Beginning Nov 1, 2019, the free version of the diary will only save data for last two years
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born_of_fire74 wrote: »It sucks but more money for less service is the way things are when it is commonplace to jump from service provider to service provider for the best deal rather than cultivating and being rewarded for a long term relationship with the single preferred provider. If you think it's only criminal organizations employing this business practice, you are not paying attention.
I was not the one who brought fictional smugglers into the discussion; but your introduction of them did remind me of the ransom odor in the MFP moves.
I think some, including you, fail to realize that I am NOT arguing against MFP's right to change their prices going forward.
I am arguing about changing prices retroactively.
The "old deal" was that data were stored and accessible for the duration of our account, i.e. in exchange for data mining and watching ads.
MFP have slowly gone ahead and "ransomed" our data. First by changing the available export functionality. Then with their new plan to delete. All with marginal, or no announcement.
If the burden of storing data is too large for the backup service I provide for free to friends and family, I might ask them to contribute. If they don't and I am about to delete their data to make room, I will tell them so and offer them options as to how to download what is stored. If the options create a cost to me, I can, again, either ask for contributions or charge a cost recovery fee that is above board and justified (as opposed to a profit node). Or I can ransom their data for profit.
Examples of companies that have handled negative service changes in the digital domain relatively well do exist. CrashPlan comes to mind.
I don't see why the opposite (LogMeIn, and now apparently, MFP) should not be called out.
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collectingblues wrote: »How do I export the exercise data?
Don't care about the food data ... I've been eating the same stuff for 4.5 years now. But I do care about the exercise data.
That one I haven't figured out. There are better trackers for keeping those stats, though -- so this might be a good time to jump over to Runkeeper, which gives a lot of features for free. (It's owned by Asics now, which I don't love, but at least Asics hasn't messed up all of the good features.)
If you can manually see each day's exercise data in your diary, it'll be a giant time suck, but you could manually then enter them into Runkeeper and postdate each entry.
My Fitness Pal is only one of many ways I keep track of my exercise ... but I'd still like the MFP data.
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I have a question for those who have data older than 2 years and aren't paying the monthly fee. Can you view your data right now, without exporting?0
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Thanks. Can't someone write a script and convert the html files into data? I know that's hard, but assuming a person has the necessary skills, is there anything stopping it?0
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collectingblues wrote: »How do I export the exercise data?
Don't care about the food data ... I've been eating the same stuff for 4.5 years now. But I do care about the exercise data.
That one I haven't figured out. There are better trackers for keeping those stats, though -- so this might be a good time to jump over to Runkeeper, which gives a lot of features for free. (It's owned by Asics now, which I don't love, but at least Asics hasn't messed up all of the good features.)
If you can manually see each day's exercise data in your diary, it'll be a giant time suck, but you could manually then enter them into Runkeeper and postdate each entry.
My Fitness Pal is only one of many ways I keep track of my exercise ... but I'd still like the MFP data.
Got it.
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Yes, but only a few days at a time.
This is by contrast to how things were till about 2017, when you could, presumably, look back at unlimited number of years at a time, though the most I can personally attest to is three,
Sometime in 2017, I believe, this changed to a year at a time. And a few months later, at least for me, it changed to a variable amount of days numbering around 40.1 -
Yes, but only a few days at a time.
This is by contrast to how things were till about 2017, when you could, presumably, look back at unlimited number of years at a time, though the most I can personally attest to is three,
Sometime in 2017, I believe, this changed to a year at a time. And a few months later, at least for me, it changed to a variable amount of days numbering around 40.
I can see 365 days at a time and I've successfully downloaded all my info since I started on Feb 2015. 1 -
It would seem to me that without the skills to scrape the data, videoing the screen or using a screen video program would be the best option to retrieve the data, without paying $10.0
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The_Enginerd wrote: »lynn_glenmont wrote: »poisonesse wrote: »Hmm, I never even knew I could look back that far, in all honesty. If I was paying for the site, then maybe I'd be a little bit upset, but for a free site? Too many users, not enough servers, and with no money coming in from all the free users, I think 2 years is a wonderful amount of time. But since the farthest back I've ever searched was a week or two, what do I know?
It's not a "free" site. It's a site where you and all the other users are the product that MFP delivers to advertisers. Some users felt that was a fair exchange for being able to store their logging data in an easily accessible format indefinitely. Some users might have chosen to make their bargain of exchanging their eyeballs and browsing data and whatever other data MFP is collecting about us with some other site if they had known MFP was going to choose at some point to unilaterally decide to delete the data they wanted to store.
This site is certainly not a charity operated by the benevolent Under Armour corporation. And as such, once you turn your data over to them, they do not keep it for you out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of it being beneficial for them to do so. Once you store it on their system, it becomes their data. Data storage is expensive, and they are likely storing petabytes of data of old log entries, of which only a tiny fraction ever gets accessed. I imagine they'll save quite a bit of money by wiping this data for most users, which is why they are doing it.
