[HN Gopher] "Click to subscribe, call to cancel" is illegal, FTC... ___________________________________________________________________ "Click to subscribe, call to cancel" is illegal, FTC says Author : spzx Score : 2630 points Date : 2021-11-17 07:22 UTC (15 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.niemanlab.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.niemanlab.org) | xg15 wrote: | > _Publishers tend to think of this as "retention."_ | | My understanding was that "retention" used to be simply a measure | of how many unique users/customers kept using your product. With | some implicit (maybe too optimistic) understanding that they | stayed because they _wanted_ to. | | In classic "if your measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a | measure" tradition, "retention" today seems to be about keeping | as many recurring visitors as possible, no matter how and no | matter the reason why they are staying. | darkwizard42 wrote: | I don't think this concept is new. I mean look at the | gym/fitness market. It is largely defined by gyms looking to | onboard members with special discounted entry rates and then | largely leaving them be and milking the monthly payments. | alpaca128 wrote: | Maybe they confused it with detention. | travisporter wrote: | I once had to reset my password for Comcast via web chat. "while | I'm resetting this, can I interest you in a TV service? Only | 60/mo no additional fees." Wasted 10 mins of his time getting TV | service priced out (of course - set to box wasn't included!) and | said no thanks. Of course as a student my time was essentially | worthless | flerovium wrote: | Does this apply to ISPs? If so, this headline is much bigger than | it appears. In the US, it can often take a full day to cancel | Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum... | | There are horror stories that require follow up over multiple | days. | | If only laws could fight the administrative burden of insurance | companies, healthcare providers, credit bureaus... | omarhaneef wrote: | And phone service like AT&T. Also my question. | | Maybe if they can not force you to take a modem, and then they | only cancel it with a physical return. Another dark pattern. | nonameiguess wrote: | Ha, Spectrum very helpfully canceled my home Internet service | without me even needing to ask when an incoming neighbor fat- | fingered their new account signup and accidentally claimed to | be moving into my house. | | On the other hand, it _did_ take a full day to get my service | restored. | jurassic wrote: | I vowed never to pay the NYT another dime after the hassle they | gave me about unsubscribing from their crossword subscription a | few years ago. It was such a pain, I told to actually cancel my | news subscription too. Never looked back. These days I mostly | read the WSJ and it meets my needs. | kabdib wrote: | Took me nearly an hour on hold with the WSJ to cancel my | account. The longer I had to wait, the stronger my resolve got. | josefresco wrote: | I wonder if this will apply to Network Solutions, which requires | you call to cancel services. | boringg wrote: | Thank Effing God ... I don't care if your churn metrics go to | isht please enforce this decision. | 4monthsaway wrote: | Finally. Now let's see how often it goes unenforced, just like | affiliate link disclosure. | yosito wrote: | What would the consequences be of subscribing to something with a | disposable card, then deactivating that card instead of formally | unsubscribing? Can companies send your information to a debt | collector or somehow force you to pay since you didn't cancel? | Can it affect your credit score? | dejj wrote: | German law knows "Dauerschuldverhaltnis" (permanent | indebtedness). If you don't cancel the contract and just cease | payment, the other party can obtain title against you, and | eventually impound you. | littlecranky67 wrote: | True, but easy way to get around this is to just revoke the | SEPA mandate - which you are always allowed to. You still owe | the money, but after revocation they will have to send you an | invoice and wait for your payment. Larger companies will not | do this as they have no process for this, and rather allow | termination. | danuker wrote: | I would suppose you'd have to actually have a choice in the | matter. If you have to spend 30+ minutes to unsubscribe, | surely it's not the only law that applies. | Nextgrid wrote: | If there's a minimum term/commitment it can be considered | morally wrong (as you're depriving them of revenue you've | agreed to pay in advance) and there might be more incentive to | collect that amount. | | If there's no minimum commitment (or it's expired already) | there's basically no problem. Yes, they _can_ in theory send | that debt to collections and litigate. Both of these are | expensive and are unlikely. | | If you've made reasonable efforts to cancel you can indeed | block future payments and let them sort it out. If they want to | litigate they'd have to explain why those reasonable efforts | were ignored (and have the court rule in their favour). | xmorse wrote: | The best thing the FTC did in the last 2 years | izzydata wrote: | I should have waited to cancel my Spectrum so I could sue them | for the ridiculous phone call I had to have. | mrfusion wrote: | This would be amazing for gyms! I've paid for six months now for | my old gym because I've been too lazy to go there in person fill | out a form or whatever is required. | TheHypnotist wrote: | Some ask you to mail them a letter. | kieloo wrote: | Same thing with The Guardian. Subscribed online and was then told | I can't cancel via email and have to endure a pushy sales call if | I want to cancel. Similar experience with The Economist except it | was via live chat instead. | | These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a | newspaper again. | dspillett wrote: | Similar with New Scientist, needed to phone during office hours | and was on hold a while, which would put me off subscribing | again in future1 though in fairness they were very quick to | follow my cancel request, not hard sell on staying, etc, once I | got through. | | [1] of course that is now a moot point as they've been bought | by DMGT and I refuse to give any money at all to those in any | way responsible for, or benefiting from, the Daily Fail. | ghaff wrote: | The Economist I just didn't renew. Nothing beyond that. | | What is true is that, with a lot of magazines, to get the best | rate you have to select an autorenew option and then they make | it difficult to cancel. (That may be the case with The | Economist; don't know.) In general, you're better off just | paying a bit more and passing on autorenew unless you're sure | you want to keep on subscribing. | belval wrote: | Can confirm that The Economist requires you to chat with a | human to cancel. The representative will basically try to get | you a "new" deal to prevent cancellation and the whole | process took about 5 minutes (with me just saying no to | everything). | | Still better than the Globe and Mail though, had to call and | talk with them for 10 minutes while they tried to sell me a | different subscription. | 3guk wrote: | I was kinda shocked by The Guardian to be honest with you - I | had a similar experience when I came to cancel my subscription | to The Guardian Weekly, which is an excellent magazine. | | In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had | a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The | Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update | my payment choices - but other than that I considered my | subscription over. | Spoom wrote: | Careful; if you don't go through their unsubscribe process, | they can consider the contract still valid, and collect on | the legally-still-valid subscription through liens and | paycheck garnishments. | heartbreak wrote: | I had to stop payment via Amex to cancel WSJ. I have copies | (and a receipt) of me informing WSJ that I was cancelling | my subscription. Now I'm intrigued though. I'd love to see | them try to claim there's documented debt and collect on | it. | emdowling wrote: | Having dealt with The Guardian and others like them to cancel, | I say "I will not explain why I wish to cancel nor will I | reconsider my decision. Please cancel my account. My account | number is x, my email is y and my address is z." | | I usually have to repeat it 3-4 times before they finally give | in and do it. | rndgermandude wrote: | Very prisoner-of-war-esque. I might try that if I ever get | into such a subscription trap. I am just not sure if I could | maintain my composure enough to keep saying "please". | criddell wrote: | In the past when I've had to deal with a retention person and | they ask why I'm leaving, I usually just say _personal | reasons_. I 've had pretty good luck with that. | LanceH wrote: | In the good old days of paper delivery I used, "I'm moving | to Zimbabwe." They never had a checkbox for Zimbabwe and | the call ended there. Now, I guess they'll just pitch the | online edition. | | Maybe I'll try, "I'm about to winter over in Antarctica and | won't have the internet bandwidth for your paper. Do you | guys deliver there?" | smilespray wrote: | Tough luck, they've got decent semi-decent bandwidth down | there these days. | | Perhaps Mars? | aliher1911 wrote: | When I had to deal with "customer retention dept" as a part of | cancellation I was saying that I'm moving to another country | and that immediately killed their interest. | Reason077 wrote: | Same with the UK subscription craft beer service, beer52.com | [1]. Subscribe easily with a few clicks, but they make you call | during office hours and endure 10+ minutes on hold to cancel. | | Sadly in the UK I guess we won't get the benefit of any new EU | legislation to address this. | | [1] https://ibb.co/r4LfK5F | ookware wrote: | When I had an account with Beer52 I them and said, | effectively, "This is my notice to cancel and the main | motivation to cancel is because of anti-consumer behaviour | like having to call to cancel. I do not authorise any further | payments and any payments you do take will be subject to a | dispute with my credit card company". | | To their credit they did send me a reply saying my account | had been cancelled and I never spoke to anyone on the phone. | mrmattyboy wrote: | Hah, literally saw the title of the post and came to comments | to find beer52 (after dealing with them over a year ago)... | must say something about a company. | | But I immediately cancelled with card after I tried to cancel | the subscription. I misread that and thought I'd cancelled, | then got stung with a bill, but they didn't send as they | couldn't take payment. So I retried to cancel and realised | what had happened... I think the most annoying bit that that | you can _try_ to cancel on their site and then, after | answering several questions (are you sure if we offer X or | Y), several pages later, they tell you that you need to call | them (IIRC the wording if you skim read it almost makes it | sound like you _have_ unsubscribed. | | For a 'hip' beer company, I was surprised at how baroque it | seemed.. I refuse to recommend them to _ANYONE_ , even though | I actually quite liked the beer. | ChrisRR wrote: | I thought of beer52 too, but not because I was thinking of | cancelling (I quite like beer52) | | But because they offered a free month to wine52. Easy to sign | up, phone up to cancel | sodality2 wrote: | Sometimes I wonder what little things differ between | countries. But this is new to me. Is it true that you find | that hold time to be annoying/out of place in the UK? I once | was on hold with an insurance company for ten hours... I | began to wonder if 1. something happened that got me stuck in | the queue, or 2. if they even had a single person working the | lines. | bodge5000 wrote: | This is the FTC, not the EU (as far as I'm aware theres no EU | legislation planned or in place for this). | | Of course you could argue that the EU might do it one day, | but you could say the same about the UK. | | That being said I thought it already was against UK law. | Maybe I got that wrong, or there are loopholes around it, or | its just not heavily enforced. Who knows | kuschku wrote: | The EU regulation on this was already passed several years | ago, and is already enforced in some countries, it should | be universally enforced by the end of the year. | rlpb wrote: | Any chance of a reference here please? I've been unable | to find the law (in my case the UK, but an EU regulation | reference would help) which enacts this, and I'm dealing | with a dispute at the moment where this would be helpful. | abainbridge wrote: | I can't find anything about the EU implementing this. | Here is a UK document from July 2021 discussing why the | UK might want to do it, and thus implying that it hadn't | yet - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government | /uploads/... | 0898 wrote: | Fun fact: The Guardian's owner has PS1 billion in assets. | 0des wrote: | That is not relevant. Perhaps on Reddit people are likely to | find that to be a persuasive negation of the topic you're not | addressing with this remark. | flyingfences wrote: | > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into | Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. | barbazoo wrote: | The difficulty cancelling Economist one time put me off from | subscribing to a paper ever since. I don't get it, their | content is good, let me cancel easily and I'll come back | easily. How desperate are those services that they implement | measures like that, counting on people to not follow through | the cancellation process, forgetting to cancel altogether, etc. | And then doing the absolute minimum necessary, e.g. offering | the easy cancel button for California residents only because | they have to. It'll be the same with this piece of legislation. | Sure they'll do it for US residents but they'll continue to | pull the same crap for us here in Canada and elsewhere. They | deserve to go out of business in my opinion and I hope they do. | d0gsg0w00f wrote: | As a WSJ subscriber I'm so used to their blunt "to the point" | editorial style that I find Economist articles too long | winded and short-storyish. I always get 5 paragraphs in and | still can't figure out what the article is getting at. Ain't | nobody got time for that. | heartbreak wrote: | Similar to OP, the WSJ was the newspaper whose cancellation | process caused me to stop subscribing to newspapers. | algesten wrote: | I'm subscribed digitally using apple app subscription. That | means I can just end it whenever and The Guardian wouldn't be | involved. | Someone1234 wrote: | But can also only read your newspaper subscription using | Apple's walled garden rather than a web browser. | csee wrote: | Don't subscribe again. You can read all these articles for free | via archive. If they're going to be doing abusive things to you | like that, you have a duty to pirate their content. | cto_of_antifa wrote: | I agree. And we should also apply this ethic to even more | important things society withholds from people as an act of | violence: housing, food, etc. | dudul wrote: | I see a lot of comments about hellish phone calls to cancel | subscriptions. | | Every time I have to make such unpleasant call (usually an ISP or | phone carrier) I always start the conversation by telling the | representative that I'm recording the call on my end. After that | it's usually pretty smooth. | watchdogtimer wrote: | This is one of the biggest benefits of using a virtual credit | card from services like privacy.com or Capital One's Eno. Just | create a card online specific to the service to pay for it, then | cancel the card when you want to unsubscribe. | | Capital One lets you create an unlimited number of cards at no | charge. | petilon wrote: | Not quite. Now the business can send you to collections. | 0des wrote: | Which company sent you to collections? | throwawaycuriou wrote: | If you provided a pseudonym, how would they associate it with | you? | 1shooner wrote: | Have you done this before successfully? I wouldn't just stop | paying for a service to without following the agreed-upon | termination process, it sounds like a great way to get referred | to a collection agency. | danlugo92 wrote: | Use a prepaid gift card, give a pseudonym. | [deleted] | torsday wrote: | Looking at you Economist . | bilalq wrote: | Which regulatory body can make "sign up for gym membership in | person, send registered mail to cancel" illegal? Unethical | subscription processes happen even outside of tech. | 0xffff2 wrote: | The link won't load for me, but based on a quote from the full | FTC ruling someone else posted, I'm pretty sure it's the FTC | and this rule would do just that. The ruling seem to be much | broader than the headline implies. | Mountain_Skies wrote: | AOL's revenue would have been much lower if this had been the | policy back at their peak. | myfavoritedog wrote: | I signed up for an introductory rate subscription to an online | publication, then when the introductory rate was running out, I | thoroughly intended to just let it continue at the higher rate. | | By chance, I noticed that if I DID want to cancel, I needed to | call. The wrongness of the tactic made my decision for me. I | called them right away to cancel and let them know that I would | have continued with my subscription, but I wouldn't pay for a | publication that used unethical retention practices. | thayne wrote: | This article is talking primarily about publishers. Does it also | apply to other subscription services, like say, an ISP? | eckesicle wrote: | Meanwhile in Scandinavia: | | You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in any | way that is most comfortable to you. [0] | | For example, you can: | | * send them a letter | | * send them an email | | * call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone | | * write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee | | All are equally legit and legally binding. | | Companies obviously do not want to deal with the manual overhead, | so services typically have an easily