Pissing Off Users By Changing Terms Of Service Along The Way
from the big-changes dept
One of the important things with online services is that users need to feel a certain level of trust with the service providers they use. Otherwise why would they take the leap and use them. It's no surprise that service providers often end up changing the terms of service to keep up with the times, legal changes or changes to the service itself. But, when you make a big change in the terms of service -- one that fundamentally alters what people thought they were signing up for, that's a pretty big problem. A bunch of folks have sent in the news that Kodak has changed their terms of service, such that its "free" photo sharing site (which was formerly Ofoto) is no longer free at all, but will cost users $5/year in additional services (i.e., you have to buy $5 worth of prints/year). If you don't, Kodak will simply delete your albums.Now, obviously, Kodak is doing this to try to increase its revenue and get those who don't bring in much money off the site. Kodak certainly has every right to try to come up with a better business model. But, in changing the terms of what people had already agreed to, and in doing so, threatening to delete their photos and "treasured memories," it seems that Kodak is absolutely killing any level of trust people might have had with the site. There are tons of competitors out there (many of which do still include free options). Kodak may not mind the free users going elsewhere, but breaking that bond seems like a massively dangerous idea. Those "free" customers still can generate some revenue -- but they won't at all if you piss them off by suddenly charging them for what was previously free or deleting their photos.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: changes, terms of service
Companies: kodak, ofoto
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Terms Of Severence
And this is why cloud computing will fail to meet expectations
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Terms Of Severence
Seriously, what does cloud computing have to do with that statement? You provide nothing more than a snarky comment that has no apparent relation with the subject at hand, or you're generalizing so broadly that you're destined to fail.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Terms Of Severence
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Trust
I did take advantage of the new terms by uploading a stock photo and setting up one album, with one picture in it. Guess that Kodak will try to bill me for prints of a picture I don't want.
Oh well. Digital was going to do them in anyway. Lack of understanding of what an agreement is won't slow things down.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Only One Thing to Do
When they came for the free users, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a free user.
When they came for the $5/year customers, I didn't speak up...
If they can change the terms of service so drastically after an agreement is made, it follows they'll have no qualms about doing it a second time. Or a third. Or...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Hasn't this happened before with Shutterfly
Pity Elliot Spetzer couldn't keep his fly zipped. If he had a few words with the CEO of Kodak, maybe that might have done some good.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Screw Kodak
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
A cup of coffee
I imagine that in internet cafes all across the US people are sipping a momentary cup of coffee worth more than a year's access to their 'precious memories' (in my local currency this would be true). Not to mention the fact these precious memories don't seem to be backed up anywhere else?!? We all pay for storage be it on CD, DVD, memory stick, HD etc...$5 per year for access, convenience etc from Kodak seems pretty resonable to me.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: A cup of coffee
Besides, if it was free before, what did they add to make it worth paying for? If the answer is nothing, then the user automatically feels cheated.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: A cup of coffee
I'd definitely agree if the amount were more than such a paltry sum. If it were $5/month it might make me stop and think. But it's such a measly amount for the service they provide and if you don't have copies of your photos elsewhere frankly I doubt people place much value on their data anyways.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Kodak not learning from hostage negotiations 101
Problem with that hostage negotiation scenario is that you then have no faith that they will not increase the terms again further down the line. You also question whether they will remain faithful to their word. Deadly force becomes a more likely scenario for resolution.
Kodak may have just ordered in the tear gas grenades from their users.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Kodak not learning from hostage negotiations 101
Kodak has notified you up front, as well. So, download your photos and save them locally. What is the hostage situation here?
You also use the term "more" money. Understand that there was no cost before. They are saying, in effect, "We are no longer providing this service for 100% free. To continue using this service, you must purchase at least $5.00 per year worth of product." Where, exactly, is the "bad faith" you claim?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Nothing New
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
There fixed that for ya.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Everything Old Is New Again
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Whiners, much?
