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.
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.
It isn't just out of the kindness of their hearts that they don't do this. There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation. I have to go through a legal and privacy process at my big corp job whenever I want to record a new timestamp and I need to ensure that the data is used appropriately and that it is wiped later. I've only seen these compliance requirements become more onerous over the past ten years and I expect that to continue.
> There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation.
One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]
Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.
With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.
Why? What has Google or Anthropic done that suggests they are trust worthy? Google is infamous for not not being evil. It's not like either asked for permission to access copyrighted material either. Not one tech company deserves trust. They all should be treated as suspect. I don't expect anyone to trust anything I make for the simple reason I don't trust anything anyone else makes.
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.
People are rightly worried about that, but is there any indication that it nullifies any privacy contracts around the data? Is it:
1) We know that legally privacy terms to data are still binding, and those worried about it are freaking out over nothing,
2) We know that those contracts are null and void, and there are no restrictions on what can be done with that data beyond blanket legal protections to such biological data, or
3) It's an open legal question
I don't understand the legal terms of something like this in bankruptcy, if the data are seen as being separated from the contractual obligations that acquired them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The actual fines under GDPR aren't a huge deal. There are companies who get fined over and over and over and over again year after year after year. It's not running them out of business, it's just cost of business.
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!)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The sign up page does say you can cancel within 48 hours and get a full refund. Of course that same page could have said there were no photos in the account though.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I took a tour of the CBOE in 2011. The old trading pits that were no longer used were filled with a random assortment of desktop PCs running as servers for the exchange. At least that’s how it look and what they told us. I hope it isn’t still that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just FYI, my wife has to fight a lot of outright fraudulent Stripe disputes filed against the company she works for (things like a customer claiming they never received <digital goods> when she has an extensive paper trail of them receiving, using, and thanking the business for said goods) and she's mentioned how Stripe's signals aren't especially accurate--in the past month she's won several major disputes that Stripe predicted she had a low chance of winning. You can't win them all, but it's not totally futile!
I just refund autmoatically when there is a early fraud warning, not worth the fight. We had lot of issues from Brazil, who all just falsely claimed their creditcard was stolen.
If we get our dispute rate down, might consider trying fighting it again, they are always our lowest tiers of 19 or 29 usd. So not really worth it. Just frustrating it's such a terrible process on our end. Also twice users are open to withdraw it when I contacted them, yet their bank / card doesnt make that easy or possible, so they still count to our dispute rate.
As a consumer who has only tried honest chargebacks within their 'consumer rights' and has never won them, apparently you can fight them, and apparently companies deem them worth fighting.
> Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.
I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.
Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.
To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).
The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.
Yeah if the refunds are automated Ive had it prevent a dispute, if I had pre-emptively refunded myself it didnt prevent the dispute. I think only mastercard and visa use the early fraud warning system, I have rules that auto refund on a warning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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...
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.)."
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.
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".
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.
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.
The chargebacks I've received all just have a very generic category [0]. I've never see free-form text entry reasons that would allow the customer to explain the "why". Maybe their bank asks them for that info but it's not passed along.
I don't have a problem with that. I wouldn't upload anything to these I didn't keep a local copy of. Monetarily it makes sense: they have to recover the cost of storing these images. By charging to recover every old image, they can cover the costs of holding on to these for people. The fallacy is that there's a third option between paid recovery and not storing them indefinitely: doing it for free.
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.
"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."
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.
I suppose, but that "brand" was owned by many different people, and the current one has very little to do with whatever people did in the past. At a certain point, one should at minimum back up all one's stuff when ownership changes, just in case the ZIRP economics don't exist to float those AWS bills anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
At least you were able to restore them. 25 years ago I was using the service and went a while without logging in. They deleted some of my favorite photos. They were photos I had taken with a cheap $20 digital camera (pushing it to it's limits). I hadn't backed my photo's up anywhere else so they were just lost.
Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could get at those long lost photos (I'm sure they were physically deleted back in the day).
I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish.
But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)
I use a Yahoo address for "throwaway" stuff like online shops. They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000. Yeah I'm that old, when Yahoo launched an email service in 1996, I thought, "An @yahoo.com address?! That's so cool! I have to get one!".
In theory a copy of the emails are on a harddisk, but its control board melted, and when I got the same model disk (to transplant its control board onto the disk with data), I couldn't find the original disk...
