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okramcivokram
root-parent
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...
Aurornis
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.
dylan604
As a devil's advocate, why do you trust the AI companies to behave as you suggest and not the other way? You say you have multitude of reasons, but list none. We have already seen by example that the AI companies do not care about laws and will circumvent societal norms as long as they get a leg up, so it's not a stretch to think they'd do things like this too.
flir
Dunno about that near-blackmail scenario, but 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 last year and the database was sold for $305m.
TeMPOraL
You wouldn't win because those cynics don't really believe their own nonsense to the extent of risking money over it. But if there was an option to bet, one we could point them to and say, "if you really believe it then here's your chance at free money", maybe some of them would reconsider their belief.
gmerc
There’s no regulatory regime anymore in the US. So there’s no downside to it. It is inevitable.
therealpygon
Oh, I’m sure there aren’t any possible examples of similar behaviors. No company would try to penalize cancellation I’m sure, certainly not by forcing you to subscribe for 12 months and pay an out clause to cancel your monthly subscription, and certainly no company would make cancellations far more difficult. There is definitely nothing that would make anyone think this could be a real tactic half-buried in your EULA agreed when signing up for the service. You know, alongside all those clauses that they effectively own copies of everything you send to them.
I’m gonna bet a whole lot more money has been made off corporate apologists who say “that would never happen” about things that definitely then happened.
Wonder how many “conspiracy theorists” warned people cigarettes were causing cancer while corporate apologists pointed to the faked studies of the industry and said “See, they are all crazy, no company would sell something that they know causes cancer! It would be a huge risk!”
neonstatic
There is a way, it's called Polymarket.
kurthr
Yeah, but someone at one of the LLM providers would bet against you and do it, just to take your money. If someone bets $100k your house doesn't burn down with pictures posted within 30min of it happening, it probably will.
dorgo
Isn't this how Google operates? I have their AI subscription (about $20 per month). If you want to have a chat history (retain chats after reload) or connect the LLM to Google services (Drive, Emails) you have to activate an option which also allows training. If you don't want to allow training then the subscription is basically useless.
junior44660
I always pose fundamentalist questions and hypotheticals to the LLM to poison such training data.
RobRivera
I have loads of requests to 'Play Despacito' across agents all over the blogosphere
cwmoore
Now you can place a bet on how well that approach will work out in ten years.
yifanl
I just ask it to spellcheck the Webster dictionary about 50 times an hour.
dakolli
Also, press thumbs down when a response is good and thumbs up when a response is bad. Don't do free labor for them.
zamadatix
Unless your subscription type already comes with a guarantee the data will not be kept or used in training I'd assume the conversations will eventually be used in training regardless how much you paid previously or whether or not you decide to discontinue one day.
sharts
Or they’ll just make it public entirely if you don’t maintain a subscription.
anal_reactor
I was doing a Udemy course about AI and there was a section where I had to do some processing on randomly scraped tweets and the random tweet that the machine chose to display as an example of something was from a gay porn star and about fisting.
jpfromlondon
it obviously knew your hn username
undefined
RajT88
I don't think flat out blackmail will come from LLM companies. It will come from data brokerage companies headquartered overseas.
I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened already, but I guess there hasn't been enough unscrupulous LLM companies selling those "anonymous" chat logs yet.
dspillett
> they will be public as paid training data.
Your data is already training data. If they promise to delete everything from their models or those elsewhere that they made the data available to, even if you pay, I'd call them liars.
cj
Yes.
Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account.
At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent.
The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO.
(But not giving a preview of the account you're reclaiming isn't a good UX obviously, not going to defend that!)
lutr
Yes, I'm at fault here with missing the e-mails. The Photobucket account was registered using an old e-mail address that I was using as a kid. I happened to find the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager.
So these are the unfortunate circumstances. This post basically shows what's it like to be a living and breathing edge-case (missed e-mails & no images in your account).
This actually made me think about the edge-cases I must have shipped at work and how they're affecting people.
MisterTea
I did the same thing. I contacted support via email who told me to go through the deletion process and near the end, there would be an option to save your photos free of charge. I downloaded my photos, looked through them, then deleted the account.
vitally3643
Photobucket has been sending me an email every few months that my account is due to be deleted. It's been at least two or three years.
I'd love them to delete my account because there's nothing in it, but apparently it's just an outright scam
xahrepap
yeah, i ignored them for years just to see how long they'd play their little game. I finally got sick of it, paid them for a month, downloaded everything, and then canceled/closed the account. Didn't know there was the free option... but oh well. Glad to be rid of them.