I think someone took a look at the profit/loss statement and said 'Hey, we no longer make enough money to support all of the goodwill services that we offer. We are going to have to charge our paying customers more or get rid of the customers who don't pay us anything.'. And someone else said... "Hey!'.
I guess I don't see the problem but I do see users like Willard, who are annoyed at being charged for a service that they (apparently) didn't even use, much less make profitable. Why is it better to alienate customers who give you money by charging them more, for the sake of... Willard? (Assuming that they are trying to cut costs, like most businesses are right now.)
Until two years ago, my store did alot of stuff for free and charged alot less than we should have for alot of things, like watch batteries.
I convinced the owner to lightly raise alot of the prices on the stuff we wanted to do (like watch batteries) and people don't even blink. We still offer better service at (usually) a lower price.
I convinced him to start charging alot more for the things we don't like to do, and the things that only we can do (there are about ten jewelry stores in town but only one horologist*) and we make alot more money on those services and have gotten rid of the problem customers that needed to be fired anyway. (Yay!)
End result: More money from good customers, fewer bad customers, happier employees, happier horologist. The bad, cheap, whiny customers are pissed and will now take their business elsewhere, which is an added bonus if they do, because our competition is now spending time and trouble with them. Roflmao, thank God.
*http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-horologist.htm
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
If those memories are "treasured," surely the users wouldn't mind paying 5 bucks a year.
"...it seems that Kodak is absolutely killing any level of trust people might have had with the site."
"breaking that bond seems like a massively dangerous idea."
Hehehe...Mike, your hyperbole never fails to crack me up. But I guess that's what keeps bringing more people to this site. Kodak is clearly saying they cannot continue to subsidize freeloaders; how is that a breach of contract? Are you implying that a company should continue to bleed just to keep freeloaders happy instead of recognizing the lack of viability and acting accordingly?
"Those "free" customers still can generate some revenue.."
Pray how? When these cheapskates won't even pay $5 a year, how could they possibly bring in any revenue that doesn't offset the bandwidth and storage costs incurred on their account? Perhaps Kodak could offer a free one-year subscription to the site to anyone who buys $5 worth of prints, instead of the other way round. It's easier to give paying customers freebies than get freeloaders to pay.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Sheeple
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Sheeple
"It is not whining to point out that telling people if you do not want your stuff that we said we would hold for you, you must now pay."
Um, they are an online photo album. NEVER have they marketed the service as a data backup solution. If you used it that way, then sorry. Take a lesson, and learn to back up your stuff properly next time. It is not Kodak's job to compensate for your ignorance and lack of personal responsibility. And what is stopping you from downloading the stuff back to your hard drive, or keeping a local copy to begin with?
"It would have been a non-issue had they said we can not afford to maintain this site any longer. we are setting up a new site that will cost $5 and anyone who wishes to transfer their old accounts can. That would have been honest, extortion is not."
BS. You would still be whining. Know how I know? Because the situation you outline would have the exact same effect on the end-user. The only difference is that it would cost Kodak a bunch of money unnecessarily.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Sheeple
When is the game over? Once again, I ask, was there a time limit that Kodak breached? Or was the time limit simply not specified? If there was, then Kodak sucks, but if it was just open-ended, then Kodak just announced the end of the game. The game will be over. In the new game, the rules will be different. Deal with it.
It would have been a non-issue had they said we can not afford to maintain this site any longer. we are setting up a new site that will cost $5 and anyone who wishes to transfer their old accounts can. That would have been honest, extortion is not.
You think that they should make a new site for paying customers, force paying customers to migrate, and then close down the old site anyway?
How is that a) cost-effective and b)any better for the non-paying customer? They still lose their accounts. Further, if Kodak did that, they would have pissed off paying customers as well as whiny non-paying customers. How is that logical at all?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
As said already, cloud computing is a fools errand.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
This may sound trivial to a lot of people, but some people store hundreds of gigs of photos on these sites. Kodak probably could have just shut the whole thing down with no notice. In a bad economy you better expect free services to get cut off first.