I don't necessarily mean this to be dismissive, but it'll come off like that and it is what it is: Don't go through life getting this mad at something so inconsequential (five dollars). The typical response is "its the principal", but they're not beholden to your principals, and getting worked up because someone else compromised your principals is not healthy. Its just other people doing things. Neither money nor principals will save you from the downstream effects this attitude will have on your body and soul.
Possibly, but the real issue is more subtle: The people who need to hear this literally won't hear your anger. They're not reading HackerNews. They'll never see this blog post. They won't hear your screams. Your emotions will never be validated; we're in an echo chamber, and the people who most need to hear it won't hear it.
There's no indication that the original blog post author ever actually contacted Photobucket. Nor, would I believe, anyone in these comments tried to. We're just people on some small, isolated corner of the internet letting some dumb SaaS product ruin your day.
You're right, this is dismissive. To the point of being shitty. You're saying "don't have principles, no one cares." Well, sir, your POV is the reason we no longer have a society worth a shit. In the face of naked avarice your advice is to shut up and take it. Not to use social pressure to correct the situation. Not to stand up for one's self. Nah, just take it cause there's nothing you can do, you're helpless anyway.
Maturity is recognizing that ninety-eight times out of a hundred, there actually is nothing you can do, because nothing you do will change it. Getting angry means you're letting these people you dislike into your head, controlling your thoughts; why would you be proud of that? In the remaining two times out of a hundred, regulating your emotions by providing them the feedback in a calm, direct manner is as effective as doing so in the manner this blog post took; sometimes it is even more effective, because people generally do not engage with others who they perceive to be acting without reason.
You'll discover this path on your own, and make mistakes along the way, as anyone has. The thing you need to hear right now is: Your comment had exactly zero impact on me. It is like you never even posted it.
Don't pose as if you're some unflappable master or some other silliness, or have some sage advice to offer. Just be less shitty. Don't tell people not to have emotions because they're "pointless" in your view.
I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management.
I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons.
I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest.
I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability matters. I would want the company to be around in 20 years and still reasonably priced/useful. Suggestions?
The Nextcloud app on my phone automatically backs up my pictures to my Nextcloud instance. This is painless to run in a Docker container at home, but Nextcloud also has a subscription service if you don't want to self-host, and your money funds free software.
so you want a service that does everything, is around forever, extremely reliable, affordable, and easy to use, and not affiliated with big tech? and you don't want to do anything yourself?
I self-host Immich on a personal home server. I do pay for backups, though. For 65GB of images (not a lot) I pay ~$1/mo to Backblaze. The backed-up data is 30% bigger in size right now (= 82GB), as it's incremental.
This seems besides unethical also illegal. Never assume companies have good legal counsel, particularly in the LLMs era. There are consumer protection laws and in the US they are by state. Sometimes all it takes is completing a 5 min form in the state AG’s website. Sure, $5 is not a lot of money, but screw them.
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?
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).
I think the lesson here is that you should always save (backup) your data on storage (services) and never on functional services. And this certainly includes Google, Apple and Microsoft Photos.
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.
Yes, I think part of it was the "dark fiber" at the time, made bandwidth relatively cheap. But most personal photos don't use that much bandwidth - being able to use them anywhere online (which iCloud and Instagram don't allow) was a big idea. We went from "my content hosted in the cloud" to "Instagram's content" in a lot of ways. That is only partly a pricing issue.
I think the main thing here is merely that it's costly to keep a massive archive (of mostly garbage[1]) online and available on a long timescale. Not just the S3 bill (which I wouldn't underestimate the cost of, for a site that let just anyone upload basically infinite amounts for a decade), but the cost of having engineers maintain and monitor the site forever, either with revenue having dried up a decade ago, or, also having a staff of people to operate the whole business.
You're remembering that if you uploaded something to some free site in 2001, it was still there in 2004. That was because the same people and companies were still around 3 years later, it wasn't because they cared more about you than 2026 startups do. Sure, 2004 Photobucket may have cared more about us than 2026 Meta does -- but I doubt 2001 AOL or AT&T cared about us more.
[1] I only mean most of the content uploaded to Photobucket 2 decades ago is completely useless and abandoned with no one ever coming back to look for it. Memes or screenshots posted to forums that themselves have been offline for a decade. And just content that people don't remember even creating.
Maybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize:
1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account
2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0
3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel
4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty
5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident
Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'
Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.
He said in the article that he guessed maybe he used a different account.
This is a lot more believable (esp since he said it) than a conspiracy that PB deleted all photos and built this whole system just to steal $5 a pop -- especially considering how few people must be trying to get back into their 2-decade-old PB accounts in 2026. Hardly seems worth the effort for a scam.
They were underage when they made the account. That's a whole different and big fucking deal. Means any TOS and contracts and shit are basically null and void.
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"......
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.
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.
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.....
If it requires nothing more than a click to cancel, it seems like you'd be happier in life if you viewed such a thing as merely a two-step process (signup, get what you need, cancel immediately) rather than a serious commitment to spend $5 a month for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, everyone in business is now required to do this 'wishful thinking' that people will commit to everything. I laugh sometimes at items that Amazon hilariously suggests that I "Subscribe & Save" to!
When signup is one click, and cancellation requires a phone call... then I'm right there with you with the pitchforks!
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.
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.
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!
I really doubt anyone's getting rich off this. Genuinely doubt it. How many people remember their photobucket accounts, let alone bother to hunt them down, let alone want to bother getting a credit card out and remembering to cancel (or more hilariously, who's gonna pay $60 a year to keep that sub). I think whoever is running that site is probably barely breaking even at best, considering that they have to keep paying the S3 bill to store literally every image uploaded to PB ever.
I'd ask a different question: how many people on HN have hit their free quota limit in e.g. Google Photos and are now forking off 5 bucks a month because that's the easy way out ?
But that's a very different product. I was only saying I don't think the PB thing is getting anyone rich, rather it's probably bringing in just enough profit to keep whoever owns it from shutting it down and deleting the (S3) "bucket." As such, it's arguably a nice favor done to the few people who uploaded stuff to this site and are ever coming back for it. The alternative is for the stuff to have been long since deleted.
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.
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.
Wow. Lede well buried. I thought I got the story, but after a while I started scanning over all the edge and missed that actual story. I really though we were complaining about spending $5 to retrieve data that had been stored for years at no cost.
Pretty seedy move. That, and what appears to be the dark pattern of prompting for payment first, then ultimately allowing export after refusal.
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 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”.
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!
If I trusted my friend to hold onto my childhood photo collection as a favor, and then came back to find him asking for $5 to return it, and I reluctantly agree only to find him empty handed, I wouldn't consider that providing value.
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.
AJAX was 1999. Ruby on rails was 2004. The hazards of having your application experience and data subject to the whims of whomever controlled the server were glaringly apparent when your friend showed you a site they built and then tinkered with the data behind the scenes. It was straightforward to extrapolate that dynamic to businesses that had little plan besides grow their number of users at all costs, at least for those not in denial about the incentives of market actors.
I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.
I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful for someone who was young at the time, and is now even using a self-hosted solution. It's also 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.
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.
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.
It isn't just out of the kindness of their hearts that they don't do this. There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation. I have to go through a legal and privacy process at my big corp job whenever I want to record a new timestamp and I need to ensure that the data is used appropriately and that it is wiped later. I've only seen these compliance requirements become more onerous over the past ten years and I expect that to continue.
> There are laws and regulations. There is also legal risk and reputation.
One of the big companies, Meta, already decided to go ahead and grab terabytes of pirated books to feed their LLM. [0]
Therefore I would not give them (or similar entities) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to how they might use text that customers "gave" them under some unreadably-favorable terms of service.
With PII, the pirated-books example is doubly-relevant, because the accusation of "this output is reproducing my copyright work" is very similar to "this output is revealing my private data". The fuzzy black-box nature of the algorithms offers ways to stymie enforcement, arguing that victims or regulators cannot conclusively prove a chain of cause with zero coincidences.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...
Is the reputational risk of pirating terabytes of books worse than the reputational risk of shredding (destructively scanning) millions of books?
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
Fair enough. I don't use Facebook at all because I don't respect or trust the company or it's mission. I do use Gemini and Claude though.
Google is an ad company, I'd be very.... cautious with the trust here.
https://apnews.com/article/google-smartphone-surveillance-ve...
