New policy approval - Log in to approve

[Don-B]

You have to log in to your schedules direct account in order to approve the new policy. There is no button on the policy page.

[SneakyDave]

I don't like the fact that you're automatically "opted in" for spam and newsletters. That's a bad precedent for schedulesdirect.

[slim]

I don't like the fact that you're automatically "opted in" for spam and newsletters. That's a bad precedent for schedulesdirect.

So unclick them. What's the problem.

The people at Schedules Direct are doing everyone a favor and getting no financial gain from this.

The least you can do is unclick the boxes and quit being such a open source purist.

[xris]

I don't like the fact that you're automatically "opted in" for spam and newsletters. That's a bad precedent for schedulesdirect.

That was a business decision on my part. The checkboxes were added after the initial signup period (the alternative being "no opt out"), so there were several hundred people who had signed up but never got the chance to choose. Since in my experience (which is reflected in our database, btw), the majority of people don't mind occasional promotional emails (like "answer this survey to possibly win a free month of service"), I set everyone's preference to be opted in. Once the options were added, users got to choose their own preferences.

It's not difficult to opt out, and we don't expect to be sending much email, anyway. Those options are there because if we didn't put them in now, we'd have to make another revised privacy policy later, and annoy even more users by requiring that they log in to approve the changes, etc., etc.

I will apologize for forgotting to send a message to that first group of people informing them of the change. I dropped the ball on that one, and my only excuse is that getting this website up and running over the last 3 weeks has taken a LOT of time, and a few things got lost/forgotten in the commotion.

[mlord]

Thanks for setting things up for us all.

But please.. the next time there's a need to update the legalese, GIVE US MORE TIME. We could easily be away on holiday for a couple of weeks, and return to find our PVRs dead in the water due to one of these emails!

Thanks

[xris]

But please.. the next time there's a need to update the legalese, GIVE US MORE TIME. We could easily be away on holiday for a couple of weeks, and return to find our PVRs dead in the water due to one of these emails!

7 days will likely be the standard for such decisions. You get 2 weeks worth of data from us, which means that you'd have to be away from email/web access for a total of 3 weeks. We're aware that people do take the occasional vacation longer than 3 weeks, but it's rare, and we don't intend to update these policies very often (or even rarely). We also only deactivate the accounts, not terminate them, so you'd just have to log back in and accept the policy changes to be re-activated.

I need to check with the other board members before offering a more detailed explanation about why we had to do this.

[xris]

7 days will likely be the standard for such decisions.

Correcting myself on this one. To clarify, we had to do this because we didn't really have a privacy policy before, and wanted to make extra sure that our members were aware of and agree to the new policy before acting upon it. Until that happens, we're unable to share even basic information about our membership count, or even file our taxes (which might require sharing non-PII with the IRS); Please read section 4(b) of the Subscriber Agreement for more information about this.

Anyway, I won't say that it'll never happen again (I can't predict the future), but it's unlikely that we will have to do the whole "agree or have your account (temporarily) disabled" thing again.