Ask HN: Notion is withholding my company data, what can I do?
Around 3 months ago, I started having issues with their "Export" feature. Basically, you request to export all your data on Notion, and you're supposed to receive a link to download it. But the link never arrives.
I contacted them about this, and that's what they said at the time:
> Our engineering team is currently working through a large backlog, and there is no immediate fix for this issue...
I explained this wasn't a "nice to have" feature. It was a critical function that locks us with them and goes against their selling message of "you own your data". I was ignored, with the same robotic tone.
So today, 3 months later, I contacted them again to say I'm having the same issue. They replied with the same message:
> Please accept my sincere apologies for the ongoing difficulties with this. Our engineering team is currently working through a large backlog, and there is no immediate fix for this issue. I’ve already alerted them to the issue and told them of your particular situation, and we’ll certainly follow up if there are any developments! Really appreciate your patience with us as we continue to improve. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help with in the meantime.
I'm again explaining the same thing - If the feature isn't working, this is a critical function that they should at least try to generate manually as per my request.
They are basically locking me in. They, again, replied with scripted messages:
> Unfortunately, our engineering team is working through quite a backlog at the moment, and there isn't an immediate fix for this issue....
Any suggestions on what I can do? Thanks!
206 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadThis tells me their marketing dept is writing checks their product team can’t make good on. Not good.
Was it ever working? “Having issues” seems to imply the functionality disappeared.
It's one thing to make a new feature request and have the response be "sorry, we'll get to it when we get to it." It's quite another to have a bug in an advertised, previously working feature, with no workaround, and say "sorry, our engineers have a big backlog."
Imagine if a bank said "sorry, we know the withdrawal feature to get your money is broken, but our engineers have a big backlog." Unbelievable!
The Mt. Gox story.
Eventually, I was told a workaround where I could "Bill Pay" my own credit card for an unlimited amount and then close the account. But it's not like banks are strictly easy in comparison.
1. First off, the Simple/BBVA debacle did receive so much press because the switchover was so royally f'd. The very fact that this bad of a screwup was something so unexpected/unusual is a big reason it received so much press.
2. They did provide (eventually) a workaround. Given the current top comment it looks like Notion may have a workaround as well, but regardless, the answer from support for a bug like this should always be "we'll get you a fix ASAP, even if we need to manually work around it", not "sorry but our engineers have a big backlog".
I think that some state or federal banking regulators might have expressed displeasure if you had informed them of that policy.
If he just is moving to a different bank, then all he has to do is make a ACH transfer.
Also, the Bank may have a reporting requirement for over 10k withdrawals in cash but they will let you take even more than that in cash if you want to. You may have to work it out with them to get enough money on site at the branch if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they will let you withdraw in cash.
At the time, he may have had issue with walking into a "branch" of Simple. While BBVA was the parent bank for Simple, their branches had zero insight into Simple bank accounts. When the transition happened, BBVA branches were getting hit hard by Simple customers expecting sudden service. However as far as the BBVA branches were concerned officially those customers weren't theirs -- no BBVA account number, just Simple, which they never had insight to when it did exist.
> workaround where I could "Bill Pay" my own credit card
I'm confused on this. When you closed your Simple/BBVA account, did you not have any other checking account to transfer your funds into? Both of these suggestions will drain your account, but neither is the immediately obvious method of simply transferring your money to another checking or savings account.
I closed my account prior to the full BBVA transition, moving to Chime (heartily recommend in concert with YNAB for you folks that miss Simple's savings tools) and had no problem connecting my Chime account and transferring the funds via usual ACH transfer.
Simple was a real bank, backed by BBVA (and before that, Bancorp -- truly Simple's heyday in my opinion) and thus subject to typical banking rules. You could initiate ACH transfers with your Simple account like you could at your local credit union or bank.
That happens a bit more than we would want to.
There was an (several?) incident with Mizuho bank in Japan. During system errors they'd swallow clients cards and wouldn't give them back until a the client asks for it in person at the counter (so, a few days later when it happens on the weekend)
So if you create a snowflake VM there is now way you can move it off Digital Ocean.
Not great, but better than being stuck.
http://miki.mimix.io
A lot of gates open up once companies smell the power of the law, and anyone from their support likely _has to_ escalate any issue where a lawyer is plausibly mentioned.
If so many people on Hackernews do that, it would be like hitting them with a GDPR denial of service attack and they’ll be forced to push out this feature ASAP.
This is the part where you ask for them to generate the export on their end and send you a link manually.
It’s “normal” for a feature to stop working, but their support must be able to provide a workaround even if it takes them hours of manually zipping things. If they don’t, you should at the very least receive a refund.
> I'm again explaining the same thing - If the feature isn't working, this is a critical function that they should at least try to generate manually as per my request.
I've been thinking a lot lately about ownership. If I have a book, I can interact with it the way the publisher expects (I can read it). But being a physical object, I can also do lots of other things with my book. I can burn it. I can give it to a friend. I can sell it. I can draw in it. I can rip it up and use it as wallpaper. I can get the author to sign the front cover and donate it.
Software used to work this way too. If I have a Word document, I can interact with it the way Word expects - open it, edit it, save it and so on. And I can also do things microsoft doesn't expect. I can put it on my website. I can email it. I can back it up. I can delete it. I can reverse engineer the file format and edit it using other programs. I can archive it for 30 years, and know it will still work when I open it using the version of microsoft Word which created it. And so on.
