply has been migrated to an alternative service.)

C) make the private stuff inaccessible pending a subscription renewal

D) make it unusable but recoverable

both possibly with some grace period before it is deleted

You're guessing, and I think you're making too strong a statement about something you only guessed at.

I looked through https://prezi.com/terms-of-use/201910_NL/ ("Effective September 1, 2020") and didn't see anything about this.

If someone stops paying for private data hosting, then I'd expect them to lose private data hosting -- in full. I don't see how the "private" in "private data hosting" could be seen as severable without explicit agreement to such a provision.

By analogy, it'd be like if someone requested a plumber come by to their house to replace their toilet. Then when cancelling the request, the plumber said, okay, we can cancel, but the customer must accept the free version of this service: they'll come by and take the old toilet away -- because this is a free service, cancelling the paid version merely cancels them putting in the new toilet, but they still get the old one.

It seems to me that a customer who cancels something shouldn't be forced to accept a substitute service. It'd seem reasonable for the service-provider to ask if the customer wanted the substitute, but language implying that the customer must accept it seems wrong.

But, is that what's happening here?

1. Your data is deleted and no longer hosted. 2. Your data is still hosted and made public.

The first one is what I would expect to happen since it makes the most sense in the context of the service. The second one just makes you look like a jerk.

When the girls later discovered that their scenes were available to anyone on the internet, and tried to "cancel their service", they released their information to all and sundry including their parents/bosses, etc. Just to be jerks.

I mean, say you were in the situation with a plumber who did offer a free service of taking away people's toilets (which seems plausible -- some people might appreciate getting rid of their old toilet for free, while a plumber might offer the service in order to resell the old toilets). And then you paid for a plumber to replace yours, and they insisted that while you cancel the replacement, they were still going to take away your old one. Would you accept this, holding that it's a legal (if jerkish) way to have the toilet replacement canceled?

The plumber is a services for hire offering. Prezi is a data storage offering.

The plumber story involves work that has not yet occured and then is subsequently canceled. Prezi involves ongoing services that are being canceled.

I don't think the plumber analogy comes even close to a good example here.

Again, I see how this makes sense IF we assume that the "private" in "private data hosting" is severable. But while not a lawyer, I don't think that's true without a contractual agreement establishing it.

To be clear, I can appreciate that a provider might intend to offer privacy as a severable feature. But that seems like something they have to tell the customer. Before the customer uploads private information, they should be made aware that, should they stop paying, that private information will be published.

While not a lawyer, I don't think any reasonable court would buy the argument that customers who upload private information are consenting to have it published once they cancel the service unless there's strong evidence to that effect. It seems like a toxic arrangement that people would be unlikely to agree to, so I'd think that there would be a high standard of proof for the provider to establish that the customer intended to agree to it. I'm not sure if merely being buried in the fine print would be enough in a case like this, but is it even in the fine print?

"My subscription lapsed and the 5 decks I'd been working on and hadn't made public yet vanished forever!!!"

Then a customer could:

1. Convert it to public and access it as such.

2. Remove it.

3. Leave it alone, possibly intending to privately access it in the future if they can re-subscribe. (It'd seem reasonable to me if a service provider opted to automatically delete inaccessible content after some time-out period of non-subscription; I'd see their retention of such inaccessible content as a professional courtesy rather than an obligation of theirs unless the contract says otherwise.)

Then I'd think that a good service would offer migration tools to help make these options easier on the customer. For example, offer an easy option to make everything public or delete everything.

But it's hard for me to see how forcing publication upon canceling a service could be defensible without some sort of contractual provision to that effect.

Edit: looks like if your account expires, your data is still private, which is the right thing to do here. https://support.prezi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003478894-Can...

This is victim blaming, and it legitimizes the heinous practice of putting onerous terms behind a click-through acceptance. Please stop.

No, you didn't. You may have ticked a box that said you read the terms of service, but as we all know, no one is reading those documents. It's just plainly dishonest to drop something so unexpected into a ToS.

[a]: The reason being: you checked a box acknowledging that you read them so you can’t claim you didn’t because then someone could read them, then claim they didn’t. It’s a terrible abuse of contract law, but it is unfortunately the world we live in if the legislature won’t fix it.

