Interesting. I cancelled Netflix account 7 months ago and haven't used it since. A few days ago I received "Action needed: Reset your password" due to allegedly "suspicious sign-in". After changing the password and looking into the Recent activity, I couldn't see any suspicious recent login there. So I contacted the support and they said cancelled accounts are deleted after 10 months since cancellation. So now, with 3 months remaining, they apparently send a fake "suspicious sign-in" email in an attempt to convince me to re-activate the account. The email they sent was legit (no phishing) but there was near-zero probability of someone signing in because I used netflix-specific email address and randomly generated password for this account. EDIT: I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
I cancelled my Netflix subscriptions for a few months, then tried to renew and cannot because of a bug in their Credit Card process. I have phoned and tweeted and online chatted etc... Their only solutions is for me to buy gift cards, which I won't.
In the meantime, they keep sending me emails every week to beg me to try Netflix again.
So Netflix spends money to promote to me, and to answer my support requests, while they won't do a thing about their broken payment process.
>One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience
...and the other is the Netflix Specials department.
EDIT: Addendum so not to be too shitposty.
I think Netflix came to Denmark around 2013 or so, and the content at the time was pretty good. Now you have to wade through a swamp of third rate trash and maybe you're lucky to find something that isn't absolute garbage. My account will remain canceled.
Using services like Donotpay which generates credit card numbers that you can then freeze instantly might be the best solution for this. You can easily get an account when good content is recommended by friends etc then just switch off the card until you need to use the service. Cancelling is a lot of work.
I wish you saw more absurd situations like this in cyberpunk stories.
This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
It's wild that Douglas Adams' and Infocom's Bureaucracy, an interactive fiction published in 1987, had precisely this sort of thing as more or less its whole subject matter. It's not quite exact to what we see today, of course; for one thing, it traffics in paper forms and mail-in cards, rather than web forms and obstructionist live chats. But its juxtaposition of saccharine platitudes and hostile apathy feels no less evergreen for the intervening decades.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
In general, my remark was less about absurdity and more about how the same set of incentives can produce both consumer-friendly and consumer-hostile behaviors, sometimes from the same company.
Cyberpunk stories tend to focus on the "consumer-hostile" part, whereas I think the superposition of the two and the permanent conflict between them is way more interesting.
(For instance, you almost never see review systems or consumer watchdogs in cyberpunk stories)
That's fair; I was tempted to say that The Fifth Element also a little bit prefigured "hopepunk", in that it is, in spite of everything, a love story with a happy ending. Brazil could maybe almost be considered the "black mirror" version of the same story, if you squint really hard at least.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
Bureaucracy was very enjoyable. I wish he had released that same basic content in other forms. I often think of scenes from that game in everyday life; too few other people have ever played it.
Likewise. But it was so hard to get any work out of Adams, apparently [1], that it's no great surprise Bureaucracy only happened in the medium of IF.
Perhaps it's time for a reimagining - I could see it working really well as a collection of "websites" with "live chats" and "emails" and so forth, borrowing tools from the "alternate-reality game" style of organic viral marketing and turning them to an altogether nobler purpose. I think that'd be the right choice of medium to tell this sort of story today.
Damm, same thing happened to me. I initially thought I was going crazy that my password was hacked but something did not feel right about that suspicious sign in email.
UPDATE: I've tried to log in again today with the password I reset yesterday and it no longer worked! xD So I've tried "reset password" again now and no reset password email is coming (I have checked Junk folder and even Exim SMTP logs - I can see the email from 17th there from Amazon SES but none from today).
Apparently someone from Netflix read my comments here and deactivated the account completely. :P Thanks!
Sorry if I spoiled your clever marketing strategy but I think sending a fake "suspicious login" email and keeping cancelled accounts for 10 months is just not right.
I think the reasoning behind keeping those cancelled accounts for such a long time is to keep the account's watchlist and/or recently played items - I'm not sure about the latter, though.
Either way, I agree with you that this is not right.
I was thinking about it. The only place where the app was still installed was an Android tablet but no one has opened the app for many months (only me and my partner has access to the tablet and none of us opened the app). It could theoretically connect from the background by itself (I think android makes it possible for apps to run in the background) but when I tried to open the app the day after I got that email, it just displayed Update required screen (we don't auto-uldate apps on that tablet). And the suspicious login mentioned in the email was not recorded in the Recent Activity in the profile. Unfortunately I don't record all network activity on home network so can't 100% rule out this possibility but it seems unlikely to me that the app would try to connect from the background after couple of months by itself.
