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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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!)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This really seems like the exception that proves the rule, given how few Facebooks came out of that era. We had a social contract, but it turned out that being sociopathic is a winning strategy when everyone else is playing by the implicit rules. See also: modern politics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a legacy email account with a "used to be popular" ISP
It's free, I've been using it for ~25 years, you know the drill.
However, I lost access to it when I bought a new phone, and everything didn't transfer over. I couldn't reset the password without buying the 'premium' service, it was only $10 or $15, I was able to cancel after (so I wasn't re-charged next year or month).
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.
Attachments are suffering, as the saying goes. Presuming the author used Photobucket in the early aughts and 26-ish years later he's curious about any photos?
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.
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 of your stuff after that.
Now we have photo hosting services that barely work on the web (iCloud), or work only within a walled garden (Instagram), and I do miss the "it's your stuff, we're just a website" kind of attitude from the mid-2000s.
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.
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.
Not to excuse their behavior, but Photobucket is dead. They are trying to wring the last drops of money out of it. You should not use dead commercial products.
Regardless of whether this is legal or not, I think this move is subjectively scummy. I know that profit maximisation means going against common ideas of what is "a nice thing to do", but there's a line that's been crossed here between "the business has to support itself" and "trying to exploit and milk our customers".
Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom.
Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".
From the story I was assuming that OP maybe had multiple accounts he forgot about or that he actually uploaded the images without logging in, and that’s why there were no images to be restored.
If the images actually were on the account and they deleted them, it would be crazy.
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.
Oh man.. you made my day.. I especially loved the tiki spongebob memes.. I still have Jacques Cousteau's voice going thru my head "One Hour Later"......
Why store "childhood memories" on an online service though? Those websites get hacked all the time, you're lucky if your privates pictures don't endup in the wrong hands...
Ah, no, by "childhood memories" I meant like whatever I was screnshotting as a kid. Believe it or not, but finding old screenshots like 10 years later is sooo sweet!
For my actual chilhood photos, I'm using a little self-hosted Immich that's nicely backed up as well. Hoping that doesn't get hacked!
There’s a emphasis and repetition of sound bites and empty words in our culture, as though they mean something clear and understandable though it’s really a sound bite and a phrase to ease your discomfort and help you feel better about yourself: corporate greed is one of those words.
There is no such thing as a corporation being conscious or taking a will of its own and choosing to be greedy. It’s just a symbol to represent humans being greedy. Let’s call it what it is: it’s human leaders and bourgeois people being greedy. I don’t find it honest when we continue to use inaccurate phrases in this deceptive manner since we don’t want to look at the situation for what it really is. Or assume our responsibility in the matter.
We’ve allowed this greed by tolerating it, interacting with the humans (or not) and pretending the reality isn’t what it is. What is complaining and stopping there asking about it? Surely we can do more than just make an internet article about it and think it will change.
Agreed! I'd (sadly) pay more than $5 to recover some childhood memories that some services have deleted instead. Not $5/mo, though (I hate that part too).
Just like with almost everything Photobucket was sold or raised money from investors throughout the years repeatedly.
That money they want back!
From somewhere, any way, pimping the EBITDA and ARR numbers to the expected one for the 5-7 years resale cycle or such. ARR needs subscription, and if you have user lock in - well, otherwise you wouldn't buy some trivial service like this wouldn't you? You counted on the lock-in, that is central to you 'business model', or more like exploitation - then try cash it. Now! You can alienate people down the line? Let that be the problem of the next owner of the product, you will cash out soon anyway. And next PE look at the price/ARR ratio mostly, anyway, it will be a fine add-on to some other PE target at least, if the ARR ratio is fine.
PE is shitting where it eats.... and others eat too ... ruining it for everyone. Don't care.
Why don't they buy oil or beef farms or whatever, why they need to ruin the internet too?
They must have sent them to me too. However, the Photobucket account was registered using an e-mail address I no longer use. I found the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager.