But the new software model with smartphone apps and data in the cloud takes all this away. You can only do with your data what the publisher expects. If Notion doesn't have a working export API, tough luck. If GMail is missing an API for searching by regular expression, tough luck. If Adobe shuts down their activation servers, or a startup fails, or Google kills a product, tough luck. You've lost all your data. There is no backdoor. There are no other ways, by default, for you to have any agency over your own data that a product manager hasn't approved of. Amazon can delete books that they've already sold you. And they have. You can't sell a game you bought on steam. Or get it signed by the author. Or reverse engineer the raw database entries which store a google doc.
And this sucks. Its disempowering. I love the security on my phone, and the operational simplicity of not needing to manage my own backups. But this? I hate this. I hate that there's a good chance Notion will aquihired by a big tech company and shut down. I'm not ok with my own creations being at the whim of market forces like this.
I reject the idea that word and google docs are the only options. Git + Github is the model I want, where the cloud is a convenience but everything is stored locally as well. We need to start fighting for that.
Still, there are gems out there, like Obsidian. Your files, put them where you want, how you want. Use the tool however you want, extend it if you want. Every other day someone comes up with some crazy plugin idea I didn't think I needed but now I do. If the company behind it goes poof, it will keep working.
No two environments are identical, you don't know what weird things they've done, this causes all sorts of new bugs.
We don't know how to write bug free software for a reasonable price, and it's a lot easier to debug and update software on a server you control than on a customers computer.
On a server no one complains about auto upgrades, on a customer computer there's going to be a lot of people who don't upgrade but still want support, even if you try and force auto upgrades (which will annoy people) someone will have figured out a way to prevent that from happening.
---
I think for a lot of companies SAAS is unfortunately the responsible financial decision.
Until you're locked out.
Indeed I'm a guy who balances more between freedom instead of making it rigidly by laws, however the "Tech World" really needs "foundational directives" where all companies should abide.
Like John Locke defines, as I remember, that you have a "natural right" to Life.
Why not make an analogy here...
Right to Life - Your data is yours.
Right to Liberty - Your data goes where you want.
Right to Property - help me here lol
Idk we really should start to think more about privacy to all people, and where the top ones do with them.
You mean, you “own” copies of your data, but unless the person who controls the interface with that popular happy workflow that Everyone Already Knows How To Use lets you store it on their server, a lot of people who might otherwise be willing to collaborate with you will go “eh” and give up, and therefore, since so many marginal things require that to get anywhere, you can still just lose completely if you don't agree to the GitHub Terms of Service?
I imagine you didn't mean that part primarily, of course—but it's another thing to be aware of. There's a lot of potential for SaaSS interface lock-in—I think this is much worse for users with less technical inclination or less mental slack, but even in the realm of “people who are already developers who use Git”, this becomes a large friction source. And with more-social smaller-world flows, the coordination-control aspect has a stronger grip.
That said, it's also worth looking at how the “cloud” model is in a way reifying the folk model many users were already using. People thinking of their documents as being “in” (for instance) Word, and having no idea where they are in a filesystem or what that is in the first place, is already seared into the cultural memory of people who were family tech support in the 1990s. The default consumer cloud model is an easy extension and solidification of this: now it totally is “in” Google Docs rather than being a leakier folk-model weakening of accessing your your hard drive, and now Google Docs is accessible from anywhere. Everything is like you expect! No need to panic when your machine breaks, just get a new one and it's all still there!
And those upsides are real in their own way. But a number of downsides which are also real are less obvious and immediate.
In this case, I don't even know what they get when they export from Notion but how are they going to collaborate on those data?
> how are they going to collaborate on those data?
CRDTs make collaboration possible and work well, without needing a central source of truth. For example, Yjs.
No idea if other services can import those files into their wikis.
Right now, the only thing bothers me is the email service. For a selfhosted email service, there might be some problems.
For example, I would like to sign up FB by my custom domain email address, but after roughly two days they treat me as bot and ask for cellphone which I don't want to give them. Because there is no way to delete the cellphone later. The function on their setting is not working. Even if you deleted the cellphone on setting page, you could still get targeted AD by hashed cellphone information. It seems like they use hashed information as the way to against user deleting.
I can see how they would try to skirt around it though, they'd probably say that it is a temporary glitch but the functionality is available. That way it wouldn't be them withholding your data or false advertising per se, but rather a temporary incapacitation.
Another option would be to find other Notion customers who have the same issue or who can reproduce the same issue. That is, find other customers who you can ask to try to download their own data as well. If the issue is not isolated to you, then you can take class action against them and they would either have to take the feature down or issue a customer wide notice of of service/feature downtime. Either of these can be deemed a violation of the SLA on their part and give you a legal path for recourse.
In the mean time, you should probably reply to that email telling them to do it manually. Tell them that it is the feature you even got the subscription for. So if they said at the time of contract it is doable, then they ought to be able to do it manually if not via the feature.
Their backlog is none of your concern, they took your money and should deliver otherwise refund you.
Hope that helps.
Also GDPR can’t compel a company to not write bugs. If they’re legitimately trying to fix it - and they might be - then they might not be out of compliance were the GDPR to be applicable. Threatening legal action might have the unintended consequence of slowing things down rather than fixing anything.
* Oh, and TIL GDPR does not apply to company data https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27613213
"Go form a class action lawsuit against Notion" is just a wild thing to casually suggest as a remedy here.
Or, does this mean their backend development breaks their export code, so heavy rewrite the export code is required to make export work again?