Why? What has Google or Anthropic done that suggests they are trust worthy? Google is infamous for not not being evil. It's not like either asked for permission to access copyrighted material either. Not one tech company deserves trust. They all should be treated as suspect. I don't expect anyone to trust anything I make for the simple reason I don't trust anything anyone else makes.
More specifically, the CEO said that users are "dumb f*cks" for submitting data to Facebook, the predecessor of Meta.
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.
Dunno about that near-blackmail scenario, but 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 last year and the database was sold for $305m.
People are rightly worried about that, but is there any indication that it nullifies any privacy contracts around the data? Is it:
1) We know that legally privacy terms to data are still binding, and those worried about it are freaking out over nothing,
2) We know that those contracts are null and void, and there are no restrictions on what can be done with that data beyond blanket legal protections to such biological data, or
3) It's an open legal question
I don't understand the legal terms of something like this in bankruptcy, if the data are seen as being separated from the contractual obligations that acquired them.
And the government is sleeping and mostly worried about how to implement id verification........
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.
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.
I always pose fundamentalist questions and hypotheticals to the LLM to poison such training data.
I have loads of requests to 'Play Despacito' across agents all over the blogosphere
Calm down Satan.
Now you can place a bet on how well that approach will work out in ten years.
I just ask it to spellcheck the Webster dictionary about 50 times an hour.
Also, press thumbs down when a response is good and thumbs up when a response is bad. Don't do free labor for them.
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.
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.
it obviously knew your hn username
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.
> 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.
> (...) your anonymized chats, they will be public as paid training data.
If they are PII then under GDPR they are obligated to delete the data.
If not then they will be liable to pay fines up to $20 million or 4% of their total global turnover.
You forgot about the best part, in terms of the “GDPR threat” effectiveness:
Fines can be up to €20 million or 4% of global revenues…, _whichever is greater._
The actual fines under GDPR aren't a huge deal. There are companies who get fined over and over and over and over again year after year after year. It's not running them out of business, it's just cost of business.
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!)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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!)
Or maybe... you know... read
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.
the whole part about dark patterns is to be technically not doing the asshole thing while getting most people to fall for it.
> 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.
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.
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.
The sign up page does say you can cancel within 48 hours and get a full refund. Of course that same page could have said there were no photos in the account though.
Yes that's exactly why I mentioned that in the first line of my comment. I quote directly:
> (I do agree that it's bad that there were no images preserved and that component of the post is justifiable)
So how is it a win-win then? OP only lost?
The rest of your comment kind of assumed that OP paid for the images and then got them.
It is a win-win for Photobucket users who have their images (which OP is NOT a cohort of) preserved long term and the startup who snapped up Photobucket's data and liabilities. It is fair to say that OP experienced a win-loss in this specific situation.
I did not assume that OP got the images. That's why I explicitly called it out. In my first sentence. And again in my second last sentence. Jesus.
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).
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.
> 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.
https://xkcd.com/1150/
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
Life really is a series of xkcds, it turns out!
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
I took a tour of the CBOE in 2011. The old trading pits that were no longer used were filled with a random assortment of desktop PCs running as servers for the exchange. At least that’s how it look and what they told us. I hope it isn’t still that way.
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.
The dominant business model that decade was monetization via getting people to fork over their data.
That's basically what Web 2.0 was.
Indeed. The 2004 chat snippet is notable because it displayed attitude that was uncommon at the time. Zuck made it mainstream.
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.
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
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.
Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory.
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.
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!
Revenge after they fucked around with you is what makes doing this procedure worth it...
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.
Just FYI, my wife has to fight a lot of outright fraudulent Stripe disputes filed against the company she works for (things like a customer claiming they never received <digital goods> when she has an extensive paper trail of them receiving, using, and thanking the business for said goods) and she's mentioned how Stripe's signals aren't especially accurate--in the past month she's won several major disputes that Stripe predicted she had a low chance of winning. You can't win them all, but it's not totally futile!
I just refund autmoatically when there is a early fraud warning, not worth the fight. We had lot of issues from Brazil, who all just falsely claimed their creditcard was stolen.
If we get our dispute rate down, might consider trying fighting it again, they are always our lowest tiers of 19 or 29 usd. So not really worth it. Just frustrating it's such a terrible process on our end. Also twice users are open to withdraw it when I contacted them, yet their bank / card doesnt make that easy or possible, so they still count to our dispute rate.
