[okramcivokram]

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.

[root-parent]

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...

[Aurornis]

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.

[dylan604]

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.

[pastor_williams]

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.

[Terr_]

> 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...

[kyle-rb]

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...

[pastor_williams]

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.

[gowld]

More specifically, the CEO said that users are "dumb f*cks" for submitting data to Facebook, the predecessor of Meta.

[latentsea]

> There are laws and regulations

Those worked very for Uber.

[gmerc]

“Rule of law”. About that…, come November.

[flir]

Dunno about that near-blackmail scenario, but 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 last year and the database was sold for $305m.

[jmalicki]

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.

[cute_boi]

And the government is sleeping and mostly worried about how to implement id verification........

[TeMPOraL]

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.

[gmerc]

There’s no regulatory regime anymore in the US. So there’s no downside to it. It is inevitable.

[therealpygon]

Oh, I’m sure there aren’t any possible examples of similar behaviors. No company would try to penalize cancellation I’m sure, certainly not by forcing you to subscribe for 12 months and pay an out clause to cancel your monthly subscription, and certainly no company would make cancellations far more difficult. There is definitely nothing that would make anyone think this could be a real tactic half-buried in your EULA agreed when signing up for the service. You know, alongside all those clauses that they effectively own copies of everything you send to them.

I’m gonna bet a whole lot more money has been made off corporate apologists who say “that would never happen” about things that definitely then happened.

Wonder how many “conspiracy theorists” warned people cigarettes were causing cancer while corporate apologists pointed to the faked studies of the industry and said “See, they are all crazy, no company would sell something that they know causes cancer! It would be a huge risk!”

[kurthr]

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.

[neonstatic]

There is a way, it's called Polymarket.

[anal_reactor]

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.

[jpfromlondon]

it obviously knew your hn username

[dorgo]

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.

[junior44660]

I always pose fundamentalist questions and hypotheticals to the LLM to poison such training data.

[RobRivera]

I have loads of requests to 'Play Despacito' across agents all over the blogosphere

[bikson]

Calm down Satan.

[cwmoore]

Now you can place a bet on how well that approach will work out in ten years.

[dakolli]

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

[yifanl]

I just ask it to spellcheck the Webster dictionary about 50 times an hour.

[zamadatix]

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.

[sharts]

Or they’ll just make it public entirely if you don’t maintain a subscription.

[RajT88]

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.

[dspillett]

> 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.

[locknitpicker]

> (...) 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.

[msdz]

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._

[brewdad]

“Up to” is doing a lot of work here. I’d imagine few companies ever pay anything close to the maximum possible fine.

Just like my state law says simple littering can be punished by up to a $6500 fine. Most people get a warning or maybe pay a fine of under $100.

[autoexec]

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.

[cj]

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!)

[lutr]

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.

[MisterTea]

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.

[vitally3643]

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

[xahrepap]

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.

[Uncle_Brumpus]

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.

[the_af]

> 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...

[Uncle_Brumpus]

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.

[lutr]

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!)

[trwhite]

Or maybe... you know... read

[lutr]

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.

[uberex]

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