I cannot imagine this is about the amount of data. My entire 2011-2019 data amounted to 5 MB of data, and I keep a detailed log using the individual ingredients with more than 30 individual food entries on a typical day. That's basically a couple of photos. Even Facebook and Google allow you to export your own data (for free at that...), and that is WAY more data and more complex and rich data than the MFP diary.
This.
Space (digital storage) is cheap, and keeps getting cheaper. It cost more to make this change (programming, testing, deployment) than it does to store the data.5 -
born_of_fire74 wrote: »born_of_fire74 wrote: »You have obviously overlooked the clause in most every agreement you have made with a service provider stating the service provider can change the agreement at any time they feel whereas you are beholden to it. Examples abound of banks, phone service, cable service, utility services etc. arbitrarily altering the terms of service in for-pay situations—increasing fees without changing the service, reducing service without reducing fees, outright cancellation of various services without reducing fees...My cable bill goes up reliably by a few dollars at least twice a year and I am now paying literally 3x as much for cable as I was when I first procured the service from the cable provider while making no changes at all to my services.
I’m not saying that any of this is right in any way; it is, however, disgustingly commonplace so your level of ire over changes made to a free service is quizzical. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back on Bespin when we learn that Lando has betrayed Han and Leia to Darth Vader? “Pray that I don’t alter the deal further”
You're ignoring the fact that I've repeatedly stated that it is both commonplace and normal for companies to change terms and conditions MOVING FORWARD. It is usually announced to their user base. New terms and conditions are emailed with the changes highlighted. Provisions are made for "seamless transition" especially when service level reductions are taking place. I invite you to point me to companies that have deliberately deleted user data without giving their users the option to download them (unless it was in the context of bankruptcy).
Cable companies have a certain reputation for acting the way you describe. So do garbage collection companies. And so does LogmeIn in the digital domain.
Companies that present themselves as leaders in the digital domain and as responsive to their customers do not change terms and conditions without announcement and do not trap their users' data in a manner that presents the odor of a ransom demand. Once we establish that it is ransom, whether the pay-out is $1, $9.99, or $7,927.82 (1 bitcoin) is not relevant!
Since I believe that UnderArmour is neither a smuggling operation, nor a company that operates in a manner similar to that of companies that have been rumored to have ties to criminal organizations, I do expect them to meet (and as a public company exceed) base business norms.
Aside from Facebook and MFP, I have almost no presence online. As such, I can't think of any website that might be able to hold my data hostage but I do know that Facebook does whatever the hell it wants with my data all day, every day. I also know that I have to pay my doctor for access to my medical records, I have to pay my insurance company for access to my insurance records, I have to pay the DMV for a copy of my driving record and I pretty much have to pay anyone else who might be holding data on me if I want access to it. I also know that my bank fees and the balance I have to maintain to have those fees waived have more than doubled since I started on with my current bank. Heck, my bank increases my mortgage payment every year when my property taxes increase. As well, my power, heat and water bills all increase regularly along with the aforementioned cable bill. No notice on any of these things, just "here's the new price for your new level of service, take it or leave, sucker."
I'm actually hard-pressed to come up with any company that doesn't just charge me more for the same or lesser service as time goes on. If such a thing existed, if there were a grandfather clause honoured anywhere, by anyone anymore I'd imagine it would be with my husband's bank, where he has had an account since he was a child, so over 40 years now. Let me tell you how much he does not enjoy the same services now for the same price he paid then--no unlimited transactions for $2/month in many, MANY years there. I gotta ask, who do you do business with that still provides the same services for the same price as when you first joined up??
I really think you are making a mountain out of a molehill and you have an opinion of the situation that is not reflected by my experiences in reality. It sucks but more money for less service is the way things are when it is commonplace to jump from service provider to service provider for the best deal rather than cultivating and being rewarded for a long term relationship with the single preferred provider. If you think it's only criminal organizations employing this business practice, you are not paying attention.
My bank. No fees when I signed up, no fees now, no diminution in service (in fact, their ATMs now provide me with more off-hour options than when I first opened an account, and I find the people in the branch more pro-active about keeping the line short by offering assistance to people who don't really need a teller.
My credit union. No fees when I opened my account, none now, basically the same set of services, plus extra self-service options online and by phone.
Every bank-issued credit card that I have (not store-linked credit cards -- those do seem to want to play bait and switch), no annual fees, no other fees because I pay on time, all kinds of online services and features that didn't exist when I opened the accounts, including free credit reporting.
My mortgage service company. No changes in the fees (I pay my taxes myself, and find it a little absurd that you compare your mortgage company passing through government-set fees to a decision purely in control of MFP). Again, some added online functionality since I took out the loan.
