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by YPPH 1634 days ago
They should either add technical measures to prevent overcharging on these types of accounts, or amend the terms of service to explicitly say that the account owner is not liable for charges incurred by an unauthorised user who obtains user credentials.

I find it hard to fathom that a company which sells machine learning as a service cannot detect that an account sitting dormant for months, which suddenly spins up several large VMs, has been compromised.

It's unsatisfactory that the only recourse is hoping for a favourable exercise of discretion on Amazon's part to waive the charges.
1 comments
toomanydoubts 1634 days ago
Jeff Bezos did not become a billionaire by being user-friendly. Guess anyone trying to cancel their Amazon Prime subscription would agree.
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gruez 1634 days ago
>Guess anyone trying to cancel their Amazon Prime subscription would agree.

The unsubscribe button was easy enough to find, but had to maybe go through 2 nag screens before letting me cancel. I guess it's not pro-user, but it's also not exactly a roadblock to me canceling.

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toomanydoubts 1634 days ago
Well, it's not a roadblock but it's a dark-pattern and user hostile. Just like the lack of spending limits on AWS.

Compare that to the experience of unsubscribing from netflix, for instance.

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gruez 1634 days ago
> Well, it's not a roadblock but it's a dark-pattern and user hostile. Just like the lack of spending limits on AWS.

Yeah I explicitly say it wasn't pro user. I was more disputing the "Jeff Bezos did not become a billionaire" (presumably by making it hard to cancel prime) part.

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toomanydoubts 1634 days ago
Well, I didn't really mean to say that what made him a billionaire was making it hard to cancel amazon prime, that was just an example I came up with that demonstrates Amazon general stance on user-friendliness.

Still, I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to dispute. If we agree with both premises(1. Bezos is a billionaire and 2. Amazon products aren't usually user-friendly), than I maintain my position that the expression "Jeff Bezos did not become a billionaire by being user-friendly" evaluates to true.

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gruez 1634 days ago
fair enough.
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