Data retention policies are written by compliance people, not product people, so distinctions like overt, deliberate cancellation and "cancellation for nonpayment" or "abandonment" or "discontinuation" usually aren't captured in them. I'm not saying it's great that Heroku deleted these databases; I'm saying: the description given upthread, that the databases were deleted because of contractual requirements, is super plausible.
Plausible, sure, but that doesn't mean it isn't a cop out. There are many things that Heroku could have done to prevent this, like delaying the disconnection when they don't have confirmed delivery of the notifications and/or when they are connected to paid dynos/accounts.
Thus didn't happen because of the contract, but because the people implementing this transition didn't give a crap.
If you start disconnecting the database, in the same way a user could (on most services?) to keep the database around and idle, there's no way that counts as any kind of deletion. So do that if you need to and you really want to give customers 90 days to react.
It feels like it would've been better to have written things such that if it's attached to a still active account that's paying for other services things would be permitted to work a bit differently, but of course the relevant clauses will have been written long before anybody anticipated a new owner deciding to turn a bunch of things off, so under the circumstances at the time of writing it's unsurprising and not really the authors' fault that they didn't consider that.
I had a vague thought for a moment about maybe being able to give customers the option to opt in to an updated set of terms that would've been better designed for the situation ... but since the original Tell HN author didn't get any emails about this at all, presumably they wouldn't've got that one either so even if (and given 'vague thought' I'm not claiming any particular level of 'good idea' to it) that had been done it presumably wouldn't've helped them anyway.
It seems to me the root problem here isn't so much the compliance initiated policies as a complete failure to take 'make sure people have been adequately warned' sufficiently seriously given the potential consequences.
Deeply unfortunate.
(read that last sentence in understated deadpan dry en_UK to get an appropriate read on just how impressed I'm not by the communications cockup)
Ideally, product people defend the end users. Realistically, compliance people defend the company from getting screwed in an audit and ultimately sued by the government.