accessible button for you to | click. | | Furthermore, companies are required to notify you at least 1 | month before any contract is extended and offer you an easy way | to cancel - and if they don't you can cancel at any point and get | refunded. [1] | | [0] for example in Finland: https://www.kkv.fi/sv/information- | och-anvisningar/kop-forsal... | | [1] for example in Sweden: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument- | lagar/dokument/svensk-f... | | EDIT: Just realised Finland isn't Scandinavian, but oh well :) | tzs wrote: | If I write your name on a napkin along with a request to cancel | service and hand it to random employee of some company you have | a subscription with, how do they verify that it really came | from you? | aeternum wrote: | This seems really annoying. You can unsubscribe to most things | in writing as well in the US. | | The issue is that it takes only a misclick to subscribe, | whereas writing and mailing a letter or getting a napkin and | travelling to the company's HQ takes considerably more effort | (few companies have humans answer the phone). | | Seems that Scandinavia needs to change their laws if the goal | is to make it easy for the consumer. | ess3 wrote: | I feel like this is missing the point. The point is that it's | illegal to reject a cancellation no matter the medium it was | delivered on. So in order to not deal with the overhead and | legal trouble of managing napkins that people slip your | employees, you're incentivized to make it as easy as possible | aeternum wrote: | Because it does not solve the problem. Shady online | subscription companies can simply put the office somewhere | inaccessible and not accept e-mail/calls from customers. | | The law should outline mediums that companies must accept. | IE have a published webpage or e-mail address that allows | unsubscribe. | edgyquant wrote: | I believe the point is that this isn't acceptable in the | Nordic countries | rootusrootus wrote: | > This seems really annoying. | | The most annoying part is that in any thread like this the | top comment invariably ends up being some smug observation | that <insert European country here> is clearly better than | the US. | kreeben wrote: | What's the English word for when you're angry about | something but you aim that anger towards a whole other | thing? | rootusrootus wrote: | Who is angry? I am tired of the divisive nature of this | kind of rhetoric, and I am invested enough in the HN | community that I want it to stop. I do not have a lot of | spare emotional capacity for Internet drama, so if it | graduates from annoyance to actual anger, I will simply | abandon HN. | chrsig wrote: | The solution to this is to help the US rise to the | occasion, not complain about it on the internet. | rootusrootus wrote: | Many of us are trying to do exactly that. Can you explain | how smugly proclaiming "see how we are better than you!?" | furthers the conversation? It is not a constructive | comment, it does not offer any meaningful insight to how | we might improve the US. It's just divisive. | chrsig wrote: | Showcasing a better system that the US could emulate is a | great way to offer insight into how the US could improve. | | Interpreting it as "See how we are better than you!?" -- | literally no one has said this. Interpreting it like that | is just putting insecurity on display. | | Given the choice of two reactions: | | - "Geez, that system does sound better than what we've | got going on here, we should consider adopting it" | | and | | - "I get it, you think you're better than us! stop being | so divisive!" | | ...which do you think would lead to positive change? | which do you think is a more fair interpretation of what | the OP actually said? | rootusrootus wrote: | > Interpreting it like that is just putting insecurity on | display. | | Of course, that's exactly it. Responding to every single | thread about the US with "I don't understand why the US | is this way, we do it better" isn't divisive at all. And | anybody who suggests so is insecure. | | I prefer a constructive discussion. This ain't one. | wussboy wrote: | Is it? We reject this logic in other areas (sexual | assault comes to mind). Why is it valid here? | chrsig wrote: | Can you expand? I don't understand what you're trying to | communicate. | sam0x17 wrote: | Comments like that though are really just a viable solution | in disguise -- make the U.S. more like said country | rootusrootus wrote: | That's impossible. Said country differs dramatically from | the US on almost every meaningful measurement, from | population size, density, style of government, cultural | history, existing systems, etc. | | And it begs the question that said country's system is | _actually_ better. In some metrics maybe it is, in others | perhaps less so. And there 's no reason to believe that | US citizens' priorities on that will be the same. | jagrsw wrote: | > Said country differs dramatically from the US on almost | every meaningful measurement. | | Some differencies are relevant, some not. Population | density has nothing to do with the regulation re ease or | assymetries related to canceling contracts. | | I suspect the vast majority of US population would simply | want to import the nordic ways of dealing with the | discussed topics if there was a bigger discussion on it, | as it'll save a lot of frustration/money, while it | doesn't seem to unfairly disbenefit companies (for | whatever definition of disbenefit). Nordic ISPs are | probably doing fairly well (Telia et al). | | So, it's a question: why it's so hard or takes so long | time to implement things in US, which have no obvious | drawbacks and improve quality of people lifes? In the end | it's also a representative democracy. | | This is HN, saying "we're having this process in country | X, and it's clearly worse than in country Y, and the | reason is 'culture and history'" might be a technical | explanation here, but when it's used as a statement of | support, it "does not follow". | marginalia_nu wrote: | I tried to delete my Spotify account (in Sweden). Not just | cancel, but delete because they inexplicably put my profile on | the Internet in full display and I was not even a little bit | okay with that. | | I think 7 different "yes I'm really sure, yes despite the sad | violin music and yes despite the images of sad puppies", a | support ticket, several emails going back and forth confirming | I'm really sure, and then a few more forms assuring I'm | absolutely sure I want to do this. | | I don't... know what they think they are accomplishing with | this obstacle course. If anything this nonsense makes me want | to remove the account even more. If it was just a button I | might have come back later, but they can rest assured they will | never see me again after that nonsense. | | If that means listening to gramophones for the rest of my life, | so be it. | antasvara wrote: | I think the general idea is that if they make it difficult | enough, some people might just decide that it's not worth | canceling. I'm sure there's some metric that says most people | canceling a subscription are unlikely to resubscribe, so | making it difficult to do so probably increases the | likelihood of keeping you by some small percentage, | offsetting your likelihood of coming back. | | The NY Times is a great and slimy example of this. Canceling | the subscription requires a phone call or online chatbot, | which make a people less likely to cancel. When you do try to | cancel, they offer you a deal to stay. You have to reject | that deal to finally cancel your subscription. While this is | clearly a bad customer experience, I can almost guarantee | that it increases their retention rates. | | Ultimately, a business is hurt a lot less by giving a poor | experience to someone already canceling their subscription. | NikolaNovak wrote: | I'm sure their metrics are right overall. | | In my case, however, they were wrong: I wanted to pause The | Economist as we had a baby and I wasn't going to read a | weekly newspaper for a bit... or anything but try to get an | infant to survive and try to get some sleep :P | | They have a particularly dark pattern where it APPEARS they | have an online one-click cancel; they make you go through | the whole rigamarole of Yes I'm sure / No I don't want a | deal; and only _then_ they send you to an agent, who tries | to chat you up about your neighbourhood and build a bond | suggest helpful tips to make time to read and generally | talk about anything except cancelling your sub. | | As a result, my blood is filled with dark seeping hate for | The Economist, and what was going to be a 3-month pause is | now a life-long mission to dissuade everybody I can from | sending them a penny - same as with Goodlife fitness :D. | theK wrote: | I hate so many companies just because of these "make it | difficult" policies... it's just disgusting. NYT did it to | me as well, they will never see a penny from me again. | Economist? It was just clicking around in the site! I | unsubscribed and resubed from them multiple times and am a | happy subscriber right now as well! | BostonEnginerd wrote: | I was fortunate enough to subscribe to the Times through | the Apple Subscription platform. Only took me one click | to unsubscribe. | daedalus_f wrote: | Thats changed then - several years ago they gave me a | right dance involving phone calls and emails. Lost me as | a customer for good. | Semiapies wrote: | The UK _Times_ did the same thing to me, except I had to | call at 2am my time (no 24-hour service) in order to sit on | hold and then get the "are you aware of all the | features?/we can give you a special deal" pitch some poor | woman with a cough had to read. | vineyardmike wrote: | > Canceling the subscription requires a phone call or | online chatbot, | | This is a reason I subscribe to thinks using Apple's IAP if | I have a choice (eg. equal price). the app gui is great. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I think a lot of businesses greatly overvalue behavioral | economics as a means to control people. Nudging doesn't | seem to work nearly as well as it's "supposed" to when | implemented in real world scenarios. Heck, even in a | laboratory setting the effects are honestly pretty sketchy. | | And that doesn't even factor in disgruntled ex-customers | going around telling everyone they meet about their | experiences. | nonameiguess wrote: | This is a separate problem from that. It's really easy to | cancel a Spotify subscription. It's nearly impossible to | get your (free) account deleted, though. This is largely | because early-stage Spotify delegated account management by | allowing people to create accounts in Facebook and Google. | Pokemon Go had this issue, too, with a bunch of people | opting to create accounts through Google since it was the | easiest way if you were using an Android device, but then | it became literally impossible for the first two years of | the game's existence to extricate the account from Google | and make it native to Niantic's own databases or link it to | a different Google account. | | It's just something these startups don't even think about | when rushing to market. What happens when someone changes | or gets rid of their Facebook account? | Zanni wrote: | I'm sure it improves retention, but it also negatively | affects their subscription rate (probably not as much or | they wouldn't do it). The _primary_ reason that I won 't | subscribe to the NYT is their cancelation policy. Barriers | to exit are barriers to entry. | entropicdrifter wrote: | >probably not as much or they wouldn't do it | | Bold of you to assume these companies are rational actors | dgellow wrote: | Send an email mentioning you want to delete your accounts and | all your personal information from their system, according to | GDPR. They have 30 days to comply. | gizmo686 wrote: | A non EU resident doing bussiness with a non EU company has | no protections under GDPR. Even if you are an EU resident, | the scope of GDPR's extra judicial reach is not entirely | clear. Merely accessing a foreign site as an EU resident | does not subject it to GDPR. The site needs be actively | targeting the EU in some way. | marginalia_nu wrote: | Spotify is a Swedish company. | dehrmann wrote: | > they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full | display | | Do you mean this page? | | https://open.spotify.com/user/daniel | | That data is also visible to anyone in the app, and you can | mark playlists as private. | marginalia_nu wrote: | See, if they hadn't had such an annoying deletion process, | I might have come back after learning that. But I won't. I | will never. | tbabb wrote: | I suspect from personal experience that companies | underestimate how much business they are truly losing due | to spite alone. | throwaway894345 wrote: | Man, I remember the ordeal that was trying to cancel a cell | phone plan when I was a broke student studying abroad. Had to | plead with them in arcane, formal French (a real pain | considering I wasn't even fluent in everyday, conversational | French--ended up needing help from a native French friend) on | stationary and they _still_ rejected my cancellation and | continued to charge my French bank account. I tried closing my | French bank account, but they wouldn 't let me (IIRC because | the cell phone provider was making ongoing withdrawals) so I | just moved all of my money back to my US account and let the | French account go into the red. The French bank continued | sending me demands for money. After several years, they | eventually notified me that they would be closing my account | because I was delinquent. | napo wrote: | Funny, I had the opposite experience. I'm French and I spent | 2 years in the US. I had a T-mobile subscription, and it was | too painful to cancel my subscription. With my accent I could | barely pass the robot that was trying to understand why I was | calling. Then when I had someone on the phone, the call just | dropped, in the middle of conversations. I did that a few | times and then gave up. I assume I'll also receive a | notification one day that I'm breaking the law and owe some | crazy amount of money. | dmurray wrote: | This isn't really the opposite experience! You had the same | experience, with banks headquartered in different | countries. I still await the experience of your fellow ex- | pat who spent their blood, sweat and tears to sign up for | an expensive service but cancelled with the wave of a hand. | throwaway894345 wrote: | T-Mobile has stores all over and they can help you cancel | in person (I did this in the US, and it's _very_ common to | change carriers). I suspect you can also cancel online. You | can also pay with credit card, and in extreme cases you can | have your credit card company decline /block charges (I had | to do this when Hertz tried to defraud me out of hundreds | of dollars). I also suspect banks will happily | decline/block charges as well, but I'm less sure since I | route most of my transactions through my credit card--at | the very least it's quite a lot easier to close a bank | account in the US. | | On the other hand, when I was in France just to open a cell | phone account, I had to bring visa paperwork, proof of | residence, and a bank account (no cell phone option) and it | took 24 hours to open the account (compared with ~15 | minutes + a credit card in the US). | | I'm sure there are lots of things that are more difficult | in the US, but France excels at bureaucracy in my | experience. I should also note that I love France in | general and its investment in nuclear power in particular. | (: | JJMcJ wrote: | > I also suspect banks will happily decline/block charges | as well | | Yes, I had to do this on my debit card for an autoship | that I signed up for. | KennyBlanken wrote: | Former Tmobile customer here. I ended up with an account | on my credit report because tmobile never actually closed | the account and kept right on billing me. | | Twice. Once back in the late 90's when they were called | something else, I think...and again a few years ago. | MisterTea wrote: | Thankfully living in a big city in the USA there are T | mobile stores you can go to and speak to a human being face | to face. | throwaway894345 wrote: | I don't think you even need to be in a particularly big | city. I think most cities of at least 50k population have | one even if it's just a kiosk in a mall. | dmurray wrote: | > I tried closing my French bank account, but they wouldn't | let me (IIRC because the cell phone provider was making | ongoing withdrawals)...The French bank continued sending me | demands for money. | | This is the worst level of fraud. The bank is pretending to | be providing you a service here! But instead they funnel your | money to someone else. | | I had another variation of this, with AIB in Ireland, in case | anyone ever thinks of doing business with them. Vodafone | started billing me for a defunct account, due to (I | charitably believe) an operational error. AIB refused to | revoke Vodafone's unlimited access to withdraw funds from my | account. | | I'd guess the scope of this fraud is in the billions to | hundreds of billions EU-wide, but it doesn't seem to have | come to the attention of regulators yet. | elwell wrote: | How does this law translate to decentralized | contracts/subscriptions? It may not be possible to support | these analog mediums on an Ethereum smart contract for example. | neltnerb wrote: | Why? Can't a company make it so that there's a "cancel | contract" method? I am not an Ethereum expert, I just don't | understand, to be clear. | | I'm sure this is far more basic than what you know how to do, | but this seems pretty simple to add a "cancel contract" | method that seems like it'd meet the requirement to be as | easy to cancel as it was to set up. The account status seems | like they can at any time just read it off the smart | contract, they already do for balance monitoring each month | in this example. | | https://www.sitepen.com/blog/smart-contracts-a-tutorial | | Is the issue that there will be a bunch of extraneous data on | the chain or something when, say, Verizon