this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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538

Piracy vs. Crunchyroll account deletion (lemmy.haigner.me)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Crunchyroll

Read the article on account deletion.
Submit a support ticket.
Get response: pLeASE Be awaRE cRuNChyRoll CustoMEr SUPPorT no lONGEr diReCTLY handleS CUstOmEr Data reQUests FoR gDpR, CCPa, aNd lgPd.
Remind yourself that your ticket wasn't entirely useless. They gave you links to multiple forms to delete your account depending on the jurisdiction.
Navigate to “CCPA Request Form” if you live in California. “All Other Requests” if you live outside of California.
Select the appropriate form based on whether you live in the “European Union and the United Kingdom,” “Brazil,” or “United States, non-California” region. If you live outside of these regions, send an email to the listed email address. I go with the “European Union and the United Kingdom” region.
Indicate that you are a customer.
Specify that you want to make a data erasure request.
Click on "Crunchyroll, Crunchyroll Games" among the options, disregarding the other unrelated services.
Provide your first and last name, email address, and country of residence.
Confirm that you own the email address.
If you receive an email stating they couldn't find your Crunchyroll Games account, respond that you don't possess a Crunchyroll Games account.
Sign an account deletion contract with the blood of your newborn.
Support may delete your account, they didn't delete my account yet.

Piracy

Account? What is account? Can you eat account? Is account an instrument?

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (5 children)

Dark patterns are the bane of my existence.

My job has them for when people try to cancel services and I've been fighting like hell to get rid of them. But business is worried if people can cancel super easy, they'll do it. It's like they forget we have an actual quality product that people want to have. It ends up looking like an abusive relationship when a customer tries to leave. It takes one click to add service, but it takes a phone call and a transfer and a sales pitch, and then finally a scheduled deactivation at the start of your next bill cycle because God forbid we give you some money back.

I'm the exact type of customer who avoids businesses that do shit like this. And I'm not alone. If you make it 10 times harder to drop a service than you do to add a service, you should go fuck yourself. Gym memberships, monthly subscriptions, recurring monthly shipments with auto billing. Never sign up to this stuff without knowing what you need to do to deactivate. Or sign up with a preloaded visa gift card and a 10 minute email so you can just shut everything off when you leave and they can keep their bullshit account.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

I had a friend that subscribed to a meal plan service but it required a phone call to cancel. Instead, before each shipment, he would search for the company on Google, click the sponsored ad and then proceed to delay shipment from their account page. He did this for years to ensure it cost them money for not offering an easy cancellation path until they eventually did so.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

I had to cancel my gym membership because my laziness took over, let's be honest. I called expecting a huge battle and prepared for a trek. I said "Hi, my name is Bread. I would like to cancel my gym membership." They said okay and immediately hung up. No new bill the next month.

A bit rude, but I won't argue with results. Straight to the point.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

The entire “pOePle wIlL CAncEl if itS Ez tho” mentality is the same as “if you don’t keep people in the office at their desk and monitor them, they won’t get work done.”

All it did was force others to adopt the same practice and now no one can’t get out of anything smoothly. Maybe 1 out of 10 as a delete button. And even then, that’s just account deletion on the front end. Nothing about all the data they have stored.

flips water bottle

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Drake no : customer value proposition

Drake yes : customer chains

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Customers obviously don't understand the value we provide them, so we must force them to continue to use and pay for our services. They get a once in a lifetime opportunity to understand just how valuable our services are. If they still don't understand, they merely didn't see the light yet, and must continue to pay and use our services.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

"Look, it's a matter of trust. If your service isn't trustworthy, keep your customers hostage."

Explain it like that, maybe it clicks.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 9 months ago (2 children)

If a website has a German version, try using that. By law every web page here must have an (pretty much) directly findable button to cancel your account. Even when you are logged out. It normally is positioned in the footer of the page. Search for "kündigen" on the page and fill in the form.

Note that not all pages still do this. But normally even just threatening to sue should add it, as they really wouldn't be able to go against this in court. Tho crunchyroll does not seem to have this. Maybe I should create an account and do some trolling.

Or just use GDPR and write a cancellation mail. I am pretty sure in most countries they need to accept it. Do not forget to add a deadline of a few business days.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This is about account deletion, not cancellation. But cancellation is also a fun topic in its own right. I don't know about Germany, but cancellations are a solved problem here in Austria, even accounting for shady business practices. 3rd-party services exist that fully automate the cancellation process for most cases. They email the company, send another reminder email, store the email server response as evidence for court, and submit a complaint to the responsible Schlichtungsstelle, which then light a fire under their ass to cancel your service. If they're retarded enough to not cancel your service, then you can always take them to court with the stored evidence.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Doing some legal trolling, very German of you. Nice.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Open their t&c, tos, privacy, or legal policy.
Ctrl+F @
Send email GDPR right to delete.