The email I received was "We’ve detected a suspicious sign-in to your Netflix account. Just to be safe we've reset your password and you’ll need to set a new one." with a button to "Set a new password".
It didn't mention any IP or geolocation as many other services say in such cases.
> I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
Do you live in the US? GDPR does not apply to US companies serving US citizens. If you live in the EU, you might need to request account deletion, I think GDPR doesn't require that data is deleted, it gives Europeans the right to have their data deleted upon request. (I've read the entire code before but I don't remember the details on this point.)
I assume you're referring to the NYT there, not Netflix? (It doesn't matter that much, because the situation is similar either way.)
NYT is a US company serving a US locale by it's very name. GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans, or does EU business with EU offices*. The GDPR law is clear about this point, it is a protection for EU citizens regarding web sites and businesses that are focused on, directed and targeted toward EU citizens. It does not apply to interactions outside of the EU (aside from EU travelers visiting EU web sites), and it does not apply to web sites that originate outside the EU and are global that just happen to have visitors from the EU.
* The NYT might be advertising in the EU, I don't know. If it does, I'd be willing to bet that EU citizens are given an online mechanism to cancel, even though US citizens aren't...
GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans
It definitely does have UK specific ads, I’ve seen them, and GDPR is grandfathered into UK law.
I cancelled mine by cancelling the PayPal, there was no other way to cancel without phoning them. There is no online cancellation even for those in GDPR jurisdictions.
SkyDemon (a flight planning and navigation app) is a delight for subscribers:
* Subscriptions are for one year at a time, and have transparently indicated pricing. No "$2.71 per day, charged annually", no hidden tips, taxes or convenience fees.
* If you don't use the app for a few months, they auto-extend your subscription by an extra month as a courtesy.
* When your annual subscription is about to expire, they send a reminder a few weeks and another a few days before the expiration. If you don't renew, you get a final "Sorry to see you go, here's how to reactivate for $annual_price, if you don't renew we'll delete your stored data in a few months" email.
This is how subscriptions should work. They send an appropriate amount of notification at a good schedule to make sure you don't accidentally forget to renew, and don't pester you to death if you don't.
But please offer the option to autorenew. I don't want to have to spend time renewing all my subscriptions every year. I have my subscriptions for a good reason and see their charges every time -- if I want to cancel I'll do that.
This is similar to how Apple handles subs. You get notifications when subs are expiring or renewing, and if you cancel mid cycle you keep it for the remainder of the cycle usually, including free trials. Bonus, you can see all of your subs in one place, and cancel with a single tap.
Also if you accidentally let your Prime roll over for another month and you try to cancel a few days later without having bought anything that month, they'll offer to refund the most recent payment. Happened to me a few weeks ago, I was surprised.
But canceling prime does not make you a non-customer for amazon. People tend to forget that. You can still order, you still have your account and the refund is an incentive to "come back" -- although you never left.
Not to criticize this behavior, just to set it into the proper context. Its just smart to see the potential customer in your cancellations anyway.
I don't know about refunding here, but I love that whenever you cancel Prime, you receive a prorated refund for the unused portion of the period you had paid for.
They choose to offer refunds but also to bury the unsubscribe button behind 5+ screens with misleading text and reminders of what you'll "lose".
Rather than good customer service, Amazon try to be generous on the visible aspects that people might talk about, but quietly cheat you with antipatterns.
The fact that it’s NOT normal to act reasonably should be telling us something.
Imagine if you had to go through this exhausting process in your personal life. After half an hour since asking your spouse to help with the dishes, your spouse finally says “now that we realize using paper plates will solve your problem of dirty dishes, is there anything else I can help you with?”
We wouldn’t tolerate that in our personal life so why do we in business? After all, corporations are people...
Reminds me of the quote “Being well adjusted to a sick society is not a measure of health”
Their entire business model boils down to "exploit people's unrealistic expectations of themselves to make money". They obviously feel awkward about it, and they soften the blow a lot, which is to their credit, but at the end of the day this is where their money comes from.