So tired of the games everyone plays to squeeze $5 out of someone.
Uncle_Brumpus
This is the real tip. Thank you.
I had gone through a whole process probably 2 years ago now to "recover" my account that I lost the original email and forgot the password. I eventually got into the account before they paywalled it, and procrastinated downloading everything because I couldn't find a good way to do it in bulk.
Interestingly, you can request the download, and then just NOT delete your account, which is what I plan on doing out of spite. My 81MB of ~600 cringe avatar edits from Gaiaonline circa 2007 will forever take up that tiny space on their servers as they hope and pray that one day I might toss them $5.
the_af
> 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 really), then I've closed the account. There was no need to subscribe.
Does Photobucket make it clear that this is an option, or did you discover it by accident? I don't get that sense from TFA. If it was unclear, this is still a shitty dark pattern. The wording implies that in order to "relive" your images you must subscribe...
Uncle_Brumpus
I would have had no idea if it weren't for this post. It isn't displayed or acknowledged ANYWHERE on any page, through 3 or 4 pages of "Are you SURE you want to delete your account? You could pay us $5 per month in a different way to pay for 1TB of 'cold storage' instead? How does that sound?"
Only once you get to the final page of account deletion does it give you a single link that says "Request data download" or something.
philo23
[dead]
lutr
Yeah, makes sense. I think it's just a little honeypot for fools that don't do their research. 1 prompt to Claude would have saved me the pain, probably. ("Research" isn't even that hard nowadays!)
trwhite
Or maybe... you know... read
lutr
It's true, doing things carefully can avoid a ton of problems in life. I guess I wasn't expecting to have to use my full attention for a little "side mission".
And I'd already made peace with losing those $5. "It's time to relive them for just $5" didn't really sound like you can get them back, in my defense.
uberex
the whole part about dark patterns is to be technically not doing the asshole thing while getting most people to fall for it.
mbo
Why are we complaining about this as a corporate greed thing? (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize, and was sold to Fox and then offloaded to some no-name startup called Ontela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket). The service could have been shutdown completely and the harddrives fed into the shredder. Instead some former PE vulture did the math and figured out that preservation might make some money. You _can_ access old Photobucket images (when it works) that would otherwise get a median of 0 hits a month, while the rest of the internet succumbs to linkrot. Seems like a win-win for everyone involved.
echoangle
Well one complaint is that the OP was told he would be able to get photos for $5 when they actually weren’t any there (which photobucket knew before obviously). That actually seems deceptive enough that I would try to get my money back.
mbo
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)
echoangle
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.
undefined
xp84
Imagine you were building this reactivation flow. How likely would you have thought it to be that someone keeps the password to a completely unused account for 10-20 years, then suddenly misremembers it as an actually-used account and goes to reactivate it? This has probably happened on Photobucket maybe 5 times total. I don't even remember the names of any sites I signed up for and never used in 2006, let alone have interest in logging into them decades later. They could have added a check to make it clear the account is empty up front, but I can see how the person designing it thought it might be incredibly rare (and they were right).
Dylan16807
If it was that old you likely had a password you used for a bunch of things, and also you can reset the password.
The case of not having images is really obvious.
cloudbonsai
> Obviously Photobucket completely failed to properly monetize
IIRC Photobucket actually made a good amount of money through their advertising business unit ("Give free storage and get paid by ads" was their business model). They were acquired successfully by Fox for $300M in 2007.
Ontela was a photo-uploading app provider in the pre-iPhone era. When Fox decided to spin out Photobucket (as a fallout of the MySpace debacle), the two companies got merged.
oasisbob
If a PE vulture keeps a company with marginal profitability alive, there is absolutely no way they're devoting any kind type of human capital to proper maintenance.
It's likely running on the original infrastructure from acquisition, is full of EOL dependencies, and likely wasn't well-secured to begin with even before the takeover.
Any changes to regulatory requirements are also likely ignored. The EULA is probably full of all sorts of falsehoods about how they maintain the site. ("We use commercially standard methods to secure and blah blah blah ...")
Keeping these kinds of zombie sites online is not a win-win situation.
collinmanderson
devsda
If chad is really struggling and asks to partially pay for his gas costs to meet halfway for getting my stuff* back, I would understand and not be mad at him.