The e-mail account was fully emptied after 1 year of inactivity (with warnings and what not, to other addresses I stopped using). So Photobucket was way nicer than Yahoo from this point of view!
They have to provide the data on request. I also think they aren’t allowed to delete any data they have when you request it before providing it (although you can of course also request deletion).
Minnesota and some other states have similar laws that basically mirror GDPR. States have forms you can get that you would submit to the company. I’ve done it for my Matterport data after they started making you pay to unarchive content (originally free)
Honestly I would just try doing a GDPR request and see what happens. They first have to find out if you’re from the EU, and they probably will err on the side of caution and just fulfill it.
Actually when reading up more on it, it looks like you don’t have to be in the EU at all.
If I understand it correctly, the GDPR applies to any company that does business in the EU and it doesn’t even matter where the data subject is located or which country they are a citizen in.
So even if you’re from the US, you should be able to make a valid GDPR request.
PII is a US-specific concept that has little relevance to the GDPR. So I wouldn’t say for sure that they have to give those photos to you but it wouldn’t be as simple as “not PII”.
Removing free user data is unfortunate, but understandable that it might eventually come to that.
A monthly subscription to regain access is questionable to me, since it'd mean they are still storing the images. A one-time fee could be justified for the cost of recovering the data from cold storage, but risks incentivizing intentionally luring in users then unexpectedly holding their data as leverage to have them pay up as a business model.
Claiming a user can pay to recover their photos, while not actually having anything to restore, is misrepresentation.
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.
Not only that, but there is a cost for retrieval and transmission especially if you are in cold storage. It's much cheaper to just mark it for deletion than it is to get it back.
If it was just that, I'd be okay-ish with it (even though it started out as a service). But pushing a monthly subscription for a 1-time action? Man.....
Well they did store it for free, they are just holding it hostage. They didn’t say “pay or we’ll delete it”, they said “pay if you want it” and they’ll probably continue to store it for free continuously until you pay.
You have to view all cloud storage - all free cloud storage anyway - as ephemeral. If you want your childhood pictures to survive, store them someplace you have control over.
I resent comments like this. It’s captain obvious and nothing to do with the actual point being made by the author, and subtly justifies the author ending up in a disadvantaged position.
“if you didn’t want your computer data to disappear, you should have used paper” gee, I didn’t think of that, I’m glad I had someone to point it out, said no-one, ever.
Some of us started coding and archiving data 40+ years ago, many of us were suspicious of cloud storage from the get go and have never relied on it as primary storage and still keep multiple location physical backups regional and under direct control of stakeholders.
I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.
I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful. It's fine to say that you personally weren't concerned, were distracted by the gobs of money programmers were getting paid to build centralized services, thought that the developers with ethics would hold more long term sway over companies, and so on. But don't act like it was unknowable.
You know ...that is how we managed to offer you such a cheap subscription...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.
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.
[*] assuming chad doesnt lie about having my stuff as OP claims in this case
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.
But it's okay. Getting those $5 back would make Photobucket look slightly better in my mind, and I don't want that.
I use a debit card and I wasn't even sure you can do charge backs with them. But yes, apparently!
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.
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.
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.
Sure. Now provide a notarized statement showing THEY agreed to those exact terms.
Cause guess what... they cant prove shit.
It's free, I've been using it for ~25 years, you know the drill.
However, I lost access to it when I bought a new phone, and everything didn't transfer over. I couldn't reset the password without buying the 'premium' service, it was only $10 or $15, I was able to cancel after (so I wasn't re-charged next year or month).
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 of your stuff after that.
Now we have photo hosting services that barely work on the web (iCloud), or work only within a walled garden (Instagram), and I do miss the "it's your stuff, we're just a website" kind of attitude from the mid-2000s.
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...
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.
It was ahead of its time. Glad you're still working in the photo sharing space!