But it's definitely not for everyone! If your reaction to Beeminder is "I would not do anything differently and just waste money" then you are probably right and should not use Beeminder. We've been around for about a decade which we think is evidence that there are people for whom it does work.
For anyone in the category you describe (tried Beeminder, found their expectations of themself to be unrealistic, quit Beeminder) we definitely want to talk to you.
Also calibrating self-expectations is one of things many users tell us is worth paying for.
Exactly. The normal SOP is to require a credit card at the beginning of the free trial period in hopes you will forget about it and allow them to keep charging every month.
Mine sometimes does. We also tend to refund recent payments liberally if, for example, someone who hasn't been using the app in a while asks to cancel just after they've renewed for another period.
Sure, it's a principle thing, treat our customers as we'd like to be treated ourselves. But it makes sense from a purely business point of view as well.
In return for giving up some small amount of subscription revenue by putting through a cancellation that was going to happen anyway a bit sooner, we generate positive sentiment. We often get a nice thank-you message back, with extra information about why someone was cancelling or hadn't been using the app recently.
We know for a fact that we have sometimes gained new customers from referrals by those people we helped out a little. Sometimes a former customer's situation changes again later and they come back to us, too.
And the reality is that particularly with online payment methods, there's also a small risk that someone will do a hostile chargeback without bothering to even try cancelling, particularly if they forgot about a subscription and changed their email address or something like that. Even if you've done nothing wrong and provide evidence accordingly, you have a good chance of losing a dispute anyway, and one way or another it ends up costing you more than it would have done to preemptively cancel a subscription that you knew wasn't being used for a long time.
This is from the perspective of a small business in a niche market, where there is definitely a sense of community and reputation does matter. We've met some of our customers in person, and there are many more mutual connections or friend-of-friend kinds of relationships that might be relevant one day. Maybe things work differently when you're running a huge business with a strong brand in a huge market; I've never done that, so I wouldn't know. But I honestly can't imagine why we'd want to run things any other way. There are few things more valuable to a business like ours than a good reputation in the community we cater for.
What a great attitude! I wish more businesses were like that. I had to leave a startup once, that I as a senior dev managed to drag to profitability, because I saw how they treated their customers.
It was such a sad experience- while helping out with the customer side I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I mean yeah they did get a fair amount of money from those schemes, but they did loose all of their senior devs in the process.
I was wading through emails _begging_ to cancel their subscription. Some people were closing their bank accounts to do that, because the founders intentionally introduced dark patterns to hide the unsubscribe functionality.
I personally don't think routine cancellation policy should even be up to the business. Deliberately preventing customers from cancelling a subscription that they are entitled to cancel, or making it unreasonably difficult or intimidating to do so, should be grounds for legal or regulatory intervention to protect consumer rights.
A basic rule along the lines that subscription services must provide a means of cancelling that would normally be no more demanding than the means of starting the same subscription seems fair to me.
Thank you, I appreciate the sentiment. Unfortunately if I told you that, I might inadvertently be outing other parties as well through my comment history, and I don't think that would be fair. I hope that our policies aren't that unusual anyway. We're just a small business run by real people and trying to treat our customers as real people too.
My experience with this was having a dormant Chase account with like $100 in it, which they chipped away at, withdrawing the $4/mo fee or whatever, until the balance was at $0, whereupon it was immediately closed.
I'm not sure if this really counts for much in their favour.
I closed an account with Santander and they sent the remaining monies in it to another bank account.
Then they accepted a charge on the account from a subscription I had forgotten to move, even though the account was closed, and because my account was then in deficit decided to reactivate my account without letting me know. Then they charged me an overdraft fee and daily penalties, and then eventually sent me a bill with like £120 of charges.
I challenged it and had to speak on the phone to people for ages. Eventually they took the charges off as a "one-off gesture of good faith" which annoyed me, because it still implies that it was my mistake and not theirs.
If signed up to the scheme (most are, including Santander), your old bank is responsible for passing on any deposits directly to your new bank account and the new bank is responsible for processing any transactions made using your old details. This carries on for, I believe 12 months.
I found the Switch Guarantee service to be excellent and believe it's a significant driver of innovation and competition in UK banking (which is far ahead of many other European countries in my experience).
My payees from my old bank were even transferred over to my new one.