[*] assuming chad doesnt lie about having my stuff as OP claims in this case
lutr
Life really is a series of xkcds, it turns out!
inigyou
Back in the 2000s there was an implicit social contract that websites would treat your uploaded data with respect. You weren't putting your stuff in Chad's garage, you were putting it in a professional seeming storage business that just happened to be free because none of us really understood how to monetize the net.
xp84
> websites would treat your uploaded data with respect
Are you saying that the free websites in question owed their users completely free storage of that data, in perpetuity?
How is that a reasonable expectation, regardless of how one viewed "Chad"?
I can agree that that would certainly be nice. But like, with the exception of those who remained in continuous profitable operation, most free sites will end up shut down or sold, so either the data will be deleted, or someone is going to be paying for servers continuously to preserve that data forever. No one will do that and expect $0.
I'd also add that I am pretty sure of all random things uploaded to random sites 20 years ago, 99% of it is either content no one cares about today, or content that the uploader kept on their own disk or their paid cloud storage.
veltas
I will say personally I didn't feel this way in the 2000's, and I was a child at the start of that decade. Maybe I am cynical.
Dylan16807
I don't know how long respect lasts for keeping abandoned data but it's not more than five years.
And I expect a professional business to protect my items less long than Chad.
klodolph
Back in the 2000s I think a much larger fraction of the web was running out Chad’s garage.
You got a Pentium III and a DSL connection? Run a website! Run an IRC server!
dghlsakjg
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks
2004 is when that was typed. I'm not sure that that social contract ever existed. We just didn't understand how "free" services worked.
kevin_thibedeau
That works when you are the product and they have customers who want to use their humans for some other business activity. If they have viable customers, you are useless as a product.
micromacrofoot
social contracts stop working when they're not between individual people with a shared experience
when you make a contract with facebook or any other large site you're making a contract with a legal team tasked with protecting their money
at a certain point scale only works through oppression
undefined
InsideOutSanta
Yeah, I think this is actually kinda nice. I recently got my fotos out of flicker and paid them a month of subscription to do it. I didn't mind that at all. At least my data is still there.
lutr
[dead]
equinoxnemesis
Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.
lutr
Right?? I mean again, I could have gotten a refund in 48 hours, per the smallprint... But I noticed it about ~3 months too late, while writing about this.
But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.
uberex
You can charge back months after. Best to ask for refund first (as in now, despite their legally irrelevant time limit) as the CC would expect you to do that first.
lutr
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!
scjody
You can absolutely do a chargeback months later. This is fraud, and credit card companies are usually very willing to address that! Typically they'll put the onus on Photobucket to demonstrate that you received the service you paid for, and they won't be able to do that in your case.
xp84
I'm honestly genuinely surprised that you care so much about $5 ($3 in 2006 money, when people last used photobucket) that you wrote this article over it, but cared so little to just ask for the refund 15 seconds after finding the account was unused.
lutr
Haha, that's fair! I wrote the post because I thought it was actually kinda funny. And when I found out the account was empty, I did stop the subscription. But I guess I didn't realize in time that I could go even further and request a refund. Not really a refund kind of person :P.
dkuntz2
100% issue a chargeback
StrLght
Fully agree, that's just straight up fraud and it's covered by chargebacks.
dawnerd
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
sneak
The ToS is what binds. Good luck getting most card companies to allow you to do a chargeback these days.
I’ve been sold counterfeit or defective merchandise on eBay thrice in the last year. eBay’s guarantees are totally worthless even with evidence, and it was like pulling teeth to get my bank to do a chargeback. In one case they wouldn’t at all.
echoangle
> The ToS is what binds.
I don’t know where you’re from but this isn’t the case in any normal country at all.
People always treat ToS as some god-given mandate that’s valid just because it’s written somewhere, but in reality there obviously are limits to what you can enforce.
You can’t just circumvent customer protection laws by denying them in the ToS.
Spoom
Your bank sucks. The few times I've done a chargeback, it's been totally pain free. I do advise trying to get a refund informally first as that is expected by the CC networks.
inigyou
ToS are rarely binding.
nekusar
> The ToS is what binds.
Sure. Now provide a notarized statement showing THEY agreed to those exact terms.
Cause guess what... they cant prove shit.
luisf_mc
[flagged]
geor9e
If Google Photos gave me my photos in one go, exactly as they are in the app, I'd gladly pay $5.
As it stands, they offer "Takeout" for free. This process gives you hundreds of zip files with the photos distributed into deep subfolders by date. That would be forgivable if it weren't for the fact that they revert all their processing and deduping, leaving you with 20 copies of the same file scattered in random places. To make matters worse, if you try to download more than two zips at a time, it throws an error and forces you to start a new Takeout request. You then have to wait 24 hours for an email telling you that you can try downloading the zips all over again.