As a consumer who has only tried honest chargebacks within their 'consumer rights' and has never won them, apparently you can fight them, and apparently companies deem them worth fighting.
> Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.
I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.
Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.
To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).
The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.
Yeah if the refunds are automated Ive had it prevent a dispute, if I had pre-emptively refunded myself it didnt prevent the dispute. I think only mastercard and visa use the early fraud warning system, I have rules that auto refund on a warning.
It's not an automatic thing. The bank has to review your case and decide if photobucket committed fraud. But the odds are higher than you think.
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.
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.
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.
100% issue a chargeback
Fully agree, that's just straight up fraud and it's covered by chargebacks.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
ToS are rarely binding.
> 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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
Photobucket has sent me the “do you want to keep your old photos?” email every three days or so, from 8/2023 onwards.
Some of the emails specifically mention that there’s 35 photos, so at least mine’s not empty.
I’d assume that at some point the emails must cost more than $5?
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.
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".
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.
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.
The chargebacks I've received all just have a very generic category [0]. I've never see free-form text entry reasons that would allow the customer to explain the "why". Maybe their bank asks them for that info but it's not passed along.
[0] https://docs.stripe.com/disputes/categories?dispute-category...
I don't have a problem with that. I wouldn't upload anything to these I didn't keep a local copy of. Monetarily it makes sense: they have to recover the cost of storing these images. By charging to recover every old image, they can cover the costs of holding on to these for people. The fallacy is that there's a third option between paid recovery and not storing them indefinitely: doing it for free.
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.
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.
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."
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.
...or $11 for a month, and you can cancel it? Where do people think the money comes from to store gigs and gigs of photos literally forever?
Keep in mind that this is a brand which has offered 1TB free in the past. They kinda only have themselves to blame for any minimum-price assumptions.
I suppose, but that "brand" was owned by many different people, and the current one has very little to do with whatever people did in the past. At a certain point, one should at minimum back up all one's stuff when ownership changes, just in case the ZIRP economics don't exist to float those AWS bills anymore.
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...
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.
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.
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
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!
Can Immich on Android automatically upload taken photos like Google Photos?
Yes, it work well. It works less well on ios, some pain points due to how Apple handles background apps.
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.
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".
> I would have preferred they delete it
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?
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.
Yes, that's exactly it! I must have had multiple accounts. I don't think they deleted any of my images.
> I think this move is subjectively scummy
I'd argue that it is objectively scummy.
At least you were able to restore them. 25 years ago I was using the service and went a while without logging in. They deleted some of my favorite photos. They were photos I had taken with a cheap $20 digital camera (pushing it to it's limits). I hadn't backed my photo's up anywhere else so they were just lost.
Edit: I see now that there were actually no photos to restore. A second question I wondered is if I could get at those long lost photos (I'm sure they were physically deleted back in the day).
This is 100% true.
I also lost all my old Yahoo accounts because I didn't log into them for >1 year. Same for a lot of videos I made on a nice little site called GoAnimate. So keeping data is better than removing it! Even charging a fee feels fair-ish.
But forcing me to sign up for a subscription on an account I don't actually even have any data? Weeeelll, this doesn't feel so nice :)
I use a Yahoo address for "throwaway" stuff like online shops. They had a catastrophe and lost some people's mail. I never got such an email, but one time I looked, and it lost all of my emails before 2000. Yeah I'm that old, when Yahoo launched an email service in 1996, I thought, "An @yahoo.com address?! That's so cool! I have to get one!".
In theory a copy of the emails are on a harddisk, but its control board melted, and when I got the same model disk (to transplant its control board onto the disk with data), I couldn't find the original disk...
I don't necessarily mean this to be dismissive, but it'll come off like that and it is what it is: Don't go through life getting this mad at something so inconsequential (five dollars). The typical response is "its the principal", but they're not beholden to your principals, and getting worked up because someone else compromised your principals is not healthy. Its just other people doing things. Neither money nor principals will save you from the downstream effects this attitude will have on your body and soul.
I get your point, but wouldn't that be exactly what bad actors want you to do? Normalcy bias is a great help to them
Possibly, but the real issue is more subtle: The people who need to hear this literally won't hear your anger. They're not reading HackerNews. They'll never see this blog post. They won't hear your screams. Your emotions will never be validated; we're in an echo chamber, and the people who most need to hear it won't hear it.