puts their entire | customer database onto Ethereum? | elwell wrote: | I was more so referring to having to support the handing of | a napkin to an employee. | Spivak wrote: | You'll probably have to make it so that either party can | cancel contracts. | antihero wrote: | I don't think the law really cares about this sort of thing. | ferdowsi wrote: | Seems like smart contracts aren't so smart if they don't | support easy cancelation mechanisms. | elwell wrote: | Our future digital overlords might choose to integrate | humans into the hivemind to support these analog | cancellation requests, but gas costs would certainly spike. | topkai22 wrote: | I'm a bit ignorant of smart contracts and I'm not a lawyer, | but presumably the service provider would have to take | whatever action would invalidate the subscription. | | It gets weird with escrow though, because it's possible the | law could treat money in escrow (like in a contract account) | as already prepaid- if you wrote a contract to be paid every | month for 12 months provided that a given key to a service | stated valid and funded the escrow for the 12 months, it's | possible the court would rule that you bought 12 months of a | product, not a subscription. | | I'm not aware if this has been litigated. | bjoli wrote: | Sixt (car rental) did not follow these rules. The procedure was | something like "write a letter to out german head quarters". | | I ended up making a GDPR request for them to first send me all | data they had and then remove any data (including email | addresses) they had on me. I will hopefully never have to use | their services again. | kazinator wrote: | Avis sends me a monthly statement for $0 dollars, even though | I have not rented a car in years. :) | nonameiguess wrote: | Are you renting a fleet? How do you even subscribe to car | rentals? Is this a thing where if you rent frequently enough, | you get a discount to just pay constantly instead of per car? | jpttsn wrote: | [1] decrees that (but not how) consumers can cancel auto- | renewing contracts immediately iff the business hasn't informed | the consumer about auto-renewal in writing. | euroderf wrote: | Wellll, Finland IS Scandinavian, in social system if not in | language. | [deleted] | wpietri wrote: | One other thing I'd like: For digital subscriptions, I'd like | not using the service for, say, 30 days to automatically pause | billing. So if I don't use Netflix or read the NYT for a whole | billable month, they don't bill me for the month. If there's no | cost to the producer and no value to the (non-)user, there | shouldn't be a charge. | secondaryacct wrote: | It's nice. I m French living in Hong Kong, and in both I | sometimes have to cancel my credit card to get rid of newspaper | subscription. | | And often, the more the newspaper whines about freedom of the | press the harder it is to get rid of their legal warning that I | must pay !!! And there was no contract limit during the 1-click | 5 minutes sub !!! Mediapart in France was so borderline writing | me every week after I had to cancel my second credit card, | being unable to send french snail mail from France, the only | way they accept ! The first card was for LeMonde. | | Totally made me hate the militant press, and in BOTH places, | it's really insane. Like they treat their readers way worse | than the government treat them, and yes, even in Hong Kong :( | | At least NYT didnt threaten me legally and took a simple email. | I was so stressed when I cancelled, there was again no frigging | button. I will never again sub to newspaper it's just too much | worry you ll have a forever parasitic CC bill until you force | cancel the CC :( | napo wrote: | I also had a terrible experience trying to cancel my | subscription to Le Monde. In the end I paid a service | something like 6euros so that they would send the proper | letter. There's 0 chance I will ever subscribe to a newspaper | ever again. | jolux wrote: | Reading the replies it seems like this law may have | incentivized some companies to make themselves extremely | difficult to contact in the first place. How does the law deal | with this? | eckesicle wrote: | It doesn't. The legal framework leaves a lot of room for | interpretation by the judge. They look at the law itself, and | interpret the intent of the lawmaker. | | Suppose I wanted to cancel a service from a firm that was | hard to reach. I'd block the payments through my bank and if | it ever went to court I'd just need to show I took reasonable | steps to attempt to contact them before blocking any payments | and then most likely win the case. | registeredcorn wrote: | I'm interested to know: | | * Does this apply to all of Scandinavia, or only specifically | Finland and Sweden? | | * How do they avoid abuse of the system? I.e. I unsubscribe you | on your behalf by pretending to be you. Surely at least one | person must be doing this maliciously on a constant basis. | | * How many subscription companies are there in countries where | this applies compared to countries where there are no such | laws? Given the burden, it seems logical to completely ignore | and actively avoid the countries where this applies. | creddit wrote: | > You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in | > any way that is most comfortable to you. [0] > For example, | you can: > * send them a letter > * send them an email > * call | them and tell anyone who picks up the phone > * write it on a | napkin and hand it to an employee | | This is bad, actually. Unnecessarily raises costs. | | The FTC's perspective is much improved over this. | mynameisvlad wrote: | Customer choice and experience should almost always trump | "increased costs". | | Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of | their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness | just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they | explicitly don't have to deal with all that. | creddit wrote: | > Customer choice and experience should almost always trump | "increased costs". | | No it shouldn't and that should be obvious. | | > Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest | of their comment, where they explain that the extreme | openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to | do so they explicitly don't have to deal with all that. | | Yes, this is good, but the FTC's ruling does this as well | so it's better. Only way a company could get around | offering click to cancel would be to not offer online | signup. Best of luck to those companies succeeding! | mynameisvlad wrote: | > No it shouldn't and that should be obvious. | | Explain why that should be obvious. If you're building a | service for a customer, said customer _should_ be your | top priority. | [deleted] | creddit wrote: | The number of things that could increase the costs of | providing a service beyond willingness to pay for the | service is essentially unbounded. | another-dave wrote: | I imagine though that you'll still have companies trying | to stretch the definition of "at least as easy as sign- | up" to breaking point. | | You didn't just "click to sign up", you probably filled | in a sign-up form to create an account, clicked on a link | in your email to validate your account, then filled in | another form to add payment info. | | I wouldn't be surprised to see companies saying we can | have multiple, multi-page 'exit' forms and an "Are you | sure?" email and still be FTC compliant. | dqv wrote: | >Customer choice and experience should almost always trump | "increased costs". | | This seems like a very shiftable goalpost, so I would have | to understand what situations you think _aren't_ almost | always. | | >Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of | their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness | just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so | they explicitly don't have to deal with all that. | | This doesn't work in places like the US, in my experience. | I stopped letting people cancel by phone (which a lot of | people think is the most convenient way to cancel despite | what is said here) after a few incidents in my first years | of doing business: one person calling anonymously without | identifying themselves saying "Hi I need to cancel my | account, thanks bye" and two others who called to cancel | and later said they never called to cancel after we | terminated their accounts. Oh and the other 10 or so people | who said they called to cancel and that we just didn't | cancel their account. It's extremely hard to prove the | negative that they didn't call. So nah I don't care about | those kinds of customers. Tangible forms of cancellation | only: a written notice with your account number and intent | or the online cancellation form. | detuur wrote: | It provides regulatory pressure to make unsubscribing as easy | as possible. Those costs are entirely absent if customers can | click a button. Otherwise, if the regulation merely | prescribes that there has to be a button, there is little | consequence if the button doesn't work, or you have to jump | through 50 hoops to find it like in cookie banners. The | Swedish model ensures that if your button is unsatisfactory, | you'll be legally obliged to pay heed to any random letter, | phone call, email, or indeed even napkin that comes in. | | It's a simple incentive. | creddit wrote: | > Otherwise, if the regulation merely prescribes that there | has to be a button, there is little consequence if the | button doesn't work, | | This is a ridiculous strawman. | | The Swedish model also makes it such that sufficiently | motivated ass holes can make a company's life very | difficult. Much better to have sensible legislation like | the FTC's where your mode of unsubbing is equivalent to | your mode of subbing. Really, shockingly good stuff from | the FTC here. Unsurprisingly crappy stuff from Sweden. | | Also, looks like the Swedish outcomes are pretty shit! | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29255702 | | Will be interesting to see how it goes in the US. | dguest wrote: | I don't think most companies are maliciously breaking | unsubscribe buttons, but there are a lot of websites that | don't work on some browsers, are badly maintained to the | point of being unusable, are confusing, or simply don't | work because the people that maintain them aren't | professional web designers. | | When your website is broken and you continue to charge me | money, I don't think the onus on me to report the broken | website, help your (maybe non-existent) IT division to | find the bug, wait around for them to come up with a fix, | and then help them beta test it. I should be able to file | a ticket and say "I don't want your services please stop | taking my money". | creddit wrote: | And how would this case work against you in the FTC's | legislation? Seems pretty clear that if it doesn't work | to unsubscribe but it would work to subscribe then it's | against the ruling. | | If the website can't actually add subscriptions then good | luck to that company surviving! | lostgame wrote: | Related to HN: this is part of the reason I always disliked the | allowing of paywalled links on HN. | | I've had several journalism publications that have pulled this | bullshit, and; frankly - at this point it seems to be part of | their core profit plan. Probably always was. | | It's about goddamn time this was a law. | chriskanan wrote: | It would be great to have this universally, especially with gyms, | where one can click to join but must write a letter and mail it | via the postal service to cancel. | illuminati1911 wrote: | Or even better. Send a fax. :D | yodsanklai wrote: | I had the issue with the WSJ. I couldn't believe it was so hard | to cancel. My solution was to update my card with an incorrect | number, they canceled the subscription after the payment was | declined. | bodono wrote: | I wonder if this strategy could impact your credit rating | though? | acnops wrote: | Does it? I'm having the same issue | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | Years ago I did credit investigations related to mortgages | as a job. My info is perhaps a bit out of date but I'm not | aware of any significant changes related to this. If you | simply ignore an account that has a balance due | accumulating on it, they'll likely charge it off to a debt | collector as part of a routine batch process. The threshold | where this happens varies but 90 to 120 days overdue is the | common range. You could argue with the collection agency | that the service provider voided the contract by their | behavior, but honestly, arguing with a collection agency | isn't gonna be easier than jumping through the hoops to | cancel with these scummy service providers. | ds wrote: | No. You cant do anything to someones credit unless you have | their SSN. Damn good thing thats the case also, if you | happen to be named Jane Doe or Bob Smith. | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | This is incorrect, see my other reply to you in the | sibling thread. | hnburnsy wrote: | Yup, the local city library dinged my credit report for | late library fines ($18) and I had to clear it up to get | a new mortgage. The library did not have my SSN. | lexapro wrote: | You still owe them the money technically. | ajb wrote: | The problem with that is that you still have a valid contract, | some companies will ding your credit rating and still pursue | you for the money. | ds wrote: | You cant ding a credit rating unless you have a users SSN, | which the NYT almost certainly does not. | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | Nope. To put something on a credit report you need only | match 2 out of Name, Address, DoB, and SSN. This is one of | the big reasons why the reports are so inaccurate. It's | absolutely hellish for people with a very common name. | Source: when I was young my job was to investigate adverse | items on credit reports and find legal pretexts to get them | removed. | ilikepi wrote: | > To put something on a credit report you need only match | 2 out of Name, Address, DoB, and SSN. | | So any third-party vendor on Amazon has enough? | Fantastic. | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | Yeah, the whole industry is insane and scummy. It's | designed to give creditors as much gossip as possible, | and congress has only taken rather tepid steps to reign | it in. At the time I thought I was on the side of | goodness, as my job was to find legal reasons to dispute | these negative items on credit reports, submit the report | back to the bureaus for a rescore, and ultimately get | people their mortgage. But with the benefit of hindsight | I can plainly see how I was a cog in creating the 2008 | crash, and how the whole system was ultimately | constructed to look the other way vs fraud if it meant | the mortgage went through. | | We badly need much stricter privacy rights surrounding | personal information, but I don't see a viable political | path to making it happen sadly :(. | jasonhansel wrote: | Maybe change your name and/or billing address, and _then_ | change your card info? | wonderwonder wrote: | I cancelled my wsj subscription the other day, I had to call to | cancel which is insulting but it only took 5 minutes. Wonder if | someone sued them in between our cancellations. I actually | cancelled because I found out call to cancel was their policy. | Wont do business with companies that have this process. | yodsanklai wrote: | > but it only took 5 minutes | | I live in a different country / time zone, wasn't unsure how | long it was going to take and if my phone would be charged. | Also English isn't my native language and it adds to the | burden of having to call them. | kelp wrote: | California SB-313 | (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...) | was passed in 2018 and has this requirement: | | "... a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous | service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic | renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may | include a termination email formatted and provided by the | business that a consumer can send to the business without | additional information." | | But I have one recent anecdote that suggests this language is not | specific enough to lead to a very good outcome. | | I had a SiriusXM subscription for my car, and paid $52.21 for the | past 12 months of service. And they wanted to renew me for | something in the ballpark of $20/month ($240/year). I absolutely | hate that business practice and having to go talk to them to | negotiate a better rate, otherwise they auto-renew you for a much | worse rate than you were already on. | | So I went to cancel. There is no click to cancel option. You have | to call or do online chat. I think the online chat is how they | can say they follow California law. | | It still took me about 30+ minutes to actually cancel the | service, because the person responding to the chat has to run | through a script to try to retain you. First they want to know if | you are enjoying the service. Then they want to know what | stations you like. Then it's "I'll switch you to this new plan | that's only $12/month, can I go ahead and do that?" | | All the while I'm telling them that the reason I'm cancelling is | that they tried to auto-renew me to a much higher rate, and now | they are making it super hard to cancel, which makes me want to | cancel more. | | So I had to go round and round insisting I wanted to cancel. | Never did they offer me anything close to the previous rate I was | paying. Though I see now that if I re-enabled my subscription I'd | get close to that rate again for 6 months. But for a service that | I only use when I don't have good cell phone coverage, and the | annual time waste they put me through to avoid over paying... | It's not worth it. | PaulHoule wrote: | We talk about UI dark patterns but the people who try to retain | you are trained in conversational dark patterns. | | If anything these are deadlier in retention then in the first | sale. I'm awful at sales but I like to drink with salespeople | in hotel bars and otherwise pick their brains and I have