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.

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.

Also, press thumbs down when a response is good and thumbs up when a response is bad. Don't do free labor for them.

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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.

the whole part about dark patterns is to be technically not doing the asshole thing while getting most people to fall for it.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.

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 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).

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?

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.

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!

Yes, it work well. It works less well on ios, some pain points due to how Apple handles background apps.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. To be fair I'm not that mad about it. It was a very poetic moment that I'll forever cherish...

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"......

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

Chargeback time. They claimed to have your photos, then fucking lied about it.

And a chargeback costs them like $20.

Removing free user data is unfortunate, but understandable that it might eventually come to that.

A monthly subscription to regain access is questionable to me, since it'd mean they are still storing the images. A one-time fee could be justified for the cost of recovering the data from cold storage, but risks incentivizing intentionally luring in users then unexpectedly holding their data as leverage to have them pay up as a business model.

Claiming a user can pay to recover their photos, while not actually having anything to restore, is misrepresentation.

I don't think your comment represents the situation very well. They allowed the user to upload the data and they're storing the data regardless, right?

That's fair push back. In defense, my comment was motivated by the OP's assertion (multiple times) that this is merely an example of corporate greed. I don't know what the original user-agreement was, but it seems to me that common sense would say that you have to make money some way. If this business at one point offered a free service and at some point market pressures showed them that wasn't going to work, so they needed to do something else to remain solvent. Egress is not free, so merely uploading and storing is not an argument for free retrieval.

Not only that, but there is a cost for retrieval and transmission especially if you are in cold storage. It's much cheaper to just mark it for deletion than it is to get it back.

If it was just that, I'd be okay-ish with it (even though it started out as a service). But pushing a monthly subscription for a 1-time action? Man.....

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.

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.

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.

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.

People uploaded photos to Photobucket 20 years ago, before anyone knew this. This smug take is not the least bit helpful in this instance.

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.

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.