Piracy vs. Crunchyroll account deletion

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?

51 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- Drake no : customer value proposition
  Drake yes : customer chains
  
  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.
- "Look, it's a matter of trust. If your service isn't trustworthy, keep your customers hostage."
  Explain it like that, maybe it clicks.

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.
- 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 removed enough to not cancel your service, then you can always take them to court with the stored evidence.
- Doing some legal trolling, very German of you. Nice.

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

Ironically Crunchyroll actually started off as a illegal for profit pirated-video site
- Same for Hulu. I stopped using it when they started charging and lost content that was "exclusive" to netflix.
  
  I can't find anything about this on the web. Did they rebrand?
- 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

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

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.

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

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
- Until they can provide a better product than the people doing it for free I’ll stick to the fansubs
- Three years. The price changed from 49,99€ to 69.99€ per year. At least in Germany.

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.
- 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.

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
- I love privacy.com for this reason

Sail!
(We need some piracy memes with this)
- 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.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.

Private trackers are also quite easy to delete accounts in anyways

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.

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

Is that fucking DOTA in the top image?
- No, it's the labyrinth map of the Maze Runner movie.

So where is the maze for the pirate ship?

ai?
- Checks notes, it says that I'm human, but idk for sure.
  
  Can you draw a hand?

51 comments