had | news paper ad and radio commercial salespeople share their | retention playbooks with me. (e.g. "Don't you know your | customers will think you went out of business if you stop | running ads?") | smilespray wrote: | "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM..." | powersnail wrote: | SiriusXM is the worst. My subscription came with the car, but | luckily it wasn't auto-renewed. However, after my subscription | expires, I got calls every single day from SiriusXM trying to | get me to subscribe again. And each time, they used a | _different_ number. It was ridiculous. | | In the end, I just pick up the call, and put the phone in my | pocket. They still insisted on calling for about half a year | before giving up. | dahfizz wrote: | I had a similar experience, but after picking up and telling | them never to call me again, they stopped calling. | [deleted] | kqr2 wrote: | Does this also apply to gym memberships which are notoriously | difficult to cancel? | kelp wrote: | It should apply to anything that you've signed up for online. | They have to provide an online way of cancelling. Only | applies to California residents. | cwp wrote: | Damn, I had that exact same experience. Eventually, in | exasperation I said something like "I don't want you to respect | my wishes, I want you to act on them." And somehow that did the | trick and the CSR cancelled immediately. Of course, I then got | increasingly insistent spam from them for the next year. | throwawaygh wrote: | Some car companies require you to sign you up for a "free" | SiriusXM subscription with a new car purchase, which you then | have to go through the effort to cancel. | | I told the dealership I'd never buy a car from their brand | again because of this. | elliekelly wrote: | This really ought to be considered an illegal "tying | arrangement" but since our antitrust laws are so poorly | enforced and overly-emphasize price (ignoring things like | quality and customer service) I doubt it's even on anyone's | radar. The Chicago School strikes again, I suppose. | neya wrote: | Fuck New York Times, I had to go through this chaos once and | promised to never ever use any of their services ever again. I | even went to the pain of making sure all my ad blockers were in | full force when visiting the NYT. I developed a strong sense of | hatred after realize what kind of slimy tactics they used to stop | you from cancelling a subscription. | | One day, I found a loophole. I would email them requesting a | cancellation for my record and initiated a chargeback against | them via my credit card company. I had no hopes of getting the | money back, but then I also had evidence that I tried to reach | out to them via calls and emails to make them cancel my | subscription and the chargeback went through and I got a full | refund. I really enjoyed that feeling knowing that the NYT lost | more than they made from me as for every chargeback, the credit | card company would penalize the merchant with a fixed fee - | usually anywhere from $20 to $50 per chargeback if I'm not wrong. | | I wish all those who had been scammed by NYT raises a chargeback | and burn them to the ground. God, I never realized how | passionately I could hate a company like this. | jgb1984 wrote: | Why would I want to read their woke hysteria anyway... | cto_of_antifa wrote: | Because it's some of the most accurate and highly detailed | journalism in the world. | op00to wrote: | Reading about opposing viewpoints broaden your horizons, and | surrounding yourself with media that reinforces your own | world view does nothing to make your life better. | bopbeepboop wrote: | Sure -- and I don't read Bolshevik, Nazi, or Cultural | Revolution literature. | | I don't really want to understand how their contemporaries | propagandize, either. | | That your life is better with culture (broadly) doesn't | mean that any culture improves your life. | drexlspivey wrote: | I subscribed to NYT via apple pay (through their website not | the app) to avoid these shenanigans but the subscription won't | show up in Apple pay. Does anyone know why? | Nextgrid wrote: | Apple Pay is just a one-time payment authorization mechanism; | it does not keep track of subscriptions and doesn't have a | way to cancel them. You may have been confused with App Store | subscriptions which are mediated by Apple (and they take a | cut) and do allow you to cancel there. | bedobi wrote: | > God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company | like this. | | May it burn in hell huh xD sorry but this is so relatable and | cracks me up badddd | treyfitty wrote: | Just to play devils advocate, can't they just send it to | collections if they really wanted to? | | I did the same thing for a gym membership (NYSC) and they | threatened collections 3 months later. Fortunately, they went | bankrupt. | csomar wrote: | He tried to reach them to cancel his subscription. In that | case, he could challenge collection and then go to court to | prove his case? | | For the gym, it depends on your contract. Maybe you had a 1 | year commitment but you paid monthly? | Puts wrote: | There's been a lot of talk about how newspapers are dying | because nobody wants to pay for digital subscriptions. I think | this industry seriously gets to blame themselves for this. I've | tried subscribing to a couple of magazines back in the days and | with every one of them it was a living nightmare to get out of | the subscriptions. Once ending the subscription one even | started sending what looked like regular invoices with due date | in red and everything, but if you read the fine print at the | bottom of the page it just said that "this is to start a | subscription, if you are not interested ignore this mail". | | Generally I don't have a problem paying for culture, and I also | like reading both news papers and magazines but now days I | always buy them at the local news stand. I've got enough proof | that newspapers and magazines can't handle the trust with | personal information and payment details. | | I've also always admired journalists and the craft of good | investigative journalism. It's sad that these creatives are | stuck with the most hostile sales people in probably any | industry (except maybe phone companies). | thedougd wrote: | Subscribing through something like Amazon also makes it easy | to cancel. | hnburnsy wrote: | This. To give you an example I signed up for a local Gannett | newspaper subscription for $17 per month delivered. I have | since learned... | | -twice a moth they claim they send premium content newspapers | charged at $7 each extra. This content is trivial mass | produced garbage. -there is no billing statement detailing | monthly charges. You can pay $5 a month to get an detailed | billing statement. -if you go on vacation there is no credit | since they claim all the content is online. -the newspaper | shows up at my house some days at 12:15 am, so it is devoid | of most news from the previous day. | | I only get this for an elderly family member who reads it | cover to cover everyday or I would be long gone. | tvhahn wrote: | New York Times, I'm looking at you... | alixanderwang wrote: | "Email to cancel" isn't as insidious, but should also be illegal. | | Superhuman does this. They responded promptly and cancelled my | subscription, but nonetheless, that friction to not provide a | synchronous button is always a deliberate choice, and often one | that's telling of company values. | nobody9999 wrote: | Dark patterns aren't just for cancellations. | | A couple years back, a friend bought me a one year gift | subscription for Britbox[0]. | | When I tried to activate the _gift_ subscription, the site | refused to allow me to do so unless I provided them with a credit | card number. | | Which, from a practical standpoint, makes no sense as it was a | _gift_. | | I wasn't going to provide these wankers with my credit card | number[0], so I then had to have an awkward conversation with my | friend as I didn't want her to pay for something I couldn't use. | | To their (very minor) credit, Britbox did refund the cost to my | friend. | | [0] AFAICT, much of the subscription industry relies on having | your credit card details so they can continue to bill you. | Especially with annual subscriptions, as most folks will forget | about it until they see the charge on their credit card | statement. Then the subscription service has another year for you | to forget about it again. Rinse and repeat. | slipheen wrote: | That is unacceptable behavior, and I entirely understand you | not wanting to condone it. | | For people who find themselves in that situation, one practical | workaround I've found is using a service like Privacy.com which | lets you generate dedicated Visa cards that you can pause or | limit charges on | smoe wrote: | I would love to use privacy.com but I couldn't find any | alternatives outside the US. Any suggestions? | b3morales wrote: | Unfortunately Privacy.com requires the generated cards to be | paid by a bank account (rather than a credit card). So you | have to be okay with them having your banking info. | mikeiz404 wrote: | If you complain to them about that they will allow you to | use an ACH number instead of account credentials. | barbazoo wrote: | I got very interested in that service but it's ridiculously | difficult to figure out how one's account get funded. I did | find it at the very bottom of [0]. Also restricted to US | customers only. They're not that much better when it comes | to dark patterns if the "How it works" section completely | neglects the part where and how you pay THEM. | | [0] https://privacy.com/virtual-card | derbOac wrote: | This is one reason I miss one-time credit card numbers. My main | credit card used to allow you to generate one-time numbers. You | could control the limit on the numbers, how long they would | last, you could edit this, and so forth and so on. I loved it | because you could give a different unique card number to each | site, that would self-destruct after a specified amount of | time. | | It was great for stuff like this because if they pulled this | kind of nonsense, you could just walk away and they were left | with a unique card number that didn't matter worth anything. | Most of the time, you might only have the number active for a | few weeks, so if they tried to charge that number say, a year | later, it was obvious they were trying to use a number you had | intentionally made limited in time. | | This service was discontinued and I really miss it a lot. | | I still don't know that I'd go into a contract with any company | that behaves this way (newspapers included) but it provided a | layer of insurance in case you missed something. | llIIllIIllIIl wrote: | privacy.com | ww520 wrote: | Citi and Capitol One have the virtual credit card feature. | GloriousKoji wrote: | While I'm super glad that Citi added the Virtual Account | Number feature back to their credit cards, I'm puzzled by | the fact that the virtual credit card numbers can no longer | have an associated total spending limit. Now it's a daily | spending limit which is fairly useless. | mwest217 wrote: | As of a few months ago they could have an aggregate | spending limit, I used it in June. | registeredcorn wrote: | Not trying to do an advert here, but privacy.com does offer | this as a service. I've never used them myself, but if you | don't mind paying a bit of money (subscription fee, I think?) | this is a good option. | | Personally, I think all banks should offer this type of | service! It sounds wonderful. | syspec wrote: | With Apple Card you can generate a new CC number at will, any | time. | | I use this when giving my CC number over the phone when | dealing with contractors. | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | > This is one reason I miss one-time credit card numbers. | | I don't remember those. It sounds awesome. | blacksmith_tb wrote: | My bank also had (and then killed off) this feature, which I | used a lot for exactly the same reason (or ordering stuff | from Aliexpress etc.) I have been looking at privacy.com | which seems like it may be an acceptable replacement, though | it has some strange sign-up hoops of its own. | edge17 wrote: | This seems to be a common design pattern on iOS App Store as | well. Download a 'free' app and don't let the user use the app | in trial mode unless they click a button that gets them to sign | up, subscribe, or buy some in app purchase. | iscrewyou wrote: | I'm here to vent/rant about this. I bought vsco filters packs | ages ago. I haven't used vsco in a while and I downloaded it | again recently. Turns out they've moved to subscription based | method. Fine, I'm sure I can still restore my old | purchases...false. To even use the app to get to the restore | button to check this, they made me sign up for an account. | After much hesitation I finally did only to realize my old | purchases aren't available anymore. | | To top it all off, I tried to delete my account...the app | won't let you!! You have to go to their website and delete | it. But wait! First you have to verify your email before | deletion. No, not verify email before accessing the account, | verify before deletion. | | What a trash of a company. Please don't do this developers. | baby wrote: | I really really hate this pattern on iOS. This and the app | that is completely filled with ads. | handrous wrote: | Apple-mediated subscriptions are at least easy to list & | cancel. | | I do wish they'd 1) allow explicit demo versions of apps-- | using IAP to have a de-facto demo that requires IAP to | upgrade just isn't as good, IMO, because I want to be able | to distinguish demo-to-paid from nickel-and-diming IAP | garbage, and 2) have an actually-free filter for apps that | don't have ads, IAP, a paid upgrade, or heavy reliance on a | paid account of some kind. | ratww wrote: | I agree. The lack of distinction between Demo and IAP | apps manages to hurt apps with demos, free apps and | users. I really fail to see Apple's angle on this. Maybe | they're trying to educate customers to accept IAPs. | ghaff wrote: | If anything, I'd expect Apple to favor "fairly priced" | apps you pay for upfront as was mostly the norm at the | beginning. | | The situation is probably more that free-to-play in | various degrees of obnoxiousness that don't require an | initial purchase to use the app--possibly with a separate | demo version--is mostly what consumers expect these days. | baby wrote: | Or that money is where subscriptions are at, not single- | time payments. | danlugo92 wrote: | www.privacy.com www.revolut.com | dehrmann wrote: | One or two of my credit cards offers an unmaintained way to get | virtual card numbers with dollar and month limits. I'd just use | that. Save the awkwardness with the friend. | joelbluminator wrote: | I am sometimes uncomfortable developing features which I feel | arent 100% kosher. For most users they understand what they are | buying, but there is a certain segment (lets say 1 in 5) who | dont. As the company needs to grow at all costs u can imagine | they won't be quick to rectify the situation. Kinda sucks that | this is prevalent in our industry. | xg15 wrote: | > _including an option that's "at least as easy" as the one to | subscribe_ | | Weirdly enough this sounds like a loophole. | | I can already see some companies trying to bullshit their way | through an investigation: "Oh sure, we don't provide online | cancellation, because our way to cancel is _even easier_ than | online: " * _presents a way to cancel that is in practice more | difficult than online_ *. | | I think either mandating that cancelling must be possible using | the _same_ workflow as subscription or more clearly defining what | "easy" means would be important. | IanSanders wrote: | There's also a "genuinely super easy way to unsubscribe, except | it unfortunately is experiencing technical problems" | Humdeee wrote: | I'm sorry sir, but the Cancel button is only available on the | Advanced plans. Please upgrade to cancel (and allow 30 days | for changes to occur). | [deleted] | rolandog wrote: | It should have been stipulated that unsubscribing should be | offered immediately after the option to subscribe. | logfromblammo wrote: | I think "unsubscribe" should only be offered after a customer | has been charged. Before that, it should be "cancel" or | "annul". | | For instance, if there is a "free trial" period, wait until | after that expires, and the customer has been charged, before | offering an "unsubscribe". | | But aside from the hair-splitting, yes, you are absolutely | correct. If I have instant buyer's remorse, I should be able | to click it away just as instantly. | cgriswald wrote: | I don't agree. | | "Canceling" a free trial means the trial ends immediately. | | "Unsubscribing" during a free trial means the trial | continues, but you are no longer subscribed so when the | free part of your subscription runs out it won't | automatically renew. | suifbwish wrote: | What about GYMS that make you show up in person to cancel your | subscription but make it so you have to talk with someone who | doesn't work very often. | hwers wrote: | > _mandating that cancelling must be possible using the same | workflow as subscription_ | | I'd rather not put into the law that strict a requirement on | our UI design. | GrinningFool wrote: | > I'd rather not put into the law that strict a requirement | on our UI design. | | But you all had it your way and it is a net negative for the | actual humans who have to deal with not having that UI | element available. If it wasn't common practice to skip that | UI 'option' in the first place, the regulation wouldn't be | needed now. | lrem wrote: | In the meantime I'm sitting here and reading how the way out | of one service includes registered mail. Probably multiple, | couldn't figure that out. Fun, eh? | genocidicbunny wrote: | It's not really a strict requirement. If you want to make | your cancellation workflow opaque, your signup workflow | should be similarly opaque. There's no mandate for a specific | UI, just that you can't fuck over your users more on | cancellation than on