That's a great question. I'd expect that courts would not uphold claims to one's first-born child[0][1], but only because that sort of thing is already illegal (human trafficking). As for stuff that isn't illegal, I expect that YMMV.

That said, people actually "agreed" to give up/assign their first-born children with these "Click-wrap" agreements.

That people are so cavalier about such things should be a huge red flag for regulators to require not just a link to such terms, but that both parties should be required to demonstrate their specific understanding of terms and conditions before such a contract can be considered enforceable.

But that's not how US courts have interpreted this sort of thing. So, as always, Caveat Emptor!

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/29/londoners...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/nobody-reads-tos...

Edit: Fixed spacing.

Also says that any claim you make has to be made in some particular US court. WTF, this is a game I bought in Australia.

There were pages and pages of other legalese but those are the parts that I remember.

I was so angry after reading it that I haven't accepted it or been able to play the game (that I paid for) since.

What kind of bullshit is that? Changing the terms of something that I purchased six months earlier?

I wonder what would happen if I take it back to the store and ask for a refund because I can't accept the TOS.

'If you cancel, all of your private presentations will be deleted.' with a tick box that says 'I understand - delete my private data'. I should not have to go do a bunch of extra legwork to ensure my private data doesn't become public when I cancel my subscription, and in particular, non-consensual cancellations (e.g. cancellation due to non-payment) must not make my private data public.

They can block people in the EU all they want, it won't make a difference.

I don't know about you, but I never agree to anything when I sign up to anything, because I never read anything before I sign up, just like everyone else (except people paid to do so.)

Which is why a "severability clause"[0] is pretty ubiquitous in contracts.

N.B.: IANAL

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/severability.asp

On topic, I think a friendlier approach would be to automatically delist or unpublish anything flagged private. The user can then go and update as needed.

I figured maybe you give Prezi the rights to your content, but in fact, no. They can only republish your content on their account if you tag it as "public":

Customer hereby grants to Prezi a world-wide, non-exclusive, revocable, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license for the Term of this Agreement to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works, communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, distribute and transmit the Customer Content: (i) for the purpose of providing the Presentation Services to Customer and (ii) to the extent Customer has designated any portion of the Customer Content as “Public Content” through the content management features of the Presentation Services, for Prezi to make use of such “Public Content” in connection with promotion and marketing of Prezi’s products and services. Customer also hereby grants to Prezi a world-wide, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to (a) analyze the Customer Content for the purposes of quality control, benchmarking and improving the Presentation Services and (b) maintain a back-up copy of Customer’s “Public Content” indefinitely. Customer represents and warrants that it has all rights, clearances and authority necessary to grant the foregoing licenses to Prezi. Customer reserves all rights to the Customer Content that are not expressly granted in this Agreement.

In literacy tests, under 2% of Americans read beyond a grade 12 level. Odds are than under 1% could read that terms of use and actually understand it. Even if they wanted to.

(Note, they only analyze the first 3000 words.)

TEXT READABILITY CONSENSUS CALCULATOR www.ReadabilityFormulas.com

Timestamp: 11/02/2020 — 12:19:15pm

Purpose: Our Text Readability Consensus Calculator uses 7 popular readability formulas to calculate the average grade level, reading age, and text difficulty of your sample text.

Your Results:

Your text: These Prezi Business Terms and Conditions, togethe ... (2920 words total)

1. Flesch Reading Ease score: 29 (text scale) Flesch Reading Ease scored your text: very difficult to read.

2. Gunning Fog: 17 (text scale) Gunning Fog scored your text: difficult to read.

3. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 15 Grade level: College.

4. The Coleman-Liau Index: 13 Grade level: college

5. The SMOG Index: 14 Grade level: college

6. Automated Readability Index: 15 Grade level: College graduate

7. Linsear Write Formula: 18 Grade level: College Graduate and above.

---------------------------------------------- READABILITY CONSENSUS ---------------------------------------------- Based on (7) readability formulas, we have scored your text:

Grade Level: 15 Reading Level: very difficult to read. Age of Reader: College graduate ----------------------------------------------

I find this hard to believe, given that 34% of Americans have a college degree.

That's roughly "college level reading" on official measures.

