It's always the same story. You order something from a website, had your guard down, miss the purposefully easy-to miss button to refuse sharing your information with Shop.app and then BAM. On the next screen thanking you for your purchase you see a notification that says "We've saved your payment information with shop.app" and realized that you've been dark patterned into doing the online shopping equivalent of catching herpes.

Now they have your e-mail, your phone number, your address and your credit card information saved and easily accessible to anyone who hacks your e-mail or their databanks. You have to go to their website, log in with the credentials they stole from you and request for your account to be deleted. But if it took seconds to create the account, somehow it takes them 30 DAYS to delete the account. The dumb thing too is that there is no real way to tell if they truly deleted your account because if you try to log in they'll ask you for your e-mail and phone number, which they will use to create a new account without your permission if didn't exist before.

Those are blatant predatory practices and if it isn't illegal, it absolutely should be. I really hope they get hit by a giant crippling class action lawsuit. Or a train, whichever happens first.

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[–] 3 points 4 months ago

They definitely create an account-ish record for you when you purchase on one of their hosted stores, whether you voluntarily register a new account in a traditional sense or not. There is sort of a composite key of the shop's unique store ID and references to personal information collected about during your session, such as the email address you use when checking out. If you've used your email address on one hosted store and then use it again on another, your customer record will be associated with both stores. I work on this stuff every now and then. They already know all about you, and I don't really feel that it's necessarily super evil, but I also don't think it's marvelously great either. It's just kind of a practical use of the solution to a problem lots of retailers don't want to solve/maintain/fund themselves, and so they pay the platform do it for them.

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