This Isn’t The Way To Increase Your Userbase, SoSasta [Updated]

Update: Added Groupon India’s response

SoSasta‘s database leak has been widely covered in Indian as well as international media. It was first reported by risky.biz showing how a search on Google revealed the whole data base. It then alerted SoSasta about the leak, after which the Groupon India subsidary sent an email telling all users to change their passwords. They claimed that no financial information was compromised and they had taken measures to secure their database.

I signed up for SoSasta after I saw it was being acquired by Groupon just to see what was the big deal about group buying and daily deals sites. On signing up I realized that almost all the deals were useless and never bothered to visit SoSasta again. Now the whole password leak incident pissed me off and I decided to delete my account. Guess what? there wasn’t any option to delete the account from the settings page on the site, so I mailed support staff to ask how do I delete my account. I received this in reply:

, Jun-29 11:12 (IST):

Hi Rounak91,

Thank you for reaching out to us!

I am so sorry to tell you that once if you access will not able to delete the account.

Please let us know how we can help you! We are always happy to help!

Thanks for using SoSasta!

Regards,

Team SoSasta.

From the broken English all I understand is, if I sign up on SoSasta I won’t ever be able to delete my account. So after leaking my information SoSasta goes on to say that I can’t even delete my account to show my anger.

This isn’t the way to increase your userbase SoSasta!

Update:Ankur Warikoo from Groupon India responded to this post. Here is the reply:

Hi Rounak

I am part of the SoSasta team and was sent your WATBlog post by a colleague. I understand that you wish to delete your SoSasta account, which we should have had a provision for. Or the least we should have done is to accept your request and process the cancellation. I apologize that neither of the two happened.

Please share your email address and I will go ahead and process the request.

That said, I sincerely hope that you check out the deals we run on a daily basis. Unfortunately we dont have a deal page for Goa, which I assume if your location. But it will be a pleasure to retain you as a customer and a happy one, that is.

Thanks and keep writing!

——–

ankur warikoo

Groupon India

www.sosasta.com