And yes, comparing high school graduation rates with adult literacy it is obvious that a lot of people graduated high school with skills below what they were supposed to have. I find this depressing but in accord with my experience.

You might have misread that. It says 2% of global adults (“across all countries”) are level 5. It also says that level 5 does not officially exist, and level 4 is the highest level on the PIAAC scale.

According to that article, 12% of Americans are in the highest level measured. Over 13% of Americans have post-graduate degrees. And while on the scale you linked to, the U.S. ranks lower than a lot of countries, don’t ignore the fact that the spread of absolute scores above the U.S. is in the single digit percentages. Framing these particular scores as representing some kind of glaring education problem here seems to be over-emphasizing minor global differences and ignoring some context.

I hope this gives you reasons to feel more optimistic. We have plenty of room to improve, but it is clearly not as bad as you thought.

If you go to https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf for a more detailed look at the data, you'll find that the fraction of adults world-wide who score at level 4/5 is the same as the USA. In age breakdowns, more US 55-65 year olds are at that top literacy bracket, and in every other age cohort is worse.

Therefore there is no reason to believe that the US at the level 5 is any different than the global average. And there is reason to suspect that the USA is getting worse over time.

Incidentally I was merely stating it as data and didn't blame this on a glaring education problem here. That would be a much longer discussion.

It is clear that the earlier claim "under 2% of Americans read beyond a grade 12 level" is not true, and not what your supporting links actually say. It's absolutely clear that your speculation "Odds are than under 1% could read that [Prezi's] terms of use and actually understand it." is both not true and dramatically pessimistic.

Yes, legalese is dense. Hardly anyone reads it because it takes a lot of time, not because nobody is capable. How many people read below a 12th grade level (whatever that means) are using Prezi in the first place?

I'm just pointing out that your initial interpretation of the data was off by an order of magnitude.

There absolutely is a level 5. It was defined and measured in the survey. Both links confirm that.

But then they did not break it down in the reporting because few enough people fell into it for their survey to produce reasonable statistics on a per country level.

Now you are correct that I should not have said "under 2%". But given that the portion of the USA at level 4/5 matches the international portion at the same level (both cases 12%), it seems likely that the portion of the USA at level 5 (which the survey was not large enough to estimate) is about the same as the international average (which the survey measured at 2%).

Therefore even though the survey did not report a figure for the USA, it is likely that the real figure is around 2%.

I stand by my belief that this terms of service is sufficiently complex that even fewer can understand it.

You are right that the average Prezi user is more likely to be literate than the average American.

This figure is meaningless, which is part of why they didn’t report it. You’re fixating on a number that doesn’t inform you.

Whatever their level 5 means, it excludes at least 90% of the people who wrote large technical and impenetrable documents just to graduate from school, not including all the practicing lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, and writers in the country.

There’s a disconnect between using the 2% number to represent any kind of literacy threshold, and reality. It may have measured something, but this “2%” does not represent a limit on number of people who have the capability to read Prezi’s terms of service.

> I stand by my belief that this terms of service is sufficiently complex that even fewer [than 2%] can understand it.

That’s unfortunate, I’ve failed to make a convincing argument. I was hoping to help you see more clearly that’s not what your data actually says, and is also contradicted by other data as well. The data isn’t wrong, but your interpretation is.

Plus it's a poor use of half an hour if they can change things anyway:

> Prezi may revise these Prezi Business Terms and Conditions. If Prezi makes material revisions, Prezi will notify Customer, either through the user interface of the Presentation Services, in an email notification or through other reasonable means. Customer’s use of the Presentation Services after the date such revisions become effective will constitute consent to the revised Prezi Business Terms and Conditions.

I know it doesn't exactly say that...but it doesn't clearly say anything else either, and presumably some actual body of laws has to apply no matter how California's laws evolve; I'm honestly curious what the actual intended result of this provision is.

> 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.

(emphasis mine)

(*) delete all data, () make data public.

Whether the GDPR apply to data stored on that service can only be judged on a case by case basis after having looked at the data in question.

In any case, I'm not sure that they prevent their customers from deleting data. It seems that that content is public unless deleted if a customer cancels their paid subscription.

a) delete all your private content; b) make all your content public.

But the tweet is tendentious. Nothing prevents the user from deleting their content - THAT would be the problematic part.