There's no indication that the original blog post author ever actually contacted Photobucket. Nor, would I believe, anyone in these comments tried to. We're just people on some small, isolated corner of the internet letting some dumb SaaS product ruin your day.
steals from you
"lol, u mad?"
You're right, this is dismissive. To the point of being shitty. You're saying "don't have principles, no one cares." Well, sir, your POV is the reason we no longer have a society worth a shit. In the face of naked avarice your advice is to shut up and take it. Not to use social pressure to correct the situation. Not to stand up for one's self. Nah, just take it cause there's nothing you can do, you're helpless anyway.
Fuck you.
Maturity is recognizing that ninety-eight times out of a hundred, there actually is nothing you can do, because nothing you do will change it. Getting angry means you're letting these people you dislike into your head, controlling your thoughts; why would you be proud of that? In the remaining two times out of a hundred, regulating your emotions by providing them the feedback in a calm, direct manner is as effective as doing so in the manner this blog post took; sometimes it is even more effective, because people generally do not engage with others who they perceive to be acting without reason.
You'll discover this path on your own, and make mistakes along the way, as anyone has. The thing you need to hear right now is: Your comment had exactly zero impact on me. It is like you never even posted it.
Don't pose as if you're some unflappable master or some other silliness, or have some sage advice to offer. Just be less shitty. Don't tell people not to have emotions because they're "pointless" in your view.
Keep your shitty opinion to yourself.
What's the best alternative? Flickr?
I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management.
I don't want to use Apple or Google or MS Clouds for various reasons.
I do want to support a pure-play, independent-ish, profitable, consumer friendly platform. To upload hires shots and have them easy to tag/share/access among those to whom they may be of interest.
I expect to pay, but not through the nose. Reliability matters. I would want the company to be around in 20 years and still reasonably priced/useful. Suggestions?
The Nextcloud app on my phone automatically backs up my pictures to my Nextcloud instance. This is painless to run in a Docker container at home, but Nextcloud also has a subscription service if you don't want to self-host, and your money funds free software.
so you want a service that does everything, is around forever, extremely reliable, affordable, and easy to use, and not affiliated with big tech? and you don't want to do anything yourself?
> I don't want to self-host my photos, too much management.
I dunno https://immich.app is pretty painless IME.
You still need a host that provides a large storage and monthly bandwidth, which is becoming expensive. It doesn't take care of backups either.
I self-host Immich on a personal home server. I do pay for backups, though. For 65GB of images (not a lot) I pay ~$1/mo to Backblaze. The backed-up data is 30% bigger in size right now (= 82GB), as it's incremental.
Perhaps try https://ente.com/, as they offer a paid plan.
You could try SmugMug - I was a happy customer for almost 20 years
What's next, paying to retrieve your car out of a parkade? Your car! That you can't even have a copy of!
This seems besides unethical also illegal. Never assume companies have good legal counsel, particularly in the LLMs era. There are consumer protection laws and in the US they are by state. Sometimes all it takes is completing a 5 min form in the state AG’s website. Sure, $5 is not a lot of money, but screw them.
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?
That's exactly it! And the saying fits so well here, in the literal sense too!
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).
I think the lesson here is that you should always save (backup) your data on storage (services) and never on functional services. And this certainly includes Google, Apple and Microsoft Photos.
5 dollars for having that story to tell, not bad
Yeah. To be fair I'm not that mad about it. It was a very poetic moment that I'll forever cherish...
This is gross, it could be a onetime fee.
It's hard to remember with all the ownership changes, but the Photobucket era was really a different time, of "it's your data, you're in charge, and we give you maximal control of it" - people would upload there to post elsewhere, and I recall they ran ads to monetize. But this era had the ethic that uploading was expensive, and you'd maybe want to do it once and have control 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.
I, too, miss the time when I was a kid and people would give me free cookies. Now as an adult I have to buy my own cookies.
Yes, I think part of it was the "dark fiber" at the time, made bandwidth relatively cheap. But most personal photos don't use that much bandwidth - being able to use them anywhere online (which iCloud and Instagram don't allow) was a big idea. We went from "my content hosted in the cloud" to "Instagram's content" in a lot of ways. That is only partly a pricing issue.
