Interesting. I cancelled Netflix account 7 months ago and haven't used it since. A few days ago I received "Action needed: Reset your password" due to allegedly "suspicious sign-in". After changing the password and looking into the Recent activity, I couldn't see any suspicious recent login there. So I contacted the support and they said cancelled accounts are deleted after 10 months since cancellation. So now, with 3 months remaining, they apparently send a fake "suspicious sign-in" email in an attempt to convince me to re-activate the account. The email they sent was legit (no phishing) but there was near-zero probability of someone signing in because I used netflix-specific email address and randomly generated password for this account. EDIT: I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
It sounds like there are two departments in Netflix working against each other. One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience (not paying for a service they don't use) and the other trying to retain revenue by any means necessary (sending fake security warnings to artificially trigger activity on an account).
I cancelled my Netflix subscriptions for a few months, then tried to renew and cannot because of a bug in their Credit Card process. I have phoned and tweeted and online chatted etc... Their only solutions is for me to buy gift cards, which I won't.
In the meantime, they keep sending me emails every week to beg me to try Netflix again.
So Netflix spends money to promote to me, and to answer my support requests, while they won't do a thing about their broken payment process.
>One is trying to make sure that customers have a positive experience
...and the other is the Netflix Specials department.
EDIT: Addendum so not to be too shitposty.
I think Netflix came to Denmark around 2013 or so, and the content at the time was pretty good. Now you have to wade through a swamp of third rate trash and maybe you're lucky to find something that isn't absolute garbage. My account will remain canceled.
Using services like Donotpay which generates credit card numbers that you can then freeze instantly might be the best solution for this. You can easily get an account when good content is recommended by friends etc then just switch off the card until you need to use the service. Cancelling is a lot of work.
I wish you saw more absurd situations like this in cyberpunk stories.
This mixture of trying to help the consumer to boost your image and sabotaging your own consumer-friendly process to drive up revenue is what late-stage capitalism is all about.
It's wild that Douglas Adams' and Infocom's Bureaucracy, an interactive fiction published in 1987, had precisely this sort of thing as more or less its whole subject matter. It's not quite exact to what we see today, of course; for one thing, it traffics in paper forms and mail-in cards, rather than web forms and obstructionist live chats. But its juxtaposition of saccharine platitudes and hostile apathy feels no less evergreen for the intervening decades.
You're right that the cyberpunk genre lacks a sufficient dose of this kind of absurdity. I think that derives in large part from its original popularizers - I'm thinking here of Gibson and Stephenson, in particular - being in such deadly earnest about everything. Gibson especially, being a literary author trafficking in genre, I think could fairly be blamed for this; Stephenson at least attempted a sense of humor in his most significant work, and sometimes even succeeded, but in his case I think it's more a flaw of worldbuilding in that the mechanisms of transition from the America of his present, to the micro-balkanized future he depicted, were insufficiently fleshed out and thus failed to capture the mounting absurdity of daily life that any such transition I think necessarily entails.
Perhaps that's a touch presentist of me, in the case of Snow Crash at least; after all, it was written in far less absurd days than these. Nonetheless, I think most who've followed have felt to some degree bound to emulate - not all, though; for example, the brilliant cyberpunk film The Fifth Element does spend deliberate effort to successfully, if briefly, depict the absurdity of life in such a dispensation.
Would that more works in the genre did the same, and in general that they would more broadly update their extrapolation of possible futures to look ahead from today, instead of from thirty or forty years ago. But that kind of work is very hard, so maybe it's not too much a surprise to see it done so rarely.
In general, my remark was less about absurdity and more about how the same set of incentives can produce both consumer-friendly and consumer-hostile behaviors, sometimes from the same company.
Cyberpunk stories tend to focus on the "consumer-hostile" part, whereas I think the superposition of the two and the permanent conflict between them is way more interesting.
(For instance, you almost never see review systems or consumer watchdogs in cyberpunk stories)
That's fair; I was tempted to say that The Fifth Element also a little bit prefigured "hopepunk", in that it is, in spite of everything, a love story with a happy ending. Brazil could maybe almost be considered the "black mirror" version of the same story, if you squint really hard at least.
In any case, I haven't watched either film in far too long. I should really remedy that soon!
Bureaucracy was very enjoyable. I wish he had released that same basic content in other forms. I often think of scenes from that game in everyday life; too few other people have ever played it.
Likewise. But it was so hard to get any work out of Adams, apparently [1], that it's no great surprise Bureaucracy only happened in the medium of IF.
Perhaps it's time for a reimagining - I could see it working really well as a collection of "websites" with "live chats" and "emails" and so forth, borrowing tools from the "alternate-reality game" style of organic viral marketing and turning them to an altogether nobler purpose. I think that'd be the right choice of medium to tell this sort of story today.
Damm, same thing happened to me. I initially thought I was going crazy that my password was hacked but something did not feel right about that suspicious sign in email.
UPDATE: I've tried to log in again today with the password I reset yesterday and it no longer worked! xD So I've tried "reset password" again now and no reset password email is coming (I have checked Junk folder and even Exim SMTP logs - I can see the email from 17th there from Amazon SES but none from today).
Apparently someone from Netflix read my comments here and deactivated the account completely. :P Thanks!
Sorry if I spoiled your clever marketing strategy but I think sending a fake "suspicious login" email and keeping cancelled accounts for 10 months is just not right.
I think the reasoning behind keeping those cancelled accounts for such a long time is to keep the account's watchlist and/or recently played items - I'm not sure about the latter, though.
Either way, I agree with you that this is not right.
I was thinking about it. The only place where the app was still installed was an Android tablet but no one has opened the app for many months (only me and my partner has access to the tablet and none of us opened the app). It could theoretically connect from the background by itself (I think android makes it possible for apps to run in the background) but when I tried to open the app the day after I got that email, it just displayed Update required screen (we don't auto-uldate apps on that tablet). And the suspicious login mentioned in the email was not recorded in the Recent Activity in the profile. Unfortunately I don't record all network activity on home network so can't 100% rule out this possibility but it seems unlikely to me that the app would try to connect from the background after couple of months by itself.
The email I received was "We’ve detected a suspicious sign-in to your Netflix account. Just to be safe we've reset your password and you’ll need to set a new one." with a button to "Set a new password".
It didn't mention any IP or geolocation as many other services say in such cases.
> I also think they are breaking GDPR by keeping the account for 10 months after cancellation.
Do you live in the US? GDPR does not apply to US companies serving US citizens. If you live in the EU, you might need to request account deletion, I think GDPR doesn't require that data is deleted, it gives Europeans the right to have their data deleted upon request. (I've read the entire code before but I don't remember the details on this point.)
I assume you're referring to the NYT there, not Netflix? (It doesn't matter that much, because the situation is similar either way.)
NYT is a US company serving a US locale by it's very name. GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans, or does EU business with EU offices*. The GDPR law is clear about this point, it is a protection for EU citizens regarding web sites and businesses that are focused on, directed and targeted toward EU citizens. It does not apply to interactions outside of the EU (aside from EU travelers visiting EU web sites), and it does not apply to web sites that originate outside the EU and are global that just happen to have visitors from the EU.
* The NYT might be advertising in the EU, I don't know. If it does, I'd be willing to bet that EU citizens are given an online mechanism to cancel, even though US citizens aren't...
GDPR doesn't even automatically apply to European NYT subscribers, unless the NYT advertises directly to Europeans
It definitely does have UK specific ads, I’ve seen them, and GDPR is grandfathered into UK law.
I cancelled mine by cancelling the PayPal, there was no other way to cancel without phoning them. There is no online cancellation even for those in GDPR jurisdictions.
