Email sent to Bristol Trading Standards office re freeonlinesurveys.com

G'day:

Here's the email I sent to the Trading Standards office in Bristol, where ProblemFree Ltd, owner of freeonlinesurveys.com are based.

Hi there:
I've recently had dealings with a Bristol-based online company, ProblemFree Ltd (https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/04602671). This company provides a online survey builder for creating... well... online surveys. Its online presence is https://freeonlinesurveys.com/.

I've detailed my dealings and scraped some information from their site in a blog article: http://blog.adamcameron.me/2017/01/survey-results-weve-been-stitched-up-by.html (note it uses fairly... err... "colloquial" language).

In summary they offer a service to create surveys for free. When signing up for an account there is a link to a document detailing the limitations of the free service. Screen shots of that are in the article. Nowhere that I can see does it state they will hold your data to ransom after ten days, without further notification.

As I am a very small online presence, it took me some time to gather enough information for me to analyse, but I decided I'd given it a couple of weeks yesterday, so I'd better feed-back to my readers. This is when I discovered that my data was being held to ransom. I could not access it any more unless I paid the company money to release it. This is under the guise of a "subscription".

Now I do not believe that everything in life should be free, and I appreciate the company offering any free service at all. However I think their practices here are a bit lacking in professionalism, and, to be honest, borderlines on professional extortion.

I thought about dealing with them directly, but I've been advised to contact you instead. This makes sense because if I deal with it myself it will only solve my immediate situation; it will probably not help future users of this service.

I don't really know how to proceed to solicit you to look into this, or even if it's something you'd want to look into. But I thought dropping you a line would be a good start.

Please also note I will be publishing this email on my blog. I also intend to publish any follow-up from you, unless you expressly flag it as inappropriate to do so.

Thanks.

I got an automated reply which referred me to National Citizens Advice Consumer Service. I filled in their form with the exact copy above. They will revert within 3 days, apparently.

I will also contact David Meagor of  ProblemFree Ltd with this information. I attempted to advise him via Twitter, but it seems he doesn't really monitor his account.

Email sent to David Meagor:

To: support@problemfree.co.uk

Mr Meagor:
My account is [redacted].

I take issue with the ransoming of the data I have gathered via one of your free surveys, due to not noticing (or being advised of!) your ten-day embargo date before blocking access to the data unless I sign-up for a paid-for account. This is, in my opinion, first fraud and then extortion.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I'd like to advise I have detailed my experiences on my blog:

• Survey results: we've been stitched-up by freeonlinesurveys.com
• T&Cs located! partial correction on the freeonlinesurveys.com stitch-up
• Email sent to Bristol Trading Standards office re freeonlinesurveys.com

As per the latter article title, I have also raised this with the Trading Standards office, who in turn referred me to the  National Citizens Advice Consumer Service.

Over and above whatever the NCACS has to say about this, I would like you to release my data to me. At that point in time you should feel free to close and delete my account.

I would also like you to do this:

• be more honest about the limitations of the free account. Advise there's a ten-day limit on a free survey on the same page you detail the other limitations.
• Link to that on the sign-up page.
• Send an advisory email to your free clients before you start ransoming their data.

If you were to do those three things, I'd be happy to advise NCACS to take my enquiry no further.


Thanks.

I'll update with any further... stuff.

Righto.

--
Adam