So it's a small nuisance for the user, but they ARE telling the user. They don't make your content silently public and then say "you agreed to that in paragraph 7.9.12 when you registered."

(This is similar to how LucidChart works)

I’m not saying that anyone is entitled to it, I’m just saying that I think the model of ‘content created when I was a premium subscriber can retain some limited premium features’ is a much more graceful and customer-friendly downgrade path.

Forcing all your documents into either public, or a downloadable format you will never be able to edit again even if you resubscribe, doesn’t seem very consumer friendly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This same thought process works for suicide bombers fighting for a theocracy as much as you or me.

Consider that giving this advice to everyone on earth would just lead to more extremism in all directions. E.g. PETA sees meat consumption as animal genocide, but meat eaters don't see animals as being in the same class as people (they're humanists).

Well, most do except those who engage in the practice, of course.

I agree that corporate lawyers are abhorrent ;)

I categorically disagree. Your stance is what seems to me what would increase extremism, because there's always someone else you can point to and go "BUT WHAT ABOUT..." to justify any arbitrary shitty policy.

I don't think understanding that beliefs are arbitrary and fighting for your beliefs is mutually exclusive. If anything there's at least the acknowledgement that because many moral arguments work both ways, bringing people who disagree to your position requires other methods.

If you want to get more technical, there are normative and positive statements, the former describing what we are talking about here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics

In that lens, "Your stance is what seems to me what would increase extremism" is probably positive because it could be evaluated experimentally, but "cutting in line is wrong" is a normative statement.

My open question (and I'm very open to being wrong) is if there's a way to convince line cutters from a culture of line cutters of their wrongdoing without resorting to violence or coercion. How would you do it?

So what's your conclusion then. Morals are relative, therefore there are no morals? Who are we to criticize genocide and terrorism?

Unless your definition of moral absolutism only encompasses humans living today (with the implication that technology makes certain things possible), which I might agree with.

And yet by focusing on and stating "just that," you steer the conversation away from the concrete action that this whole thread was started about.

We're not going to resolve moral relativism vs absolutism in a web form, nor should that be a necessary pre-requisite for condemning the immoral behaviour of a company.

It's one thing to debate if the particular action in question is good or not. It's another to attempt to invalidate the entire debate by stating that "morals are relative."

You may think you're just stating "morals are relative, just that," but in reality, the context within which you state it serves only to move the discussion away from the morals of the act in question into some abstract debate about morals in general. It's a distraction. Sometimes the "root cause" cannot be resolved and we should focus on the symptoms and more surface level issues.

The parent comment I originally responded to was about jobs they found morally objectionable and an Upton Sinclair quote.

My reply was about how some people don't actually find those jobs objectionable.

Then the reply to that was about moral relativity (which okay, now we're getting into philosophy).

And now we're about to discuss the purpose of a web forum, but that seems even more meta than this conversation.

I guess in summary, I agree we have veered off of course (arguably the original comment had very little to do with this Prezi incident), but I also think these side discussions are interesting. If you don't want to chat about philosophy you don't have to and it's okay if some people are wrong on the internet.

That said though I can see how this specific case happened just looking at incentives. Startups are strapped for people, and offboarding is sadly one of the first things to get dropped, because it doesn't directly increase revenue (and may even decrease retention).

Even more cynically I wouldn't be surprised if there was a time where this warning wasn't even shown at all and presentations just went back to being public because the has_active_subscription field returned false.

I have seen good people do bad things out of negligence that later gets attributed to malice on the internet when it gets discussed.

People always drift towards malicious intent but I think it's uniquely terrifying that "good" people can do bad things when the incentives are misaligned, or they aren't thinking end to end, if only because it's an opportunity to admit that we ourselves might make a similar mistake, so we should be vigilant.

Probably the same people who recently suggested re-colonization of Africa and downvoted my horrified responses to oblivion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893411)

Is this just a recent spike in abject immortality or is this an Eternal September?

I don't know what's going on either but there certainly seems to be an uptick in some straight up embarrassing thinking on this site.

I did notice that this all reversed when TikTok was going to be banned, and a lot of people were happy that the US government was going through with it.

One thing I do question is if there was an actual shift in the trend and I noticed it or if this libertarian-ism was always present in tech circles and I'm noticing it more now.