signup. | HelixEndeavor wrote: | I would like to see 1 reason you would find that this UI | restriction would be a bad thing. | jjk166 wrote: | Let's say you subscribe to something as part of a 3rd party | bundle, like say you sign up for newsletter A and there's a | whole bunch of other options and you leave newsletter B | selected to also subscribe to that. Then the workflow for | unsubscribing from B would be going through the | subscription workflow for A. This would be bad for all | parties: it may be difficult or even impossible for the B | group to change A's subscription workflow, group A likely | suffers increased churn as pissed off consumers have its | subscription manager open anyways, but most importantly | it's incredibly unintuitive for the consumer to go through | A to change B, especially if they are only loosely related. | | While maybe rare for spam email, it's a pretty common | scenario for downloaded software. But more generally, there | are lots of workflows that are substantially easier in one | direction than the reverse. You'd either need to ban all | such UIs that are directional, or you open up a huge | loophole for bad actors. | Spivak wrote: | I'm gonna need one concrete example of this because I | cannot for the life of me think of a single instance | where bundled subscriptions, "buying Showtime through | your cable provider" shouldn't be required to allow | cancellation through the place you bought it. | | Sure, it sucks day one that 3rd party sellers don't have | cancellation flows but it's not an intractable problem. | jjk166 wrote: | You misunderstand, having the option to cancel through | the place you bought it is perfectly reasonable, the | problem is when you can _only_ cancel showtime via your | cable provider because that 's how you happened to | purchase it. | | For example, I recently purchased a new car. I had to go | there in person and do a whole bunch of paperwork. While | I was there, I registered my new vehicle, got an | insurance plan for it, and financing for the auto loan. | Imagine if to change insurance providers, I had to go | back to the dealership and spend 3 hours doing paperwork | because that was the workflow by which I just happened to | get my last provider. It would be absurd, and I'd | probably never go through the trouble even if my | insurance provider was more expensive than competitors. | handrous wrote: | Does... the rule prohibit other methods of cancellation? | jjk166 wrote: | It requires just the one specific method of cancellation. | Good actors will have multiple methods to make things | easier for people, but the rules aren't for them. The | rules are for the bad actors who don't want to make it | easy, and who will do the absolute minimum required. As I | said before, the issue is the creation of the loophole: | by specifying that the same workflow must be used, by | making your workflow highly directional, you can comply | with the rule while still screwing people over. | | Instead by focusing on how easy the workflow is, you | regulate what people actually care about. If | unsubscribing via the third party actually is as easy as | subscribing, that's good enough; but if it isn't they | have to implement better options. | xg15 wrote: | I can understand that. I think the reasoning for tight | restrictions is mostly to minimize the opportunity for | dark patterns. | | So instead of saying "cancelling must be possible through | the same workflow as subscribing", regulators could also | mandate something like the following: | | Option A: Design a web unsubscribe workflow once as part | of the regulation process, consult with UX expert to | ensure it's accessible and low-friction, then mandate | that providers must provide an unsubscribe flow that very | closely resembles the designed workflow (using the same | steps, same visual assets, etc). | | Option B: Design a web API for unsubscribing, mandate | that providers implement it and leave the UI to browser | vendors or other third parties that have no interest in | adding friction to the process. (This unfortunately risks | a conflict of interest if browser vendors themselves | offer subscriptions) | | I'd honestly have wished that the EU had used one of | those approaches for GDPR consent management - then we | wouldn't have the current mess of intentionally tedious | consent dialogs. | ketralnis wrote: | What's your super innovative cancellation UI that's being | held back by all of this overzealous regulation? | eropple wrote: | Other countries do, and it works fine. Why not? | xg15 wrote: | Why not? | | This is exactly the kind of UI that a company would want to | sabotage with dark patterns - so I think if any UI had | reasons to have strict legal requirements, it would be this | one. | chadash wrote: | That's just what's in the summary. The actual policy [1] spells | this out in more detail with examples: | | > _ROSCA requires negative option sellers to provide a simple, | reasonable means for consumers to cancel their contracts. To | meet this standard, negative option sellers should provide | cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the | method the consumer used to initiate the negative option | feature. For example, to ensure compliance with this simple | cancellation mechanism requirement, negative option sellers | should not subject consumers to new offers or similar attempts | to save the negative option arrangement that impose | unreasonable delays on consumers' cancellation efforts. In | addition, negative option sellers should provide their | cancellation mechanisms at least through the same medium (such | as website or mobile application) the consumer used to consent | to the negative option feature. The negative option seller | should provide, at a minimum, the simple mechanism over the | same website or web-based application the consumer used to | purchase the negative option feature. If the seller also | provides for telephone cancellation, it should provide, at a | minimum, a telephone number, and answer all calls to this | number during normal business hours, within a short time frame, | and ensure the calls are not lengthier or otherwise more | burdensome than the telephone call the consumer used to consent | to the negative option feature._ | | [1] | https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements... | xg15 wrote: | Ah, this sounds a lot better. Thanks for digging in! | dhimes wrote: | I would like it better if the word "shall" was used instead | of "should." | susiecambria wrote: | Agree. As a policy wonk, I find it particularly odd since | "shall" is the language of lawmakers and regulators. | [deleted] | apendleton wrote: | Just responded to another comment to the same effect, but | this is neither a law nor a regulation, but rather a | policy statement, probably so they can get away with not | having to go through APA-mandated notice-and-comment | rulemaking, so it's deliberately framed as | recommendations for how to comply with existing | rules/statutes rather than creation of new ones. | 8ytecoder wrote: | Aren't that the same? I thought 'must' would be more | appropriate. | IncRnd wrote: | Those words actually differ in these sorts of documents | but are used as "terms of art". Shall is | a mandatory requirement. Should implies a goal and | is non-mandatory. Must is not often used, since it | really doesn't seem different from Shall. | garmaine wrote: | Everyone is responding with quotes from IETF and ISO | documents. But this is a legal context, and it is not | necessarily the case that they have the same technical | meaning. I too wonder what the answer to your question | is. | LambdaComplex wrote: | "Should" means that there are scenarios where doing | something is not necessary, and therefore really does not | constitute a hard requirement. "Shall" means that you are | inherently required to do something; it is much closer | (if not identical) in meaning to "must". "Should" is the | subjunctive mood; there is an implied "if" somewhere in | there: You _should_ do this if blah blah blah, I _would_ | do this if blah blah blah, etc. | | There are probably some subtle connotational differences | between "shall" and "must" that the average reader would | not care about (and which I don't feel like figuring out) | meshaneian wrote: | In general "should" is a recommendation, not a | requirement. "shall" indicates a | requirement "should" indicates a recommendation | "may" is used to indicate that something is permitted | "can" is used to indicate that something is possible, for | example, that an organization or individual is able to do | something | | https://www.iso.org/foreword-supplementary- | information.html | | https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt | | Additionally, your suggestion of "must" has valid reasons | for being preferred in contracts over "shall": | | https://www.plainlanguage.gov/guidelines/conversational/s | hal... | DrammBA wrote: | If you don't mind me asking, what's the point of | "should"? Usually anything that is not a hard requirement | is promptly ignored, so I'm not clear why is time devoted | to create "should" statements. | apendleton wrote: | The way they've framed this is not that it's a new rule, | but rather, a statement as to how they intend to enforce | the existing rules that are already on the books, and a | "recommendation" to regulated entities as to what actions | they should/shouldn't take in order to not suffer | negative enforcement consequences (in other words, it's | not "the rule is now that you must do this," but rather | "just FYI, our interpretation of current | rules/statutes/whatever is that behavior X is already | prohibited, so if you don't want to get in trouble with | us for failing to comply, you really ought to do this"). | | This is advantageous to the agency if they can get away | with it because new rulemaking involves a bunch of extra, | lengthy process under the Administrative Procedures Act | (they have to publish a bunch of drafts and collect | public comments on them, then address any substantive | comments they receive, etc.). | onionisafruit wrote: | "What's easier than making a quick phone call? It's certainly | easier than getting internet access, typing a url into a | browser address bar, validating a ssl certificate, establishing | an http session, authenticating with your credentials then | finding and clicking the cancel button." | [deleted] | htek wrote: | 2010's GoDaddy, is that you? They used to pull this, then you | would stay on the phone seemingly forever until you got a | (the?) CSR that would first try the carrot of more services | for free if you just re-upped then tried to browbeat you into | the deal if you still weren't convinced. Also, the New York | times did this, I think you can cancel online now. There | should be multiple ways people can sub/unsub, but if you sub | in one manner, you should be able to unsub in the same manner | without jumping through hoops. | JTbane wrote: | This is the most tone-deaf thing I have read today. Logging | in to a website is miles easier than waiting hours in a phone | queue. | WarOnPrivacy wrote: | Don't feel bad. I missed the subtext too. | jhawk28 wrote: | I think its pure sarcasm. | psyc wrote: | The quotes indicate this is the subscription service | playing dumb. | spiderice wrote: | It's pretty obviously sarcasm, and an example of what some | ill-intentioned company could try and argue. Thus the | quotes. | dfinninger wrote: | Given the quotes around the parent commenter's text, I | think they are mocking the absurd response of a fictitious | company trying to argue that a phone call is easier than a | button. | jonnycomputer wrote: | Bingo. | koheripbal wrote: | Some might try that but one call with the FTC legal team will | make any company stop that shit immediately. | | You don't piss off gov't regulators | user3939382 wrote: | > You don't piss off gov't regulators | | Yep. If you deal with them you learn quickly that all that | "splitting hairs" stuff you see in Hollywood dramas buys | you nothing. For a lot of administrative compliance, with | the state or Feds, they are judge jury and executioner and | the rules are what they say they are. Unless you have a lot | of money and influence don't play games with them. | twothamendment wrote: | Yup, the same rules apply to building inspectors. You | better hope you get the good one because they can twist | codes around on a whim and they are always right. | repiret wrote: | Depends on the inspector and the contractor. More than | once I've had contractors successfully win arguments with | building inspectors in the wrong. | thayne wrote: | > Unless you have a lot of money and influence don't play | games with them. | | There are a fair number of companies that do these dark | patterns that have a lot of money and influence though. | mindslight wrote: | You're certainly right for personal advice, but does the | New York Times not have a lot of money? They've certainly | got the influence bit covered. Once you can buy enough of | your own bureaucrats to tie up their bureaucrats, | regulators' power isn't so clear. | BizarroLand wrote: | More powerful than that though is that you don't want the | regulators to have to do any work. Once they have work to | do they are insanely efficient, at least when it involves | punishing the person who made them do work. | daariomj wrote: | The Economist Magazine makes it extremely hard to unsubscribe. I | had to change my credit card. | aczerepinski wrote: | I suspect for many sites you could change your address to | California and then cancel online. Sites have had to support CA | cancelations for years. | uncomputation wrote: | This will be great for insurance and gym customers. Both make it | as difficult as possible to cancel. | stretchwithme wrote: | My guess is making it easy to unsubscribe to everything will make | it more likely that people will experimentally subscribe to | things in general. | | This is actually better for users and legitimate, useful | services. | Yizahi wrote: | This exactly is why every year I think about subscribing to some | expensive (for me) journal, then google horror stories about | unsubscribing and abandon this idea. | | Some people above mentioned inconvenient work hours when calling | to unsub, but it's not only that. International subscribers must | also pay to simply call another country. If will be put on hold | for tens of minutes or more, then the price of that call will | easily be more than annual sub price. | | I suspect that even if FTC will change something in US, | international subscribers will still be left out, because this is | what usually happens in such cases. | algesten wrote: | I had this exact experience with New York Times. I subscribed, | realized I didn't like their editorial style at all, and then | had to call long international phone calls to get it to stop. | literallyaduck wrote: | Now, do must click to renew. How many elderly are still paying | for magic jack, AOL, or other vampiric services. | daertommy wrote: | Is this the most upvoted post on HN? | msravi wrote: | Meanwhile in India, The Reserve Bank rolled out a new policy | (from Oct-1 this year) for recurring transactions on credit cards | that requires the cardholder to provide an "e-mandate" for | subscriptions with an additional factor of authentication (AFA). | The e-mandate can be withdrawn at any time by the cardholder, | giving them control of their subscriptions. | | https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1166... | rogual wrote: | I just expect these tactics from periodicals these days. Last | time I signed up to one (The Economist) I used a pre-paid debit | card for this very reason. | | Sure enough, they eventually gave me a reason to cancel (popup | modals over their online articles for paying customers) and I | just emptied the card and sent an email to their customer service | saying "I hereby cancel my subscription; you are no longer | authorized to charge my card". | | Can't refuse to cancel me if I have no money _taps temple_ | jffry wrote: | Making them unable to easily collect money from you doesn't | magically erase your contractual relationship. | | They probably still just canceled your account since it's paid | up front and it'd be more hassle to try and collect on your | debt. | rogual wrote: | Yep, if you've signed an agreement to remain a paying | customer for a set duration and you pull this, they can send | collections after you. In this case, I hadn't. | cutemonster wrote: | Could they have sued you if they had wanted to? | | If, theoretically, there was an unsubscribe button in one's | user settings that you hadn't seen, and you sent an email | instead and blocked the payment card? | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | No one would sue unless the balance was into thousands, or | they're just an individual pursuing a vendetta. What would | likely happen is they'd charge it off to a debt collection | agency that would hassle you by whatever means of contact | they have for a couple years until you paid or they gave up | on it. And when they give up on it they usually just sell it | downstream to an even more crappy company more willing to use | aggressive tactics. | cutemonster wrote: | Oops sounds both scary and realistic | | Maybe the collector would do a credit check to find out how | much money they could get from you | jasonwatkinspdx wrote: | Naw, they wouldn't want to pay for a credit check. They | run boiler room style call centers where the folks | hassling you work on commission. So they just push | whatever leads they have to their staff and make it their | problem to squeeze money out of it. The entire industry | is really, really, scummy, and barely one step better | than those fraudsters that pretend to be the IRS. | Nextgrid wrote: | The email is evidence he's let them know of his intention to | cancel. Unless there is some major clause in the contract | that entitles them to more money such as a minimum | commitment, I don't see a problem. | | Granted anyone can sue for anything anyway, but I can't see | them having a strong case. They'd be paying a lot of money to | try and