Sounds like what the girlsdoporn guys did to their "models". They took them to another state and then badgered them into doing an adult scene, claiming they would only be seen on DVD in another country.

When the girls later discovered that their scenes were available to anyone on the internet, and tried to "cancel their service", they released their information to all and sundry including their parents/bosses, etc. Just to be jerks.

Seems more than merely jerkish to me.

I mean, say you were in the situation with a plumber who did offer a free service of taking away people's toilets (which seems plausible -- some people might appreciate getting rid of their old toilet for free, while a plumber might offer the service in order to resell the old toilets). And then you paid for a plumber to replace yours, and they insisted that while you cancel the replacement, they were still going to take away your old one. Would you accept this, holding that it's a legal (if jerkish) way to have the toilet replacement canceled?

That analogy doesn't really apply. The plumbers service and the data hostings service differ in several important ways.

The plumber is a services for hire offering. Prezi is a data storage offering.

The plumber story involves work that has not yet occured and then is subsequently canceled. Prezi involves ongoing services that are being canceled.

I don't think the plumber analogy comes even close to a good example here.

The data-storage offering isn't the issue. The issue's a related service, i.e. publication, which hasn't occurred yet.

Again, I see how this makes sense IF we assume that the "private" in "private data hosting" is severable. But while not a lawyer, I don't think that's true without a contractual agreement establishing it.

To be clear, I can appreciate that a provider might intend to offer privacy as a severable feature. But that seems like something they have to tell the customer. Before the customer uploads private information, they should be made aware that, should they stop paying, that private information will be published.

While not a lawyer, I don't think any reasonable court would buy the argument that customers who upload private information are consenting to have it published once they cancel the service unless there's strong evidence to that effect. It seems like a toxic arrangement that people would be unlikely to agree to, so I'd think that there would be a high standard of proof for the provider to establish that the customer intended to agree to it. I'm not sure if merely being buried in the fine print would be enough in a case like this, but is it even in the fine print?

I think we are in violent agreement :-)

Either can go really badly.

"My subscription lapsed and the 5 decks I'd been working on and hadn't made public yet vanished forever!!!"

I think a reasonable default would be for the customer's account to continue to reference the private material, but to disallow private access to it.

Then a customer could:

1. Convert it to public and access it as such.

2. Remove it.

3. Leave it alone, possibly intending to privately access it in the future if they can re-subscribe. (It'd seem reasonable to me if a service provider opted to automatically delete inaccessible content after some time-out period of non-subscription; I'd see their retention of such inaccessible content as a professional courtesy rather than an obligation of theirs unless the contract says otherwise.)

Then I'd think that a good service would offer migration tools to help make these options easier on the customer. For example, offer an easy option to make everything public or delete everything.

But it's hard for me to see how forcing publication upon canceling a service could be defensible without some sort of contractual provision to that effect.

Sure but one you fix in your product by having a grace period for accounts that are closing. The other you can't fix because once something on the internet is public you can't undo it.

But lots of people would want the second one (since lots of people have free Prezi accounts). And the second option effectively gives the user the choice between the first and second options; and even more than that, since the choice is per-presentation. So it's the user-friendlier thing to do.

I don't think Prezi are doing anything bad here at all, except possibly communicating their policy badly.