The name of this site should be changed from "Techdirt" to "Mike expects everything online to be free."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: mike expects everything to be free
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Let me get my photos back
Second the $5 a year is only if you have less than 2GB of storage space used. I have over that so I need to pay $20 a year. This is still not that much but right now I do not have any need for any additional prints or products.
Third, lets say someone did use Kodak for their only online storage or if someone uploaded their pictures to Kodak and then lost any other copy leaving Kodak's site as the only place the picture is stored. There is no way to get those pictures back from Kodak unless you subscribe to their Premier subscription for $25 a year or purchase an archive CD. Granted this is a lot less expensive then any kind of data recovery service it still seems down right dirty. If someone is stuck and wants their pictures back to goto another service Kodak will charge them for that. A similar situation happened to a company I used to work for. They had a document imaging service they were paying for. This service stored all their images onto WORM disks and the drives to read them were discontinued years ago. They also stored the images in a proprietary format so even if you could gain access to the file system you could do nothing with the images. However that company that held our images did offer another service to convert our files to PDF format. I think in the end they paid several thousands of dollars to get THEIR data BACK from this company. An analogy to this would be you get an account from your bank and then you decide to goto another bank but they say in order to withdrawal all your funds you will have to pay us a fee.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Let me get my photos back
So sad for the user. Should I whine about Wal-Mart for not keeping a backup of my negatives when they developed them because I couldn't be bothered to keep track of them? As I said in another response, this is an online photo album, not a data backup service. Any data backup service is going to cost MUCH more that $25.00/year, so your complaint is quite moot.
"An analogy to this would be you get an account from your bank and then you decide to goto another bank but they say in order to withdrawal all your funds you will have to pay us a fee."
It's called an "account closing fee," and yes, banks do this. In fact, I just got charged $25.00 for closing an HSA account. Still, this is a lame analogy. If Kodak were holding your actual photo negatives, or if they somehow forced you to delete all your own copies of the file, then yes, this would be equivalent. They aren't. They are holding a digital copy, with the emphasis on the word "copy." That is, you copied your file up to them. If you proceeded to lose that file, that is your own problem, not Kodak's.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Does anyone know how to unsubscribe from the site? Unless I missed something, they don't provide a way to contact them.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Contract Sanctity
Companies routinely "break" contracts with customers all the time. In fact many of these "contracts", to me anyway, don't even qualify as valid contracts. Yet where is the moral outrage when companies fail to honor their contracts by those who feel that the AIG contracts should be honored?
If private industry can renege on the holy contract at will in any arbitrary and capricious fashion of their choosing. The government has a right to void contracts allowing unearned "bonuses".
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Contract Sanctity
For pay services (mobile phone carriers, cable cos, ISPs, etc), I agree with you 100%.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
kodak can't print well
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Alternative
But it does point out a big problem. Photos are the most important data that we have, and it's really the only irreplaceable data we have. It's a big responsibility for us to keep our photos for future generations.
I've been working on a photo archiving site, www.swisspicturebank.com, for the past couple of years, and I'd like to invite you all to give it a try.
I want to be upfront with you, though. We've put most of our effort into building the secure, long-term data archiving infrastructure - we're just now looking to add photosite features and functionality - so the user interface will probably feel a little rough at first.
Please try it out (yes, free trial) and tell us what you want from a photo site.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Simply charging for a service
All they have done is attempt to offset the cost of maintaining the site. Storing and backing up that many photos, as well as maintaining a huge database, has substantial storage, bandwidth, equipment, and IT costs. They aren't asking for a monthly fee. They aren't even asking you to pay $5/year for the service (which is EXTREMELY cheap). They are asking you to spend $5.00 on $5.00 worth of product sometime during the year. I hardly find that unreasonable.