5 min of work.

If they reject, forward rejection to your DPO and request them to help.

Never had issue with anyone.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I found the process fucking terrible, so I went the EVEN BETTER route

Log into my credit card
Click “dispute transaction”
Reason: “Unable to cancel account”

Worked a dream.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's a good way but might cause trouble for you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

Possibly, but this was years ago now and my second (and final) chargeback.

No problems for me, luckily!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

That will stop billing but not remove your personal data from the providers database. Worse if your account then gets banned dispute resolution will be harder.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

~~This only skips step 1 – 5 for Crunchyroll. You still have 8 steps to go.~~ Nevermind, they've got email addresses for privacy inquiries, hidden beneath their infinite scroll anime overview, in the “Your Rights” section, behind the “this page” link. Although I wonder whether they force you to go through their painful process nevertheless.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Ironically Crunchyroll actually started off as a illegal for profit pirated-video site

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Same for Hulu. I stopped using it when they started charging and lost content that was "exclusive" to netflix.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I can't find anything about this on the web. Did they rebrand?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It looks like it was legal but free, but it had most then-recent stuff until they went subscription. I guess I just assumed it was illegal like similar sites at the time lol. Still though same principle, they charge I stop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Remember mangarock? When mangadex was buggy and relatively small, mangarock was site where you could read manga for free, now it's the same as crunchyroll but for manga

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

I really wish government would crack down on this. Every regulatory entity should be on this because it’s nearly impossible to actually get your data deleted. Let alone even send a request without hurdle or hassle.

And everyone is like ya no this is all fine privacy buy iPhone… *flips water bottle

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

My piracy website has literally a link that when you click it you purge your account and its prohibited to put that link in the chat...

And yes there are accounts but they are just for keeping track and the chat + some other social features

Btw just send Crunchy roll a GDPR data removal request. They are legally required to remove all your data then.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Can't you just put a stop payment on it and watch it implode?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Their account deletion policy aside, Crunchyroll is like one of the last remaining bastions of solid streaming for a very reasonable price that hasn't increased in many years.

There's plenty of streaming services to cancel and switch to piracy on legitimately, I don't personally believe Crunchyroll to be one of them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I dumped them when they asked me to turn off my ad blocker after paying. Not to mention the drama with censoring dubs enough to change plot elements.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Yeah, admittedly, those two things are annoying.

I haven't personally experienced the adblocker thing though, I suspect it's not intentional, but I'm purely speculating there.

The censoring thing I have run into, and it is very irritating, so I'm with you on that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

One small blessing of them being so technically incompetent is that there is no DRM, so you can just use yt-dlp to download whatever show you want to keep. It's just a small pain to do because you need to download your login cookie to pass to yt-dlp.

[–] Chronographs 2 points 9 months ago

Until they can provide a better product than the people doing it for free I’ll stick to the fansubs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Three years. The price changed from 49,99€ to 69.99€ per year. At least in Germany.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wait what happened with crunchy roll that people are deleting accounts? I saw the thing about the class action lawsuit but that's all I know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I didn't like their service, so I cancelled my account and deleted it like I always do. Not sure why others delete their accounts. Edit: How ironic that they were sued for violating privacy lol.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Partly cause I'm too lazy to go find my wallet and party because of these things I use virtual cards like privacy.com. I did for crunchy roll and I'm pretty sure Icanceled by killing the card

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I love privacy.com for this reason

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Sail!

(We need some piracy memes with this)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

Sail!

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Some piracy sites do have accounts, just mostly small-scale.

Most of this complaint really doesn't have to do with piracy...I mean a lot of account sites don't even have anything to pirate.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Most piracy websites don't need accounts to pirate content. You don't need to delete accounts if you don't need accounts. Therefore, account deletion is a zero step process for the average pirate, compared to Crunchyroll's eye-watering 13 steps. So yeah, I think this is related to piracy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Not really, it's more internet in general. And if we look at social media, they have accounts as frustrating as crunchyroll to fully delete but without anything to pirate.

Like it's a fair complaint but, to be fair

If you're trying to delete your account you're already going to a different provider (in this case, piracy), so it's not like you would've happily come back to Crunchyroll just because they let you delete your account easier.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Private trackers are also quite easy to delete accounts in anyways

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Even though I agree that the piracy-route is easier and more comfortable, it's good that account deletion isn't as straightforward as a single button on the account page, without further verification. I certainly wouldn't like to lose my Steam library just because my Steam account details were leaked once. A second and maybe even third separate step being necessary is smart for anything that involves a substantial amount of money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

🤷 What if you just used a burner card or PayPal?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Is that fucking DOTA in the top image?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

No, it's the labyrinth map of the Maze Runner movie.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

So where is the maze for the pirate ship?

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