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Comment by antsar | Hacker News Reader

They could just email the user a zipfile of all their presentations, and then delete them. No need for radio buttons, and IMHO this is the most user-friendly/intuitive option because it doesn't force you to make any hard choices but still leaves you in control. Want to re-subscribe later? Cool, you can re-import those presentations. Need the data for archiving? You've got it. Privacy? Preserved.

Let's be real, there's no benefit to involving the private/public setting here other than making the service more sticky / difficult to leave.

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Another solution is to make private presentations still private, but read-only.

That works too, but I assumed the ongoing hosting costs would be larger than the cost of developing a feature to provide an export and letting the user handle storage.

That's assuming you can fit x presentations into an email-sized zip.

They could send batches. Or provide an expiring download link.

I’m not familiar with the services provided by the company this thread is about (prezi), but giving a user a zip file with their data is not always straight forward. At a previous team we had to deal with this because of GDPR. Especially for data that has some visual element to it, the process is usually lossy because the user is also losing access to the client that renders their data.

This company seems to do web based slide decks. What file format do you give users, HTML and CSS files? A PDF printout of their presentations?

I agree that giving users a copy of their data would be ideal, but without a program that can view the data, the data itself might not be that useful.

PPT or PDF, with a second copy in a Prezi-specific format that preserves any nonstandard stuff?

There's a lot of options of varying difficulty. But they already have code to produce PDF, and dumping some proprietary lossless representation of their internal format doesn't seem unreasonably difficult. If they're shy about their secret sauce, fine, encrypt that second copy. It's only for the case that this user wants to come back to the service later on.

I can imagine plenty of business reasons not to do this, but very few technical ones.

> and dumping some proprietary lossless representation of their internal format doesn't seem unreasonably difficult.

I feel like you're not accounting for the time and effort it takes to maintain backwards compatibility. Once you give a customer a file that uses your internal format you have to always make sure your service will be able to read it back in. Going forward you aren't maintaining just 1 format, you're maintaining N different ones.

Good point. It would not be free, nor necessarily trivial/easy, to support this.

But does that mean it's unreasonable to require companies to do it? We already force plenty of engineering with regulation (GDPR, HIPAA, FERPA, PCI-DSS, SOX) because these are things society wants, even if the company would rather not.

Also, maybe the proprietary format doesn't need to work forever. Just add a disclaimer that it's only guaranteed for, say, 1 year? Or just "best effort"? All the file does is give the customer an incentive to return to Prezi later on. It would be in their own best interest to support this, if they weren't allowed to sidestep the whole issue by making it difficult to leave in the first place.

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