(Current account = checking account to any non-UK readers.)
Ah, that's good to know for the future - I closed it manually.
I wasn't told about this and didn't know about it - mind you it was a few years ago so not sure if this is a newer service.
Wells Fargo "accidentally" failed to close my account when I went in person to close it--though they did give me a check for the balance and told me it was closed--and then when I realized six months later it wasn't actually closed, they tried to make me pay them 6 months worth of monthly fees before they would close it.
When I closed my Wells Fargo account, they took out all my money, charged me some account closing fee, which over-drafted and fell back to a credit card which now had a balance on it due to the overdraft and they told me they couldn't close my account. I think I ended up paying something like 130 dollars of fees just to close my account, but at that point they'd already screwed me over so many times that I just paid it all and walked out.
Terrible, terrible company.
Every person everywhere really needs to move all their money to credit unions, our banking system is so thoroughly fucked.
In the US, they would reopen your account without telling you and start charging you fees and/or interest on the amount they overpaid. I know this because it happened to me last year when American Express mistakenly refunded a credit to me twice when closing an account (one check and one bank transfer). I never even cashed the check but apparently that didn’t make a difference to them.
Ha, I had a bank account that I opened for one specific purpose then forgot to close. It was empty. They kept withdrawing account keeping fees, sending it into overdraft. Then they added overdraft fees. When I went to close it, they tried to badger me into paying all the fees first.
I've no experience with the bank named and assume it is in the US, but for what it is worth, in the UK people hardly ever pay for bank accounts. It does appear to be viable, although I'm not sure how it works.
It's subsidised by eye watering fees on unarranged overdrafts. When the FCA and CMA looked into it several years ago, the banks claimed they couldn't reduce overdraft fees or they wouldn't be able to afford to offer free bank accounts any more. Some challenger banks wanted it to be forbidden to describe such accounts as 'free'.
Revenue from account fees must be peanuts, they make their money lending/investing/etc. deposits, in normal times interest rates are positive, so they might even pay for custom, getting more deposits, giving them more capital to make their money from.
Charging for bank accounts in North America is just like commission on retail brokers - everyone else is doing it, so why not? Eventually probably 'fintech startup challenger banks' with the novel idea of not charging will gain too much market share, and the big boys will scrap the fees too in order to compete (and barely feel it).
The big US banks each make over $1.5B in overdraft fees yearly. Fees on consumer accounts make up about 3-4% of the big banks annual income. Not as much as they make on consumer interest payments, but those are still some pretty big peanuts. I think they'd feel it if they scrapped fees.
I’ve had an empty Ally bank account open for at least a decade. Still get statements for it each month. Every time I’ve tried to close it, it’s accumulated $0.01 interest, which I have to transfer out before closing. That transfer takes a few days, so by the time I can close it, I’ve totally forgotten about it, or don’t have the will to go log in.
Leave it. If you're in CA (or some other states, but I know for CA) it'll get shut down after 5 years or so and the funds will go through escheatment to the state. Then you can go get them from the state. But you have to remember not to login and ignore all notices from them.
That’s part of of most states’ escheatment processes. Inactive bank accounts are typically closed after three years, and funds are given to the state to hold until you claim them.
Ive slightly misstated it - they closed the cheque function on the account (although the account is still called a ‘cheque account’ now, 10+ years later). The account was active but no longer had a cheque book associated with it. However I had a physical cheque book.
Notorious has at least two similar meanings; the more common one is "known unfavourably", the second meaning is a neutral "known", not positive or negative.
Most people only see the word used in the negative light so shy from it in the neutral use case to avoid being ambiguous or assumed negativity.
Using it with an adjective to clarify the meaning here is fine.
As a non-native speaker, my understanding of "notorious" so far has been what you described as the neutral form. However, to me, it does have a slight connotation of obsession or "doing it so much as to be annoying".
I am obviously not an authoritative source on how words are understood, but just wanted to add this data point.
I was kind of surprised at how simple it was to cancel my Netflix account. I was even going to fill out the standard "why are you leaving?" box because I had some strong opinions on changes they had made but they didn't even have one.
No they aren't. I had my account stolen twice which took calls to customer service to get back and finally cancelled which took hours and you can't do online when you can't even log into your account. I have like $90 of fraudulent Netflix bills.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/net...