I just assume the project manager responsible is a Dark Triad personality whose sole goal in life is preventing people from ever leaving Google Photos.
My current strategy is to chisel it down by using the Google Photos search function to show 100 files as a time, which I download as a zip, then delete those 100 while they're still selected. That way they are somewhat organized and still deduped, unlike the mess that Takeout gives me.
physicles
Have you tried https://github.com/simulot/immich-go for dealing with the some of the complexity of google takeout? Not sure how much it actually handles, and whether it can be used easily if you're not migrating to immich, but it's what came to mind here. (I'm a new user of immich but never used google photos)
netsharc
Huh, that reminds me of trying to download photos shared by other people after a group trip. Select all, download, GPhotos claims to have zipped all of it, but nope, the zip was missing a lottt of files...
janalsncm
> Apparently using Vercel to host a personal blog might not be the best idea. I'm nearly reaching the limit of Edge Requests in just 2 hours after the post.
I had always thought that fixing outages was one of the least appealing parts of software engineering, but so many SWE blogs seem to have built blogs in ways where downtime is inevitable.
Unless there is an extremely good reason not to use one, a static site generator works perfectly well. Next, there are many 3p services which will display that site for free. GitHub pages, AWS free tier, I’m sure there are plenty of other ones.
Importantly, and relevant to this article, the files live on your computer. You can mirror them in any number of repos if you want, but it is not possible for any 3p service to hold them hostage.
I am thoroughly convinced that this is the right way that I’d even go so far as to say it is a best practice for roll-your-own blogs, and any sort of issue like the article describes is a direct result of not following that best practice.
joshstrange
If ever there was a use-case for chargebacks, this is it. Threaten their support to refund or you will file a chargeback, and then file one if they refuse.
calc_exe
Exactly. And I wouldn't threaten the chargeback. If they refuse the refund or ignore you, then just file a chargeback.
To me, ideally the end result is a chargeback instead a customer support refund. Otherwise they have no incentive to change. A high chargeback percentage could be that incentive.
I think the credit card companies expect you to attempt to talk it out with the merchant first though, so you'd still want to reach out to customer support first to "give them a chance".
joshstrange
That's fair and the practices here do allow for immediate chargeback in my book. My suggestion for reaching out to support comes mostly from being on the other end of chargebacks and being frustrated when that's the first/only tool people reach for.
Chargebacks don't tell the full story, telling support "Hey you told me to pay $5 to see my pictures but there were no pictures. Give me my money or I'll file a chargeback" has a better chance of making it up the chain and changing policy. A chargeback on its own could mean any number of things and it's easier for management to write it off a "just fraud" or similar.
If you just want to screw the company but potentially not encourage them to change = Immediate chargeback
If you want to try and change the company's policies = Support + Chargeback if not fixed
I'm not making a judgement call either way, I think both are acceptable in this scenario. I'm just pointing out that if change is your real desire, the support route has better odds.
calc_exe
Gotcha, I may have made some assumptions on how the process works. From the handful of chargeback stories I've heard from merchants, the credit card company passed along the cardholder's reasoning to the merchant when issuing the chargeback. So the merchant was able to figure out why the customer was unhappy. But that's anecdotal, I don't actually know if that's standard.
jojomodding
In times like this, I am happy I live in the EU where I can request a company send me a copy of all data they have stored about me. That includes all pictures I ever send to them, or at least a low-resolution preview sufficient for me to realize which picture it is, or at the very least a file listing. Ah yes and they must do so without charging me anything.
account42
How about taking some responsibility for not archiving your "childhood memories" yourself?
IMO the main damaged party here is everyone who comes to old forum threads and finds lots of inaccessible images (or images watermarked to the point of being unusable). But then again it was never reasonable to expect image hosts to provide a free service forever.
PurelyApplied
Oh hey, Photobucket! I wonder what I stashed in there...
Look through old email to figure out what email address they had.
Attempt to log in, no memory of password. Get reset link sent to my ancient Hotmail.
Hotmail doesn't recognize this device because I haven't logged in in a decade. Send an email to my hotmailspam@my-domain.com that I apparently set up at some point to confirm my identity. Have to enter multiple confirmation codes.
Log into Hotmail, click link to reset Photobucket password.
Create a new password, put it on my vault.
"Failed to reset password Firebase: Error (auth/the-service-is-currently-unavailable.)."
Perfect. No notes.
onel
This is the kind of story that's push people towards self-hosting.