As far as deleting the albums, if you are relying on a third party to store your photos, you are an idiot, anyway. Plus, given that the primary distinguishing feature of their service is it's ability to synchronize with their EasyShare software, most of their customers will have all that "lost" work setting up albums backed up on their computer already.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Ofoto
Wow! Now we have to buy a camera from someone else, and delete Kodak from our lives.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
"free" means "until we decide to charge you".
still, you'd think _kodak_ would understand
how important people's pictures are to them,
and thus would realize that ripping that bond
will cost kodak lots of lost trust and credibility.
the threat to _delete_ photos is quite troubling!
i will certainly be leery of kodak from now on...
-bowerbird
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Great Article
I once had a website hosted with a free hosting service. They decided to change to paid hosting. The problem was that since the domain was a sub-domain I lost all of the backlinks and visitors to the site. I could have just paid the monthly fee for hosting but I was a bit pissed.
"It's no surprise that service providers often end up changing the terms of service to keep up with the times, legal changes or changes to the service itself. But, when you make a big change in the terms of service -- one that fundamentally alters what people thought they were signing up for, that's a pretty big problem."
I agree 100% with that!
-Becca
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Kodak rip off
Way to go Kodak..... you shoul be ashamed...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Notification
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I received an email saying I needed to send Kodak 34 cents to keep my account active.
I ordered a photo archive CD for $11.44, pictures that I did not have digital copies of because they were from developed film, when Ofoto offered that service.
I paid for the CD and canceled my account.
It's not a question of money; it's a question of principal. I have no interest in being a subscriber; I'm a customer. If Kodak wants to charge people yearly, fine, but that's not for me. It may not be entirely rational, but who is?
I'm irritated also by the tone of their interaction, as though by not fulfilling their arbitrary yearly requirement, I'm a freeloader. They spend $100 million a year on advertising, and give their iphone application away for free. Who is subsidizing that?
I own a Kodak camera, which I bought mostly out of brand loyalty. I'm looking forward to a new Fuji now.
Thanks Kodak, it's been a good run. I'm 35, and hopefully will enjoy many more years of taking photos. I'm happy to spend my money elsewhere.
A quarter, a nickel, and four pennies...worth losing a customer for life?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
family photos lost?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Kodak's new policy
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Deleted Family Albums
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Deleted Photos & Legal Advice
I agree 100% with those opposed & upset with Kodaks recent poor business practices. I thought the same as many in that it does not seem legal for our stored photos to be completely deleted after we were lead to believe we could trust Kodak with them based upon initial terms at sign up. They should have a back up cached or the like system to allow for existing customers to retrieve the photos deleted for an extended period of time post deletion. I believe this is somewhat of a bait & switch??? I like many did not receive the email warning (maybe went to spam??) & logged on this week to share some photos with friends to find that they all had been deleted...including shared photos received from others.I contacted Kodak & they would not restore them & said they are deleted permanently.
I do not mind paying for photos or the CD newly offered that would have proved a copy of all my albums & the opportunity to save my memories trusted in their hands. I also do believe that existing customers should have been grandfathered with the original terms. Kodak then could have proceeded by implementing the new terms with new customers as the info would be disclosed upfront.
Last, I do agree online services should not be the only method of back up storage...however in my case I was challenged with the threat of computer virus's earlier this year that prompted me to pull all photos off and back them up somewhere else quickly. Originally I was appreciative and thankful to save at least these memories as I did lose the data on my computer. I planned to pull them back off into my possession to back them up..but that takes an awful lot of time and I trusted they would be there when I was able to take on that project.
So after all of my rambling and expressions of frustration, (thank you for allowing me to do so) I am seeking any Legal Advice and or feedback from anyone who has researched the possible legal implications if any with this matter. I do believe that there must be a way for kodak to retrieve the data they claim to no longer have a record of. My ultimate goal would be to force Kodak to take the necessary actions to do so. Hopefully something can be done.
Thank you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]