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.

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.

Let's be real, there's no benefit to involving the private/public setting here other than making the service more sticky / difficult to leave.

This company seems to do web based slide decks. What file format do you give users, HTML and CSS files? A PDF printout of their presentations?

I agree that giving users a copy of their data would be ideal, but without a program that can view the data, the data itself might not be that useful.

There's a lot of options of varying difficulty. But they already have code to produce PDF, and dumping some proprietary lossless representation of their internal format doesn't seem unreasonably difficult. If they're shy about their secret sauce, fine, encrypt that second copy. It's only for the case that this user wants to come back to the service later on.

I can imagine plenty of business reasons not to do this, but very few technical ones.

I feel like you're not accounting for the time and effort it takes to maintain backwards compatibility. Once you give a customer a file that uses your internal format you have to always make sure your service will be able to read it back in. Going forward you aren't maintaining just 1 format, you're maintaining N different ones.

But does that mean it's unreasonable to require companies to do it? We already force plenty of engineering with regulation (GDPR, HIPAA, FERPA, PCI-DSS, SOX) because these are things society wants, even if the company would rather not.

Also, maybe the proprietary format doesn't need to work forever. Just add a disclaimer that it's only guaranteed for, say, 1 year? Or just "best effort"? All the file does is give the customer an incentive to return to Prezi later on. It would be in their own best interest to support this, if they weren't allowed to sidestep the whole issue by making it difficult to leave in the first place.

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.

Otherwise it's hard not to impute a malicious motive to suddenly making private data public.

Then just say If you don't want your content to be deleted, pay us (with a side of "entitled freeloaders can fuck right off")

Kinda what Flickr does now. Which I dislike (finally cancelled my Pro yesterday), but I respect that they can't keep providing the old service for free.

Then we'd be seeing posts about momentary subscription lapses (or glitches along those lines) resulting in tons of user data being irrevocably lost.

I think the safest option would be to force the user, when they unsubscribe, to select between "keep everything but on the public free plan" vs. "unsubscribe and then delete everything."

Sure, and this is where, for example, the old Flickr policy was great. You could only see the 1000 newest pics, but all the rest of them were actually still there (and inaccessible to anyone), in case you decided to renew later.

But the way I see it, if you didn't stay on top of payments, my service wasn't important enough to you anyway. A grace period with notification seems perfectly reasonable to me before I delete all your data.

As others have mentioned, I think "keep the content and make it read-only" would be the best possible experience, but I also understand (1) that would probably require even more work; and (2) sometimes you need to make business decisions to keep people from unsubscribing.

> 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

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)

I think it's a vestige from the days of the printing press.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...)

> 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.

Publicizing private content as a side effect of something other action is halfway to revenge porn.

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?

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.

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.

What was created as a private document should never be flipped to public without the user explicitly choosing to do that.

It's saying - Go delete things you don't want public before you hit cancel, because otherwise they become public.

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.

“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)”

> 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)

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.

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.

The gist was:

Your data is super safe in S3, as long as you pay the bill. If you stop, it's gone.

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)

Once again, I don't condone these terms.

For example, in the US I believe it's pretty common for renters to be obliged to pay for or fix up normal dilapidation of the property when they leave. But in the UK it's illegal to require that for residential property. If you rent out houses in the UK, you're going to be paying to repaint them every few years, replace worn carpets, and so on, because the law says the tenant doesn't pay, and if you add a clause saying "Actually the tenant agrees to pay anyway" the law says your lease acts exactly as if you didn't add that clause except now you also lose the right to get courts to enforce your lease because it was illegal and you lose certain other protections because clearly you're an abusive landlord. So bad luck you made things harder on yourself.

While there can be unfair terms, which are then unenforceable, if a tenant and landlord explicitly and freely agree that the tenant will pay for something or do something this isn't necessarily invalid as this can be interpreted as being consideration (i.e. what the tenant agrees to do in exchange to be granted the lease). Certainly there is no loss of "right to get courts to enforce your lease" or "other protections".

Did that change today?

That seems at odds with the checkbox in the UI in the Tweet in this post ( https://twitter.com/apenwarr/status/1322998961704210433 ). Maybe they've changed the business logic but haven't updated the help site?