I think the main thing here is merely that it's costly to keep a massive archive (of mostly garbage[1]) online and available on a long timescale. Not just the S3 bill (which I wouldn't underestimate the cost of, for a site that let just anyone upload basically infinite amounts for a decade), but the cost of having engineers maintain and monitor the site forever, either with revenue having dried up a decade ago, or, also having a staff of people to operate the whole business.
You're remembering that if you uploaded something to some free site in 2001, it was still there in 2004. That was because the same people and companies were still around 3 years later, it wasn't because they cared more about you than 2026 startups do. Sure, 2004 Photobucket may have cared more about us than 2026 Meta does -- but I doubt 2001 AOL or AT&T cared about us more.
[1] I only mean most of the content uploaded to Photobucket 2 decades ago is completely useless and abandoned with no one ever coming back to look for it. Memes or screenshots posted to forums that themselves have been offline for a decade. And just content that people don't remember even creating.
Maybe I'm some kind of capitalist pig, because I can't find much to be mad about here. To summarize:
1. Customer took the initiative to check out a long-dormant free photo hosting account
2. Found that it required payment with a message implying strongly that the count of photos in the account was >0
3. Customer didn't like the idea of a subscription of any kind, but eventually figured out that you can just download your crap and cancel
4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty
5. Customer cared a lot about his $5 but apparently only after 2 days had past since this incident
Of all this, only #2 is annoying -- it would be best if they didn't use the call-to-action implying you have photos on the account when the count of photos is zero. I can see though how that wasn't built -- the question asked in a meeting about this upsell feature would have been, 'who are all these people who have Photobucket accounts with zero photos, who come back after a decade to log back into them?'
Most sites from the 2005 or 1999 eras of VC money funded "Free" services simply shut down and deleted everything, many without much warning. For the 99% of people who are logging into an old photobucket account in 2026, sure, nobody needs to actually start a recurring subscription, but if you expect that they should store your stuff for 20 years and should never ask for a cent is the same attitude I had as a teen Napster user. Clearly the amount of value the customer is getting is "greater than zero" so about $0.25 a year for long-term archiving of photos is just fine.
> 4. Customer found that the account was apparently unused and empty
Empty does not equate to unused. This was their old account that they definitely used.
He said in the article that he guessed maybe he used a different account.
This is a lot more believable (esp since he said it) than a conspiracy that PB deleted all photos and built this whole system just to steal $5 a pop -- especially considering how few people must be trying to get back into their 2-decade-old PB accounts in 2026. Hardly seems worth the effort for a scam.
Yes. I don't think I'd uploaded anything on that specific account that I recovered.
They were underage when they made the account. That's a whole different and big fucking deal. Means any TOS and contracts and shit are basically null and void.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571946
? What's your point here?
And almost everyone born after 1980 created their first online accounts while they were a minor, including I'm assuming 70% of Photobucket users.
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"......
That's pretty deceptive conduct on Photobucket's part.
$5 recovery in small claims court maybe? :)
Would be a nice part 2 :P. But I've already had enough with this "side mission". Maybe I'll try a charge back and see if that works, though.
W business move
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.
Wow, shocker, a company will not indefinitely store your data for free.
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.
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.....
If it requires nothing more than a click to cancel, it seems like you'd be happier in life if you viewed such a thing as merely a two-step process (signup, get what you need, cancel immediately) rather than a serious commitment to spend $5 a month for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, everyone in business is now required to do this 'wishful thinking' that people will commit to everything. I laugh sometimes at items that Amazon hilariously suggests that I "Subscribe & Save" to!
When signup is one click, and cancellation requires a phone call... then I'm right there with you with the pitchforks!
Haha, that's fair! You know how it is – I'm not mad, just disappointed :P
You just described most app purchases these days, sadly.
[k]
It was happy to use it to make profit though...
If they can't, then why did they offer to (or at least give the impression that they were going to)?
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.
Well, they didn't according to the article, the storage was empty. But the user discover that only after subscribing.
Well, it sounds like they actually will, with the intent of using it to lure you in as a customer.
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.
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!
> Want your images back? Sure... That'll be $5!
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.