litigate this and demonstrate their bad faith in the | process. | snakeboy wrote: | Good thinking. When I cancelled it (No complaints, I just did | one of the 12 week offers as it's too expensive for me in | general) they made me go talk to a sales person in their chat | room, and they actually put me on hold for ~20 minutes while | waiting for the queue to clear. Then they try to sell you on a | reduced rate before they'll _let_ you cancel. C 'est abuse. | cheggisguilty wrote: | Chegg Study for university students does not link to a cancel | subscription on their website, you have to search google "how to | remove sub from chegg" and then you can find a "Cancel Sub" help | article on the Chegg website. You can not get directly to the | cancel article from their base website. They should be fined for | the dark pattern. | cute_boi wrote: | Many website I have encountered has similar dark patterns. Its | not just chegg but other too like facebook. Most people don't | know meaning of deactivate vs delete (and delete even takes | like 30 days ridiculous). And many website like Adobe will make | you follow series of steps like 7-8 pages. And they try to | convince you shouldn't cancel via examples like "Your following | services are active you no longer can access them". At last | page it was like this "Right now we are offering 30% discount | you can grab this easily etc.". | | Till its coded to law I don't think we can expect anything from | corporation. | GuB-42 wrote: | Several times, I've seen that the easiest way to cancel was to | block the payment. Your subscription won't last long if you don't | pay. | | I guess that in theory, they could sue, but not only it is a | small sum, they also probaby don't want to expose their dark | patterns to a court of law. | elwell wrote: | Consequently, our children's children will never appreciate this | humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM | idworks1 wrote: | Anecdata (only because I don't have access to the data anymore). | Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click | unsubscribe. In fact, when the friction is so low, the customer | is likely to start the subscription back. | | I say this as someone who worked in customer service automation. | The worst customer satisfaction score with lowest rate of re- | subscription is from companies that make it hell to unsubscribe. | | I've seen customers send messages like "Cancel and refund | immediately!" Since our response was ai driven, we cancel and | refund no questions asked in less then a minute (we do fraud | check in the background). Many times you get a response back from | the customer apologizing for their tone and praising the product. | Some of them restart the subscription a cycle or two later. | | When you make it hard to cancel, you lose customers on the long | term. Make it easy, in fact make it friendly. Unless you are | selling a shady product, there is no reason to believe customers | won't come back. | | Edit: typo | jonny_eh wrote: | > The worst customer satisfaction score with least lowest rate | of re-subscription is from companies that make it hell to | unsubscribe. | | Does "least lowest" mean highest? Or did you mean | "least/lowest"? | idworks1 wrote: | oops, that was a typo. Fixed it. | Joeri wrote: | There is this common perception of companies as if they are | entirely rational organizations, and every policy that we don't | like exists because it is profitable and benefits the company | at the expense of the customer. But sometimes bad policies are | just bad, they benefit no one, and they exist for dumb reasons. | Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies. | somethingwitty1 wrote: | An opposite statement can be said with the same amount of | authority though: There is a common perception that companies | only create policies we don't like through accidents and | unforeseeable outcomes, not by specifically crafting policies | to benefit the company. But sometimes bad policies are | malicious and designed to maximize profits, even at the | expense of long-term profits and customer retention. Maybe | call to unsubscribe is one of those policies. | | As someone that has worked (briefly) for a company that | operated in this fashion (and being a partial owner of one | that the CEO tried to shift to this model...we got the board | together and fired him), it is not an accidentally bad | policy. It is actively discussed as a way to squeeze out an | extra pay cycle (and often more) of payments. In recorded | meetings or audited channels (such as email) or even PR | releases, you are guided to discuss it as a "personal touch | with the customer" and to help "lost customers" resolve the | issues rather than cancel. You even try to convince your | employees/engineers that is the reason. But when it is face- | to-face conversations, the discussions are around the dollars | and squeezing out as many pay cycles as you can. I know I was | being a bit cheeky with my first paragraph, but this is | definitely not one of those "whoops, we didn't think this | through" kind of policies. If it were, the policy would have | changed without the FTC or laws being needed. | MathMonkeyMan wrote: | There is a third option. | | 1. "Whoops, we didn't think this through." | | 2. This makes us more money in the end, that's why it's so | pervasive. | | 3. It's difficult to correlate "making more money in the | end" with our cancellation policy, so we make a measurement | or otherwise tell ourselves a story consistent with (2), | even though (2)'s conclusion doesn't truly follow. | | This reminds me of topics in government policy, psychology, | etc. | Cederfjard wrote: | You've only really stated though that these policies are | deliberate, which I think few people would have thought | otherwise, not that they're necessarily the best policies | there can be. The question is if they're actually better | for the bottom line than the alternative (given the | timeframe that the people who make and influence these | decisions care about). Is "squeezing out an extra pay | cycle" or two possible missing the forest for the trees, if | customers who were happy with the cancellation process are | more likely to return, proselytize for you and so on? Not | saying that's the case, very open to being influenced | either way if anyone has data to share. | bojan wrote: | A lot of charities in the Netherlands do the same thing, where | you can't just give a one-time donation, but have to subscribe to | a monthly contribution. | | That is horrible enough as it is. | | But then to unsubscribe, you have to call them (during their and | your office hours) and endure another couple of pitches to keep | you subscribed until you are finally allowed to cancel. | | And then some of them even have a cancellation term of one month. | alpaca128 wrote: | In my case it was trivial to unsubscribe, but they then started | sending me all kinds of letters in regular intervals. And never | stopped, I still get them years later. I'm certain by now they | paid more for those stupid letters and pens than I donated in | the first place. Which is yet another reason for me to never | waste money there again, as I now know where it's used. | Epskampie wrote: | This is the reason i have a label next to my doorbell that | says: "Donations only without subscription and to volunteers". | Since then we've not have a lot of charities ring the bell, and | the ones that do I actually want to give to. | danielvaughn wrote: | This kind of practice isn't only in the comms industry. I had a | gym membership back when I lived in NYC. Called them up one day, | got a membership within just a few minutes over the phone. | | A few years later when I moved, I called to tell them I'd have to | cancel. I had forgotten to cancel before I moved, so I was | already in another state (Florida). They told me I had to come | into the gym physically to cancel, even when I told them I had | already moved. | | I called several times, asking everyone including the manager to | just let me cancel over the phone. I remember saying "ok so | you're telling me I have to literally fly to NYC just to cancel | my membership with you?" And they said "I'm sorry sir, that's our | policy." After a week or so, I threatened them with a lawsuit, | and then they complied. | usrusr wrote: | This is why consumers are so eager to use obscenely expensive (in | terms of what the recipient actually gets) payment methods like | Google/Apple in-app subscriptions. | timwis wrote: | Thank goodness! When trying to cancel NY Times, I had to cancel | it in PayPal because I couldn't get through to NYT! | GuardianCaveman wrote: | I would just add that services like privacy.com that allow you to | create burner cards or cards with specific limits has really | helped me with things like gym membership or other places that | may make it hard to cancel. | timwis wrote: | This service is great. I wish they offered it in the UK. | DarthNebo wrote: | Stripe can be a good enforcer of this. A lot of banking accounts | opened online refuse to close the same way too. | whoknowswhat11 wrote: | I think the hypocrisy of allowing call to cancel and not doing | anything about to stop it WHILE suing apple (which DOES make | click to cancel a reality for subscriptions) was probably a bit | too glaring. | | The reason people go for the walled gardens is because the govt, | which would be the natural control point, has dropped the ball | totally in terms of online scams and crap. | | And no, I'm not talking about going after google for the | umpteenth time for some random thing - but the straight crap / | lies / scams (impossible to cancel online subscriptions, bogus | tech support installing back doors etc). | timwis wrote: | I hope they do something like this for gym memberships! | swayvil wrote: | Ran into this with Verizon. | [deleted] | wallzz wrote: | in France, it's click to subscribe, send a physical hand written | letter with signature using a tracking number, and you have to do | this the right time( usually 2 months before the anniversary), if | you miss it, you have to wait another year. | mercy_dude wrote: | Good. The worst experience I ever had was with NY Times when I | wanted to unsubscribe I had to go through multiple call/chats | with a person and it was almost impossible since it was hard to | get in touch with one. | | I am glad FTC is doing something others are afraid to do. | cossatot wrote: | I tried to cancel my NYT subscription a few weeks ago after my | heavily discounted rate went up to normal, and the second web | page in the process offered to cut the price by half, which was | acceptable to me. Although it is still a pain to cancel, the | no-haggle rate reductions are nice. | silicon2401 wrote: | Stuff like this is why I'm a happy ad blocker and piracy user. | Even if you want to play by the big corporations' games, they | find a way to screw you over. | kemitche wrote: | I've successfully cancelled my NYT sub online before. It's a | little tucked away but it exists. I remember when I first | subscribed that wasn't possible - because a few months in they | sent me an email basically talking about how awesome their new | "online subscription self management system" is. | linspace wrote: | Ah, lucky you. I read your comment on my phone and came to my | desktop to type comfortably my rant. | | Have you ever tried to cancel a loan? The following story may | or not apply to you. It happened in a small country called | Spain: | | Some time ago I bought a car. They offer you a very nice | discount if you, instead of paying upfront, finance the | purchase. Why? I asked the seller, it makes no sense. He gave | me a list of more or less valid reasons, leaving the most | important out: the draconian interest rate, which I inmediatly | noticed. Noticing also the lack of integrity I decided to play | along and took the loan with the intent of cancelling it ASAP. | To summarize: it took something like 10 calls and saying on the | last one that I was going to send a certified mail and | forbidding my bank to pay a single EUR. I paid the loan and | saved several thousand euros, even after paying "cancellation | costs". | | The whole enterprise has changed my view about regulation. It | was regulation that gave me the right to cancel the loan | against their will, and capped the cancellation costs, which I | find it amazing they are even allowed, to compensate "for lost | earnings". After the 2008 crisis a lot of regulation has been | put in place affecting the banks. It's incredible they are | allowing still this kind of scam to buy a car. | mbg721 wrote: | In the US, financing is also a lucrative profit source for | car sales, but I think prepayment penalties are less common. | nickpp wrote: | You took a loan and "the draconian interest rate" was a | _surprise_?! I would 've thought that was the most important | factor. | Spivak wrote: | You're missing the "car dealership game" that has to be | played sometimes. Lots of places will offer you a cash | discount and/or 0% interest if you finance with them. They | get cash kickbacks and sometimes a cut of the interest. | | Now you, the savvy customer, see an opportunity here. You | were going to buy the car in cash and so there's an obvious | play; buy the car, take the financing, and then immediately | pay off the loan (or when the 0% interest expires). It's a | win-win right? Not for the bank unfortunately which is why | nowadays there are early payoff fees and dealerships will | try to make it annoying to pay them. Terrible terrible | incentives but the discount can be worth the headache -- | the discount is almost always more than the early payoff | fee. | Humdeee wrote: | > nice discount if you, instead of paying upfront, finance | the purchase | | Save $3,000 today so you can spend $12,000 tomorrow! | blago wrote: | I called their BS and told my credit card company that this | subscription was no longer authorized. They were happy to | cancel it on my behalf and refunded the last charge. | bigmattystyles wrote: | When they want you to call, tell them you're deaf. Works every | time. | havelhovel wrote: | The Economist does this as well. Very frustrating to have to | explain multiple times over chat that I just want to cancel and | that no I don't want any deals and that yes I understand the | terms of the offer being made and that no I still don't want | the deal even though I understand you are telling me that this | deal really is in my best interest. | | And yet I didn't need to talk to any employees at all before | giving them my money. | JacobThreeThree wrote: | Yep, I had this experience with The Economist as well. | | It was very difficult to cancel and it was by phone only. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | The economist also does not have unsubscribe links in their | marketing emails, the ones that you get after you're a | subscriber. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | That's why I mercilessly hit the spam button on such | emails. Any email which is slightly uncalled for is spam in | my books. | la6471 wrote: | Not only news sites , but all kinds of business should adhere | to this. Good job! | analog31 wrote: | My family just cancelled NY Times and our local paper, and | switched to online-only for the NYT. It was quite a rigamarole. | First, we had to call during business hours. Next, they went | through a lengthy selling process before letting us cancel. | | We were simply filling the bin with too much paper every week, | and the local paper raised its prices. I can get _Prince | Valiant_ online. | 88913527 wrote: | Anyone with access to a public library (photo ID will get you a | free library card) can access eLibrary services that get | updated daily. No need to pay for NYT, for WSJ, or any major | national newspaper. By paying taxes, you're already paying for | digital access to this media. | | I applaud the FTC's decision but I wish people realized there's | more practical means for accessing media that is more | frequently locked behind paywalls these days. You fight it with | a library card. | jcgoette wrote: | >photo ID will get you a free library card | | Results may vary. | rootsudo wrote: | No, Librarians are pretty liberal with this. Many in big | cities, e.g. Chicago, Seattle, etc don't even need to see | an ID, just a bill but if you show up and pester back and | forth a few times they'll still give you one. | | No government identity needed. A bill helps. | OldHand2018 wrote: | In large cities especially, libraries will have an | "independent" charitable foundation attached to them. It | is very prestigious in the local community to be on the | board or to donate large sums to these foundations. Thus, | large city libraries are typically excellent with plenty | of funding and can afford to offer services to the poor | and indigent which smaller libraries cannot. | | In the US, a lot of libraries are funded by property | taxes, and the various laws that allow these taxes to be | collected (for library purposes) will state that the | library cannot offer services to people outside the | geographic boundary for a lower cost than is charged to | the people inside the boundary and are paying the taxes. | That's why they need "proof" of where you live before | giving you a card. But then you also have laws requiring | services to be provided to the homeless regardless of | proof of residence (how do you prove your residence when | you are homeless?). How does the library resolve that | legal conflict? It pretty much always comes down to money | and local attitudes (see first paragraph). | badwolf wrote: | I always recommend folks get a library card, as they will | generally provide free access to these as well as many other | newspapers... However there's often 30-90 day embargo to | access current issues/articles online. | xattt wrote: | This depends on your library system. I am under a provincial | library system which is woefully underfunded. We get | "flavours of the month" services that are likely trial | versions offered to libraries before lock-in. Some of the | choices over the years were Freegal Music, Ancestry.com and | some sort of