I don't even have an account with photobucket but I fully feel the pain of this user and I got outraged just by reading this.
I think this kind of SaaS business is going to go the way of the Dodo very soon.
ComputerGuru
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.
incanus77
No, because I am dealing with this right now. I stopped paying for Flickr Pro after 20+ years and can only download my photos in bulk as 1024px resolution in order to get back under the free plan limits unless I pay for Flickr Pro… which is $82/year. My photos are held hostage unless I pay.
tedggh
Have you tried this?
"if you ever need a copy of your data, members can always request and download their content, including original files, through the Flickr Data section of your settings."
jmcphers
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.
jmathai
Given this is a largely technical crowd, I feel it my duty to share just how good (and free/open) Immich is.
If you’re like me and don’t want to be an “admin for life” then it’s still for you.
What has worked for me for over a decade is to keep the source of my photos in a boring old folder (backed up to my synology and Dropbox). And then layer photo viewing and sharing apps on top.
The day I’m sick of Immich and there’s a better alternative, I switch.
I’ve written about how it works as I’ve gone along. Recommend reading and putting your own twist on it.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/my-ridiculously-robust-pho...
https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
lutr
100%!!
In fact I'm also using Immich and it's amazing! It's as good as the Google Photos app, but you own your data and can more cheaply upgrade your storage, if needed.
On that old Photobucket account I was hoping to find screenshots I made as a kid. Didn't store actual photos there, thankfully.
gorbachev
I was a big fan of your OpenPhoto / Trovebox solution back in the day.
It was ahead of its time. Glad you're still working in the photo sharing space!
jmathai
Oh wow. Thank you and great to run into folks from that community.
I’ve preserved all of the tags and albums from my Trovebox library. Had high hopes of integrating it into Western Digital NAS devices but…big co :/
y-c-o-m-b
I've been using it for about 6 months now and I'm mostly happy with it, but there are definitely some pain points. Depending on individual use-case, it can be a bit tricky to get setup.
I dislike Docker Desktop for Windows, so I run it in a docker container on Windows Subsystem for Linux with Tailscale and have configured it to automatically initialize all of it when my PC is powered on. It took me many hours and lots of chatting with GPT to get it working. Perhaps my configuration is uncommon though.
My biggest issue with it is the overhead and lack of smart configuration. For example my wife and I have the same mobile device (Android) and we can't share an account while having backups made at the same time because backups mimic the default android images folders and both devices have the same structure. If we have two different accounts, then each account generates its own thumbnails and you have to run facial recognition on each one individually (which required a lot of manual tagging). This wastes a lot of time and space.
The second problem is it can't just work with the file system structure and organization I have in my external folders "as-is". You basically have to recreate them as albums inside immich yourself. I found a handy script that did this for me, but the experience is somewhat lacking.
Third issue is I can't backup to external folders. Backups go to the default immich folder and I have to manually pull them out of these and dump them in the correct external folders (recall that I have my own file structure).
I've gone to their github and luckily there are issues out on all of these which I promptly upvoted, but I'm not sure any of them have been resolved by the team yet. I'm hoping they get fixed soon.
Edit: I should mention that I don't enjoy having a bunch of different services running to get this working like an out-of-the-box experience should. For example adding Dropbox to the equation is a no-go for me. The idea of adding even more system resources dedicated to this function is a huge turn off. I also use a cheap DAS (not a NAS - and yes I do manual backups for offsite storage) because I don't want to fork out a fortune for the Synology solution. These are all things that Immich itself should be able to handle without having these complex systems with multiple failure points.
jmathai
I feel your pain points.
> The second problem is it can't just work with the file system structure and organization
I presume you know about storage templates and ruled them out.
tuesdaynight
Just a heads up, but Immich mobile app deleted my local copies when I activated the backup, for some unknown reason. I've checked my settings and there is an option to free up space on backup, but I didn't activate it. It's not something catastrophic, but some messaging apps will not see your pictures and will consider them corrupted
jmathai
I don’t trust Immich myself :). Its read only external library feature is what made it an option for me.
garaetjjte
Can Immich on Android automatically upload taken photos like Google Photos?
jpk2f2
Yes, it work well. It works less well on ios, some pain points due to how Apple handles background apps.
allarm
It works okayish on ios. Could be better, but it works. Sometimes I just have to open the app on my iphone to start the sync process, but most of the times it just works. Anyway, i'm so glad i migrated, should have done it earlier.
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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 really), then I've closed the account. There was no need to subscribe.