I really doubt anyone's getting rich off this. Genuinely doubt it. How many people remember their photobucket accounts, let alone bother to hunt them down, let alone want to bother getting a credit card out and remembering to cancel (or more hilariously, who's gonna pay $60 a year to keep that sub). I think whoever is running that site is probably barely breaking even at best, considering that they have to keep paying the S3 bill to store literally every image uploaded to PB ever.
I'd ask a different question: how many people on HN have hit their free quota limit in e.g. Google Photos and are now forking off 5 bucks a month because that's the easy way out ?
raises hand although it's for a family member.
But that's a very different product. I was only saying I don't think the PB thing is getting anyone rich, rather it's probably bringing in just enough profit to keep whoever owns it from shutting it down and deleting the (S3) "bucket." As such, it's arguably a nice favor done to the few people who uploaded stuff to this site and are ever coming back for it. The alternative is for the stuff to have been long since deleted.
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.
Tolerating it? No! Greed is good. We've grown this monster from a pup and now it's all grown up and eating people.
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.
storing data over years takes money, so charging for it I can understand
but charging and knowing you don't have any data for this user is a big NO NO
Wow. Lede well buried. I thought I got the story, but after a while I started scanning over all the edge and missed that actual story. I really though we were complaining about spending $5 to retrieve data that had been stored for years at no cost.
Pretty seedy move. That, and what appears to be the dark pattern of prompting for payment first, then ultimately allowing export after refusal.
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).
"As I was writing and reliving this beautiful experience, I noticed a little footnote on the payments page
It's not a footnote or smallprint, it's written prominently right above the button so people are well aware of it...
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?
Just do a GDPR request and get all the data they have on you for free. I’m pretty sure they would have to give you your photos as part of that.
Aren't they only required to delete the data on request? They don't have to actually provide it back to you
No, you can request your personal data as a part of GDPR (and most other privacy laws). That's why things like Google Takeout still exist.
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).
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-15-gdpr/
IANAL.
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.
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.
> They first have to find out if you’re from the EU
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).
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.
Could also say you’re a California resident and get your data too. They’ll probably just ignore or say no if they’re being that shady.
Well... If I was smarter, I'd have definitely done that!
Are photos considered PII?
Not in general, but depending on what’s on them maybe. A profile picture showing my face definitely is.
But I’m also not sure that they only have to give you PII.
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”.
Ummmm
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...
GDPR covers more than just PII.
So, like and a kind reminder they have legal obligation to give all the personal data they have about you under Europeans laws, and that's it?
Photobucket sent me multiple e-mails during a long time period to alert me about this change. So the author quite willfully ignored those.
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!
How would they respond to a GDPR request?
"You want fries with thaat?"
Wow this is a next level scam lol
Chargeback time. They claimed to have your photos, then fucking lied about it.
And a chargeback costs them like $20.
Every time I see one of these I make a note that it's a successful strategy to make money, so I might apply it in a future project.
The world would be a better place if you made money by providing value to people. Instead of extorting them.
Don't you value your childhood photos?
If I trusted my friend to hold onto my childhood photo collection as a favor, and then came back to find him asking for $5 to return it, and I reluctantly agree only to find him empty handed, I wouldn't consider that providing value.
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.
To be fair I'm doing that now, with Immich (= a "self-hosted Google Photos"). I was just curious to find out what things I was screnshotting as a kid.
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.
People uploaded photos to Photobucket 20 years ago, before anyone knew this. This smug take is not the least bit helpful in this instance.
Many knew this 20 years ago, as well.
Nobody knew it 20 years ago. SaaS was just taking off. The word "cloud" was barely a thing.
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.
So you didn't know it either, you just guessed differently from other people's guesses.
AJAX was 1999. Ruby on rails was 2004. The hazards of having your application experience and data subject to the whims of whomever controlled the server were glaringly apparent when your friend showed you a site they built and then tinkered with the data behind the scenes. It was straightforward to extrapolate that dynamic to businesses that had little plan besides grow their number of users at all costs, at least for those not in denial about the incentives of market actors.
Many? I was on the internet and well connected to many hackers starting 30 years ago. I’m an expert on early internet and hacker culture.
You’re incorrect.
Wow. Thanks for that "expert" correction!
I was there, too. These dynamics were eminently foreseeable.
I do agree that the smug take here is overall unhelpful for someone who was young at the time, and is now even using a self-hosted solution. It's also 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.