Amazon -- yes, the Prime annual fee has gone up substantially since I first signed up (or should say since I last signed up, because I signed up twice and let it lapse back in the day when it was just free expedited shipping), but for me, the many added benefits they've bundled into the service are well worth the increases. One of which is storage space for photos and music (and possibly books and videos, depending on how they actually operate that -- at a minimum, they're providing storage for digital rights records and any comments I might put in the "margins" of the books). I think users would be pretty horrified if one day Amazon said they were changing the terms and no longer providing storage and, by the way, unless you paid them some more, they were going to delete all your stored photos, music, etc. (I kind of think there's a document storage feature as well, but I've never used that).
Netflix -- the price has gone up marginally in raw dollars, substantially in percentage, but there again, over the years I've found the value of the service has more than kept up with the price increases. I have my doubts whether that will continue, as so many studios/networks/content producers seem headed toward ending their content leasing and bringing it all in-house to video streaming services they're launching or planning to launch, and I haven't found Netflix's original content quite as compelling as Amazon's. But we'll see how it turns out. I also have my doubts about the viability of those single network/single studio streaming services, so that may be a short blip.
(Not quite as trusting of the Internet as kshama, so you'll have to forgive me for not sharing the name of my bank, credit union, etc. Don't feel like I'm giving much away in admitting to having a Netflix or a Prime account.)5 -
I have a question for those who have data older than 2 years and aren't paying the monthly fee. Can you view your data right now, without exporting?
Yes, although I can't see all six-plus years at once, but if I choose a limited date range (seems to be something under two months) I can go all the way back to the beginning.0 -
I don't suppose you'd care to share?1 -
Thanks. Can't someone write a script and convert the html files into data? I know that's hard, but assuming a person has the necessary skills, is there anything stopping it?
Probably. They might have a limit to how much data they'll serve up to prevent scraping. They might use AJAX which wouldn't be impossible to scrape, but much more difficult. I'm on the app right now so I can't check how the HTML is structured.
Most things like this aren't impossible, the question is how much effort it will take, and maybe how accurate it will be. As a dev, if I really wanted the old data it would make a lot more sense to pay for a month of service than to write a custom scraper.2 -
Thanks. Can't someone write a script and convert the html files into data? I know that's hard, but assuming a person has the necessary skills, is there anything stopping it?
Ok, I remembered my password, signed in through a browser, and had a look. It's actually pretty straightforward. You can request a date by uri, and all the data is in a table with an ID. Exercise would have to be scraped separately, probably less important as most people have a better exercise diary elsewhere.0 -
Thanks. Can't someone write a script and convert the html files into data? I know that's hard, but assuming a person has the necessary skills, is there anything stopping it?
They do, in fact, hide the data behind AJAX. If you make a request for the food diary for a specific date, all you really get back is some very complicated JavaScript.
But if you use the embedded web browser control in .net, it will (1) save a cookie so that once you log in, you stay logged in, and (2) execute all that JS and render it into HTML.
So, it is in fact doable without a tremendous amount of effort. At least on a Windows system, I don't know enough about other platforms to say.2 -
I can see 365 days at a time and I've successfully downloaded all my info since I started on Feb 2015.
I mean @lynn_glenmont sees less than two months. @Machka9 sees one year. I see 14 days... who is feeling lucky today?
I just converted my "largest" one year of food logging spreadsheet to a csv. It comes to less than 800KB (less than a MB). I log with more detail than many.
My *2017* pictures and videos that I am storing with Google Photos using their free tier, number approximately 2543. I just downloaded the first 500.
Yes, I will complain about how cumbersome and error prone the selection process was, as well as the fact that you can visually select only 500 at a time. Why not select as many as I wish, and Google can then split them up for delivery as they wish? ETA: I should have used: https://takeout.google.com/ instead which allows more granular, though less visual, selection
The 500 videos and photos came to just over 2100MB (2GB). Which means that I am storing 10 to 12GB of 2017 stuff with Google Photos
Say 11,000 MB vs 0.8 MB.
My extremely wasteful (in terms of usable space % since it only achieves 17.5% effective hard drive space use) redundant and replicated storage system, in terms of hardware--excluding setup, administration, and ongoing maintenance--set me back about $0.6 per GB.
I suspect that both MFP's and Google's initial and on-going costs are substantially lower than mine due to scale. Google's more so than MFP's.
Even if they are not, my cost to store a year of my Google photos in terms of hardware is about $6. The cost to store my MFP data, about $0.05-- but not for one year. **The $0.05 in hardware is good for 100 years worth of MFP data!** 'Cause the cost for one year is way less than $0.01! This does not include the compute cost to access the information, or the bandwidth cost to transfer.
You bet that I would complain if Google ever said that "to access your stored pictures before we delete them you either have to download them 14 at a time, or pay $9.99 to get them all in a single archive".5 -
Small correction to the above to indicate that my comparison costs are closer to $7.5 for one year of Google photos and $0.006 (half a cent) for MFP. MFP math was a decimal off, plus max utilization is closer to 12.5% than 17.5% due to snapshots
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