Honestly, if storage costs were an issue, I would have preferred they delete it with notification than sell hope at a ransom.
Wonder if there any startups that have grown without resorting to these low blow tactics - just the idealised free market of "we provide such a good service that you're willing to pay us our fair price".
The fact that they did delete it, and then tried to sell access to bupkis, is just the icing on the scummy corporate cake, eh?
If the images actually were on the account and they deleted them, it would be crazy.
I'd argue that it is objectively scummy.
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.
$5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)
For my actual chilhood photos, I'm using a little self-hosted Immich that's nicely backed up as well. Hoping that doesn't get hacked!
That kind of long con is (and has always been) part of the basic business model of most of the "free" service providers on the internet.
First one is free, played on a decade time scale, works fine in a world where capital is quasi-free.
The hyperscalers play it a little more subtly, but the principle is the same.
There is no such thing as a corporation being conscious or taking a will of its own and choosing to be greedy. It’s just a symbol to represent humans being greedy. Let’s call it what it is: it’s human leaders and bourgeois people being greedy. I don’t find it honest when we continue to use inaccurate phrases in this deceptive manner since we don’t want to look at the situation for what it really is. Or assume our responsibility in the matter.
We’ve allowed this greed by tolerating it, interacting with the humans (or not) and pretending the reality isn’t what it is. What is complaining and stopping there asking about it? Surely we can do more than just make an internet article about it and think it will change.
but charging and knowing you don't have any data for this user is a big NO NO
It's not a footnote or smallprint, it's written prominently right above the button so people are well aware of it...
That money they want back!
From somewhere, any way, pimping the EBITDA and ARR numbers to the expected one for the 5-7 years resale cycle or such. ARR needs subscription, and if you have user lock in - well, otherwise you wouldn't buy some trivial service like this wouldn't you? You counted on the lock-in, that is central to you 'business model', or more like exploitation - then try cash it. Now! You can alienate people down the line? Let that be the problem of the next owner of the product, you will cash out soon anyway. And next PE look at the price/ARR ratio mostly, anyway, it will be a fine add-on to some other PE target at least, if the ARR ratio is fine.
PE is shitting where it eats.... and others eat too ... ruining it for everyone. Don't care. Why don't they buy oil or beef farms or whatever, why they need to ruin the internet too?
The e-mail account was fully emptied after 1 year of inactivity (with warnings and what not, to other addresses I stopped using). So Photobucket was way nicer than Yahoo from this point of view!
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/
Article 15 says you have the right to request the data and they must provide it to you.
Article 20 says you have the right to get your photos back in a machine readable format.
Sadly, this only applies to those in the EU. Americans can keep taking it, which makes sense as it's an American company that's giving it. Sigh.
Technically, you don't have to be from the EU. You just need to be in the EU (which includes Americans who are just vacationing in the EU).
If I understand it correctly, the GDPR applies to any company that does business in the EU and it doesn’t even matter where the data subject is located or which country they are a citizen in. So even if you’re from the US, you should be able to make a valid GDPR request.
But I’m also not sure that they only have to give you PII.
The GDPR also covers data portability, so preventing your data (not just personal data) from being held hostage.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
And a chargeback costs them like $20.
A monthly subscription to regain access is questionable to me, since it'd mean they are still storing the images. A one-time fee could be justified for the cost of recovering the data from cold storage, but risks incentivizing intentionally luring in users then unexpectedly holding their data as leverage to have them pay up as a business model.
Claiming a user can pay to recover their photos, while not actually having anything to restore, is misrepresentation.
[k]
“if you didn’t want your computer data to disappear, you should have used paper” gee, I didn’t think of that, I’m glad I had someone to point it out, said no-one, ever.
You’re incorrect.
I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.
I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful. It's fine to say that you personally weren't concerned, were distracted by the gobs of money programmers were getting paid to build centralized services, thought that the developers with ethics would hold more long term sway over companies, and so on. But don't act like it was unknowable.