EDIT: with that said they did a great job fixing my phone with an hour or two.
(IANAL, could be wrong)
The real underlying strategy here is to leverage people's general ignorance of contract law in order to intimidate them into thinking that they are contractually bound when in fact they are not, at least not legally. As a practical matter, the need to pay a lawyer often trumps the actual law (another lesson I learned the hard way).
This is so they can reuse the parts as “genuine” to do the next customer. The watch repair industry is notorious for this. They replace more than they need to, using aftermarket parts, and keep the originals for their own stock.
I was naive but I couldn’t conceive of that happening, going through a legitimate and large jewelry business.
The receipt was really long and not like a normal checkout receipt.
Also part of the profitability of uBreak was selling broken components removed from devices (like good LCDs with broken glass) back to OEMs to be refurbished, so that's why they don't let you have the old parts back.
She told me that it was a policy of Samsung...
We certainly didn't tell them it was some company policy, and LCD replacement was cheaper if your LCD was in good shape so its pretty transparent
Could the phrasing be better? Of course. One option is "I have deleted all private content on this account. I understand that anything remaining will be made public as part of our 'Free Tier.' Click here to delete your presentations if you have not done so already."
But calling it immoral to screw up in the manner of highlighting the issue seems a bit much to me.
Friendliest way to do this would be to keep content for a month after cancelling, but only let -you- see it if you renew or decide to make it public.
A) delete a lot of their stuff, or
B) make all their stuff public
Either could be really, really bad.
You could let the user pick between the two options, I guess. But really, most everyone cancelling something like this needs to go through their stuff and decide for each item: "Keep, but make public" or "Delete".
If both options are likely to be extremely undesirable to a substantive fraction of canceling users, that's the best option.
If there was a most-likely-safe option from the user perspective, choosing that by default and having it confirmed would arguably be better UX, but I don't think "keep everything that used to be private and make it public" is really a "clearly-safer option". Nor, even in the cases where it is safer, do I think that this presents the confirmation well.
> But really, most everyone cancelling something like this needs to go through their stuff and decide for each item: "Keep, but make public" or "Delete".
Some people do, but I bet lots of people have collections that very easily fall into either "Delete all" or "Keep all and make public" by the time they cancel (if only because they are only canceling after everything to which that decision wouldn't apply has been migrated to an alternative service.)
I miss the days when burying awful things that nobody would willingly accept in the fine print (which few people read and most people have a hard time understanding) was something we all understood to be immoral, to the point that it was a cartoon trope as something the Devil would do.