language training thing. | | Our Overdrive tier is probably the cheapest and I | occasionally use my parents' library card for expanded | Overdrive access, who live in a place with a much better | funded library system. | devilbunny wrote: | Fully agree. My local library system is badly funded (as | in, they let a building full of books rot rather than | simply move them, and the main library has been closed for | several years due to roof and sewage leaks) and we have no | easy option to pay for a good one. | datavirtue wrote: | We should have funded libraries in the infrastructure | bill. A rounding error would have been enough to | supercharge them. | voakbasda wrote: | Governments have realized that an uneducated populace is | easier to control. Or maybe that is too cynical a view | for HN? | koheripbal wrote: | Not only is this not true everywhere, it can also be much | more cumbersome to access. | | Not to mention that supporting quality journalism is probably | one of the best things you can do today to make the world | better. | alisonkisk wrote: | I agree, and thats why I donate to ProPublica, which is | free and doesn't use it's reporting as reputation | laundering for an Opinion section that promotes billionaire | profits ahead of humanity. | | Also, using the library is supporting journalism. The | library pays for a digital license | chefandy wrote: | ProPublica does such good work. If anyone reading this | hasn't checked them out, I encourage them to, soon. | smabie wrote: | Honest question: where can I actually find quality | journalism? | chefandy wrote: | I've tried that workflow with multiple public and university | libraries. While the experience varies from Library to | Library-- my current underfunded city seems not to have | current non-archive digital newspaper access at all-- and | some new commonly adopted platform I'm not aware of might | have solved the problem, the workflow isn't compatible with | the way most people discover news stories. It works decently, | even if a bit clunky, if you are moderately database savvy | and your use case resembles a print user's-- i.e. browse | today's headlines from a small number of sources and use them | to decide which articles to read. (Which is also probably the | best way to avoid algorithmic bias if your source choice is | solid.) However, most people access their news on a whim | through social media, web searches, and aggregators designed | to provide only the most relevant and appealing selection of | stories without having to think about it. | | While you say it's more practical, that's an extremely | subjective metric. For many people, spending a few bucks a | month for something that works with their current workflow | and saves rather than costs time is far more practical. Also, | I've never seen a Library setup that gives access to | desirable paywalled extra features like podcasts or NYT Food. | I'm sure that's quite deliberate on the NYT's part. | | I'm happy to give a few bucks a month to news orgs; in fact I | wish they were nonprofits that would somehow let me pay | enough more to abandon their asinine surveillance capitalism | tendencies and expand free access, but I have no idea what | that would look like logistically. If there was a network of | newspaper-like organizations that operated like PBS and NPR, | ideally with its own news wire, that would be a great start, | IMO. | | People having free and easy access to news from non- | government-run sources (PBS and NPR are not government-run, | naysayers) is a public good. I wish we could figure out how | to shape the industry to reflect that. | wonderwonder wrote: | Strange that this hit HN today. 2 days ago I wondered what the | cancellation policy was for the WSJ and checked. At the time I | did not plan on cancelling but after finding out that it was | "call to cancel" I called at that moment. I cannot stand the | policy where it takes 3 seconds to sign up online but you have | to call in to cancel. If I can help it I wont give money to | companies that do it. In WSJ defense (barely) it was a quick | process, probably took 5 minutes. | Axien wrote: | I just canceled the WSJ. It is not terrible. They will try | and convince you to cancel but will eventually let you | cancel. The worst is SirriusXM Radio. | infecto wrote: | I was waiting for SXM to pop up. Literally one of the worst | companies for this and I say this as someone who sadly | worked for them for a little bit. You can manage everything | in the web portal but to cancel you click a button and it | tells you to call them. I know they have content and some | people use them but they literally have so much friction in | cancelling that it is a huge part of their business. | foobarbecue wrote: | I have wanted to cancel WSJ for over a year now but their | process kept me from doing it. I started a few times and then | was like I really don't have time for this nonsense right | now. I wonder if I do it now if I can get my subscription | fees refunded. | wrycoder wrote: | You have to be firm and terse. They try to drag you into a | sales dialog and offer a much lower rate. Tell them, "I | don't want to discuss why I'm canceling, and I'm not | interested in continuing, regardless of your rate." Just | keep repeating that. | wonderwonder wrote: | Now that I think about it I think they did try and | convince me to not cancel but I have become so | disassociated from human niceties since I started working | from home the last few years I just interrupted them and | told them to stop and I wanted to cancel. Kind of | worrying that I did it without thinking or realizing. | Might be time for me to reintegrate with society. | AYBABTME wrote: | I tried canceling WSJ and they wouldn't take the call | outside business hours. So I just called their Hong Kong | office and cancelled with them, and refused to discuss | anything but the immediate cancellation, and stopped them | in their track when they veered off. | koheripbal wrote: | Getting the physical WSJ paper is ridiculous, but the digital | subscription to the WSJ is great. | | It's the only one I pay for happily. | alisonkisk wrote: | Can you cancel using the same medium you subscribed? That's | the topic of the thread, not the current quality of the | content. | bborud wrote: | Just out of curiosity: what would have happened if you had | just stopped paying them after sending them an email | informing them that you wanted to cancel? | wonderwonder wrote: | Its the online version so they have my cc on record and | charge me monthly. I guess I could have changed my cc to an | invalid one but not sure if they have some sort of | authentication process before accepting a new one, likely. | If that was possible likely they would cancel it after a | couple declined charges but you always run the admittedly | small risk that they will just send you to collections | which is no fun at all. Even if you are in the right you | still have to deal with a ton of annoyance and try and get | your credit restored if they report it to the credit | agency. | cgriswald wrote: | You could probably also have let them charge you and then | disputed the charges with your credit card company with | your email as proof you shouldn't have been charged. | beckman466 wrote: | > Strange that this hit HN today. | | these 'exciting' new dark pattern strategies spread very | quickly among firms. many people are suddenly dealing with | them. not strange imo | maskros wrote: | 5 minutes is still 4 minutes and 55 seconds too long. There's | no good reason it should take 59 times longer than it ought | to. | wonderwonder wrote: | No argument from me. They asked why I was cancelling and I | told them it was because I had to call to cancel. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | Next time pay for the subscription by check (mail it in). | They can't bill you again automatically. | jjnoakes wrote: | Is this legal? I assume if they wanted to (which | admittedly is unlikely) they could send you to | collections for not paying for the renewal that you | agreed to when you subscribed. | tpxl wrote: | In short, no it's not legal. Just because they can't take | the money from you doesn't mean you don't have to pay | them. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | The subscriptions are fixed terms. Not lifetime. Why | should they be allowed to bill me beyond the subscription | term? | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | You're subscribing for a year or whatever is the fixed | period. How is it illegal to pay for it with a physical | check? | jjnoakes wrote: | It's not illegal to pay for it with a physical check; | it's illegal (unless your original agreement | automatically terminated after a year) to not then pay | for the automatic renewal at the end of the year. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | Happy to break the law in self-defense. | bborud wrote: | I cancelled NYT by simply emailing them and telling them that I | would be stopping payment. I was curious to see if they'd do | anything. I never heard from them (and my subscription was | miraculously cancelled). | | I'm not sure if it's a factor that I live in Europe? | | I don't think I ever want to give NYT my money again though. I | have no wish to deal with scummy businesses. | bakoo wrote: | When I had to go through that about 7-8 years ago, actually on | behalf of a boss of mine who couldn't be bothered sitting | through the whole thing, it took a full 15 minutes. | | I will continue to bring it up when I can, no matter if they | change their ways. | kwanbix wrote: | I my home country the law says that you must be allowed to | unsubscribe the same way you subscribed. Which makes sense. | tzs wrote: | I wonder if I somehow got on a super secret VIP list and get | special treatment? | | I called, got through quickly, told them I did not want to | renew because I found that I wasn't actually reading it all | that much, and they promptly canceled. | | Somewhere in there I realized I should make sure they were only | cancelling the paper so I told them I wanted to keep my | crossword subscription and that I realized that this would mean | I'd pay full price when my crossword renewed instead of the 50% | off price paper subscribers get. | | They told me it was indeed only the paper that I had cancelled, | but told me I was wrong about the crossword price. The offer | for paper subscribers is to buy a half price crossword | subscription and that's what I bought. It remains a half price | crossword prescription as long as you keep it. | colejohnson66 wrote: | Not being sarcastic, but what's special about the NYT | crossword? Why not just go to a Barnes&Noble (or whatever) | and grab a crossword book off the shelf? | mikeyouse wrote: | The NYT crossword subscription gets you full access to | their app which has every crossword they've ever published, | and a bunch of other crossword-like puzzles. | nobodyandproud wrote: | You ever tried canceling Amazon Prime? | | Amazon words the cancellation prompt in a way that it SEEMS like | you're out the $139.00 when it renewed. | | And injects many options to keep you, while you think you're | canceling. | | But no, it's prorated (because it'd be illegal otherwise) and | it's all the way at the bottom many pages down. | | There are many, many dark patterns | PaulHoule wrote: | Yes! | dwighttk wrote: | Is nytimes going to go out of business? | 999900000999 wrote: | I think Match got sued for this, they go out of their way to stop | you from canceling since as a business practice they'll show you | bot messages before you sign up. Once you give them 40$ or | whatever then you'll immediately see all your matches are fake. | | This alone is already a problem, but then canceling is | deliberately made difficult. | | The problem is they've ( via their child brands like Tinder as | well) made billions doing this. If you can run a business, make | 10 billion dollars and then pay a 10 million dollar fine, you'll | just pay the fines. | | I don't have a good solution to this. I personally refuse to give | my money to or work for companies in this space. | arrosenberg wrote: | > I don't have a good solution to this. | | Break up IAC, which is an illegal combination, throw Barry | Diller in jail for fraud and seize his assets. | thrwyoilarticle wrote: | >The problem is they've ( via their child brands like Tinder as | well) made billions doing this. If you can run a business, make | 10 billion dollars and then pay a 10 million dollar fine, | you'll just pay the fines. | | Even worse, you'll choose to do it instead of doing something | productive with your time. Why do something risky and expensive | for less money? | totorovirus wrote: | Reminds me of my wsj cancellation. I procrastinated twice calling | via hotline and they ripped off three months of subscription from | me. | aigo wrote: | The Times of London does this, and so does The Telegraph. | | Most of my subscriptions go via PayPal or Google so I can just | cancel the payment and eventually my service will be cancelled | for lack of payment. | dazc wrote: | The Telegraph have stopped doing it. I think they have now | realised it's counter-productive. Hopefully, others will | follow. | | Incidentally, I also think it's now common knowledge that | unsubscribing will, in most case, initiate a lower price offer. | Gymkana wrote: | I've used the Times a handful of times as a student. It's | always painful when student discount ends and you ring up and | say I can't afford PS26 a month. They'll drop it to PS10 then | PS5 but they never match my student price. I've had to leave | during bachelors and professional qualifications. | tombert wrote: | I remember about 15 years ago, I signed up for Real Rhapsody's | unlimited music service. I tried it for about two months, didn't | like it, and found that canceling required me _call_ them on a | weekday during business hours (ending at 4pm eastern). I was | still in high school at the time, and this is pre-smartphone so | it would have been hard for me to do this during lunch, so it was | pretty hard for me to cancel. Eventually I had to ask my mom to | impersonate me, call them, and cancel it, but it was an idiotic | thing. How uncomfortable are you that users will _like_ your | service if you have to _trick_ them into staying subscribed? | | Granted, it was the Real corporation, I really should have seen | crap like that coming. | bredren wrote: | > How uncomfortable are you that users will like your service | if you have to trick them into staying subscribed? | | It reeks of insecurity. The issue is that it may be an honest | reflection that it fails to deliver actual value. | | I can think of many examples of organizations I've seen that | have used / are a form of dark pattern opt-out/unsub now: | | - Wave Apps the accounting software with their payroll service. | | - burning man org in their 2020 ticketing presale | | - Ancestry.com | | What the FTC needs to get into labelinf purposefully confusing | unsubscribe interfaces that trick the user into not performing | the action of intent as fraud. | | If internal docs show intent to mislead, (which in many cases | they will) companies should face criminal charges. | inetknght wrote: | > _If internal docs show intent to mislead,_ | | by the time a complaint is made then the internal docs have | fallen out of the company's retention and backup policies... | lagadu wrote: | In Portugal the law makes it so you can cancel any service using | the same means that you used to subscribe it, so if they support | subscribing online, unsubscribing also has to be doable the same | way; same goes for via phone, personal or whatnot. It makes | sense, prevents service providers from making it too difficult to | terminate a contract. | mdp2021 wrote: | This is extremely reasonable and civilized. Would you say that | the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the | direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability? | | I have noticed of other EU countries that a response against | abuse may exist, but severely delayed and only partial (e.g. | about sale of misrepresented services and other contractual | scams, especially when carried out over the phone). | DyslexicAtheist wrote: | > Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal | is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards | good sense and reliability? | | not GP, ... it is a role-model when it comes to the points | listed above. I think it's hard to answer your question | because how would one define "good sense and reliability". At | the risk of being called out for _whataboutism_ , here is | something that would be sobering for most people (like | myself) applauding the current "good parts": | | https://www.biometricupdate.com/202111/portuguese- | lawmakers-... | FpUser wrote: | >"...At the risk of being called out for whataboutism..." | | One who calls the other "whataboutist" is usually a | hypocrite. | kranke155 wrote: | No. Portugal is a (atm) an radically aging country, it is | rife with corruption and politics are poorly led. Brain drain | is massive. Employment is extremely difficult for both the | jobseeker and the employer due to poor competitiveness, low | productivity and terrible regulation. Healthcare systems have | been dropping off a cliff. | | IMO going the direction of a dying country. And I am | Portuguese. | | Virtually anyone I know with a good skill set that's | profitable abroad has moved. | mig39 wrote: | Yes, everyone I know, in my age range, has moved to France, | Switzerland, Canada, etc. | | We all want to _retire_ in Portugal, but it seems there are | few employment opportunities unless you know the right | people. | | I'm sure "retirement" is the only growth industry in | Portugal these days. | codingclaws wrote: | Portugal is logical on some stuff. | | Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only | advertise yourself. I wonder what other countries have | prostitution set up like this. | | Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light. | | Decriminalization of all drugs obviously too. | speeder wrote: | I am from Brazil, and here speed limits are literally | dangeorus. | | 1. In my city people mostly ignore speed limits, because | often they are unreasonable. | | 2. At same time people are so used to the above, that they | ignore speed limits in very unsafe places. | | 3. I don't ignore the limits myself since I am a new-ish | driver, but I almost crashed multiple times, either because I | was with my eyes too gluted at the speedometer, or because | everyone else was ignoring the speed limit and almost crashed | into my rear. | | 4. I got fined for crossing speed limit anyway, when I was | trying to understand the fine, I found out they been placing | radars on steep hills on fast roads, so you have basically | two choices there: climb the hill using higher gears, and | cross speed limit, or slow down until you can use lower | gears, and risk people crashing into you. | | 5. In a specific very steep hill they put the speed limit so | low that the only way to climb that hill is actually go fast | as you can until right before the radar, brake hard, | immediately put first gear, and shove your foot in the | accelerator pedal again and resume the climb tires screaming, | if you attempt to climb the whole hill slower your car is | likely to stall, thanks to Brazillian popularity of really | low power cars, our cars are literally illegal in some | european cities because of how underpowered they are and thus | dangerous in hilly places. | istjohn wrote: | Your 2012 account name is oddly apropos. | machiaweliczny wrote: | In Poland it's similar (you can only work for yourself). It's | not even taxed (don't know why). I guess NL and CZ has most | liberal laws in this case. | portportport wrote: | The drug policy is well known, but the speed traps is new and | amusing. It reminds me of the horn activated red lights in | India. Genius idea. | onionisafruit wrote: | Don't combine the ideas or everybody will be speeding and | honking constantly. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | >Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light. | | Sounds like a great way to train the entire population is to | run reds between 10pm and 5am. | Spivak wrote: | The population who would run a red light <<< population who | would speed. | bloak wrote: | > Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light. | | This sounds interesting. Since when have they been doing | this, and do you have a link to photos, video or a more | detailed description? | pnt12 wrote: | It's a red-light with a speed warning and a detector - if | you go over the allowed speed, it turns red, otherwise | stays green forever. | | But we also have hidden radars which are not announced. | mrfusion wrote: | Sounds super dangerous though. | dspillett wrote: | The red light is some distance ahead, not right in front | of the speed detector so that you have to immediately | hammer down the break pedal and be rear-ended by the | vehicle behind. | | Of course some will still get as close to the light as | they can and hammer the breaks last moment, but they'll | do that at other lights too, and other unsafe things, so | the danger is not caused by the light in that instance. | b3morales wrote: | Is it a normal light at an intersection, or an extra one | somewhere in the middle of a block? It's not hard for me | to imagine people scoffing at the mid-block light and | deciding to run through it. | codingclaws wrote: | Neither I'd say. They're usually on long stretches of old | highways with no traffic lights between roundabouts where | lots of commercial and residential buildings (and thus | people) are right on the curb. | mig39 wrote: | The trick is to drive normal speed and at the very last | second speed like a madman, so that it still has to cycle | to amber then red just as you leave the intersection! | timfi wrote: | I don't know when Portugal started this, but in Germany | there is at least the concept of a "grune Well" (literally | a green wave). Simply put: if you drive at the speed limit | you won't get any red lights. Sadly the german | administration barely makes use of this as it doesn't make | them any money... | patmorgan23 wrote: | Many cities in the US do this along major roads. They'll | time the lights to maximize traffic flow which ussally | means if your driving the speed limit you'll at least get | through 3-4 lights before you have to stop. | mjburgess wrote: | That's essentially the UK's law too -- but many arent aware. | devilbunny wrote: | > speed traps that just trigger a red light | | Much better than what I've seen in my (US) city: speed limit | 30 mph, but lights timed for 40-45 mph to get a continuous | green light down the one-way street. Either you speed, | opening you to tickets, or you stop needlessly on lights that | are set for a faster speed than you are traveling. | sixothree wrote: | We have the absolute worst of this world. If you leave a | red light and travel near the speed limit (+/- 15mph) you | _will_ catch the next red light. You can absolutely floor | it and catch up with the next "pack" of cars and make it | into the green light but you will be at the pack for the | next light which will be red. | | I hate it. I hate it so much. Travelling down an avenue for | 3 or 4 miles is just painful. The worst is when there is | zero traffic (say 10:30 at night) and you sit at red lights | watching nobody pass. | tempodox wrote: | I'd call that a "dark pattern in the physical world". | throwaway0a5e wrote: | People will do all sorts of ideological gymnastics to | justify screwing the public out of money when they money | lands in government coffers ad the end of the day. | kleer001 wrote: | Not untrue, but off topic. | | People here are talking about unjust systems built to | needlessly punish law abiding citizens monetarily and | time wise. No gymnastics or ideologies necessary. | | What comes to mind is the obscenity of civil forfeiture | used without accompanying crimes upheld against the | people who rightfully own said assets.. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Uni | ted... | woobar wrote: | Are lights timed to 40-45 mph in both directions? | devilbunny wrote: | Somewhat inconsistently. This was most obvious on a pair | of one-way streets, but one of them has been returned to | two-way traffic. AFAICT, the waves in opposite direction | started at the same time and the two streams passed each | other around the halfway point. Other one-way streets in | the area aren't on precisely the same schedule. The | stretch was only about six or seven blocks long. And the | wave didn't start at the boundary street of the area on | one end, but one block into the area. | djrogers wrote: | Not sure where you are, but if that's in fact the case, | your city would be violating the law in at least | California, and likely several other states. | dhimes wrote: | Not GP, but I've seen it in the Boston area. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | Not that the .gov won't happily take in money as a result | of the dark pattern they've created but the primary cause | of the patterns creation is likely the same old poor | coordination, inertia and ineptitude that tends to plague | government in wealthy areas with lots of stakeholders. | | The road is signed probably for 30 because that's what is | was historically or that's what they got after evaluating | what the confusing web of rules and regulations says it | should be. | | The lights are set up for 40-50 because the person | responsible for tuning the light a) looked at existing | traffic data and set the light to that or b) assessed the | properties of the road using totally different measures | and determined that's the speed traffic would go. | | And the city doesn't change the sign to reflect the | reality of the traffic because a) they'd have to re- | navigate the web of rules to do that and b) shirking | potential revenue is a fast track to a dead end job for | bureaucrats in that state c) doing nothing is easy. | devilbunny wrote: | Most assuredly not a wealthy area. But the local | government is pretty awful. | altrow1 wrote: | that is good people finally realize it. these | conspiracies are abundant! intentionally creating street | traffic in this "clever conspiracy way" and no-option to | cancel online, both are real, and detected few years ago. | you see, it is green to discourage people from driving, | in this way. yet, technically, they merely destabilize | optimum good, not actually being evil. | woah wrote: | Which law? | toast0 wrote: | https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySec | tio... | | Unless the road is determined to be a local road, posted | speed limits are only enforcable if set by an engineering | survey, or if it's at least X, which I think is 60 or 65. | But I'm not sure it's illegal to post an unenforcable | speed limit, or to ticket against it, it's just that | those contesting the ticket will win. | bradstewart wrote: | My personal favorite was a poorly-timed stop light, with a | red-light camera. | | If you entered the intersection as the light turned yellow, | and drove the speed limit, you would still be partially in | the intersection when the light turned red. And promptly | get a ticket in the mail. | | Nobody realized what was happening (at least not those on | the receiving end of the tickets) until my high school math | teacher got one. | | She went out there and measured the intersection, timed the | lights, then showed up to contest the ticket with poster | boards containing diagrams of the velocity/distance | equations. | woobar wrote: | Interesting. Before they made red light cameras illegal | in my city they required two photos to prove that you are | in violation: | | - one that shows your car before crossing the stop line | when the light is red | | - second showing your car after crossing the stop line | within same light cycle (i.e. seconds from previous | photo) | | No need to do the math if you entered the intersection | before the light turned red | orangepurple wrote: | Then gets sued for practicing engineering without a | license. | | In a display of civic engagement, Mats emailed the Oregon | State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land | Surveying in the hopes that they could help him raise | public awareness and asked for their "support and help to | investigate and present the laws of physics related to | transportation engineering." | | He got the opposite. | | After curtly informing Mats that they do not regulate | traffic lights, the Board warned him that without an | engineering license from the state of Oregon, Mats would | be breaking the law if he even referred to himself using | the word "engineer." Then, the Board launched an | investigation into Mats, which lingered for nearly two | years and culminated in a $500 fine. According to the | Board, Mats engaged in the unlicensed "practice of | engineering" when he spoke publicly about his "critique | and calculations" for the yellow-light formula. Moreover, | only Oregon-licensed professional engineers are allowed | to use the word "engineer" to describe themselves. | | Although Mats is not a licensed professional engineer | (and never claimed to), he has a broad background in math | and science. In his native Sweden, Mats earned a degree | in electrical engineering, and worked for the Swedish Air | Force and Luxor Electronics. Mats even presented his | research on traffic-light timing at an Institute of | Transportation Engineers conference, and he corresponded | with one of the physicists who developed the original | 1959 formula. | | https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/04/ | 28/... | yurishimo wrote: | This sounds like a power tripping bureaucrat more than | anything. I would take it up on appeal. Heck, might even | be able to find a lawyer to help bring up a countersuit | on contingency. | eurasiantiger wrote: | >Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only | advertise yourself. | | And then serious criminals are out of the advertising | business, but can still offer consultation, business and | personal protection, and, of course, forced sex labour | through human trafficking. | ascar wrote: | And all that stuff is still illegal as it is in the US. I | don't see your point? | pdpi wrote: | GP's comment makes a whole lot more sense if you assume a | big fat /s at the end. | re-actor wrote: | Criminals would be out of a buissness because it became | illegal? Are you sure about that? | chii wrote: | > Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only | advertise yourself. | | that's an excellent rule - because pimping should be illegal. | GrinningFool wrote: | That's not a pimp, it's an Erotic Services Agent ~s | nefitty wrote: | Wouldn't regulations be easier to enforce on agents and | organizations instead of individuals? | djrogers wrote: | Pimping has little to do with advertising, it's a form of | slavery. Nothing would stop a pimp from forcing his workers | to be responsible for advertising themselves. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | >it's a form of slavery. | | Or a protection racket. | | Or just fee for protection. | | Depends on the specific situation in question. There's a | wide variety of schemes that fall under the definition of | pimping. | marcosdumay wrote: | Those are variations of slavery. | | "You work or I will make you suffer" is slavery. | kortilla wrote: | "A fee for protection" is not that. That's the equivalent | of hiring a bouncer. | throwaway0a5e wrote: | One of the primary functions of a pimp is to provide | muscle/thread of violence to dissuade customers from | abusing the workers. | | Whether and do what degree the arrangement between the | worker(s) and the pimp is exploitative is more or less | tangential to that. | jjk166 wrote: | Big difference between "I will make you suffer" and "I | won't intervene when someone I have no affiliation with | nor obligation to interfere with makes you suffer." | | Mall cops certainly haven't enslaved mall owners. | fuzzer37 wrote: | > "You work or I will make you suffer" is slavery. | | All work is slavery. | VRay wrote: | Amen | | I got up late today, so I barely have time to make | pancakes and coffee before I have to leave for my day's | slavery.. if I'm late, I'll have to do the slavery in my | underpants at home until the morning meetings are over. | Then I'll drive to my slavery and be stuck there for 5-6 | hours, with only lunch and snack breaks. Unless I need to | take off early to run errands anyway | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | Actual slaves that don't get paid and get whipped if they | don't meet quotas would have a major problem with your | statement. | | Most of the people here not only have the option of | quitting, but a fair number could probably choose not to | work for several months, or even the rest of their life. | They certainly are not slaves. | mig39 wrote: | > Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light. | | This is the best. You trigger a red light because you're | speeding, and _everybody_ around you just glares at you. | Including the old woman walking on the side of the street. | | It's like public shaming. | | Thanks bud, because of you, now we all have to sit at this | red light and wait. Good job. | | That works so much better than the hidden speed camera ticket | I get in the mail 6 months later, when I'm not even in | Portugal anymore. | | One is about slowing you down, the other is about revenue. | scelerat wrote: | This would not work in Oakland. Cold red? zooooooommmmmm | mig39 wrote: | The power of an angry glare from an old Portuguese woman | (dressed in black) doesn't work in the US. | t0mas88 wrote: | Not just Portugal, this is a European thing but apparently | Germany hasn't implemented it yet and will do so starting next | year. | | That's the weird thing with some European "laws", they give | countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries abuse | that to go and implement it on the very last day. | anticristi wrote: | EU regulations take effect directly and are roughly | equivalent to national law (see GDPR). | | In contrast, EU directives stipulate the desired outcome and | let countries draft their own national law to achieve the | directive's desired outcome. | toast0 wrote: | > That's the weird thing with some European "laws", they give | countries 1 or 2 years to implement it and some countries | abuse that to go and implement it on the very last day. | | If you give them to the last day and they do it on the last | day, they have done what you asked, it's not abuse. Want it | done sooner? Require it done sooner. | pantulis wrote: | I can confirm this is supposed to be the same in Spain. | Implementation varies across industries, of course. | xeromal wrote: | This is the law in California too! | i_like_waiting wrote: | What in case that some company doesn't collect your email e.g. | they try to sell you only over the phone? | ClikeX wrote: | It's an EU thing, we have this in the Netherlands as well. | | We see a lot of services trying to sell you subscriptions at | the door or on the street, though. | cgriswald wrote: | In that case, it seems that they should have people going | door-to-door offering cancellation as well. | flanbiscuit wrote: | > you can cancel any service using the same means that you used | to subscribe it | | This should be the way for everything. I'm about to move and I | need to cancel my power and my cable and I just want it to be | as easy as logging into the system, selecting my last day of | service, and that's it | swyx wrote: | Same with American Express. I couldn't believe that such a well | known brand whose entire value proposition is great customer | service has a "call to cancel" process. I hope it dies. | strenholme wrote: | Since I live in California, which has a "click to subscribe means | you must have click to cancel" regulation, this isn't an issue | for me. After the New York Times published their inaccurate hit | piece attacking Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex | Ten, I was able to cancel online just clicking my way through. | | I now subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, which looks to be the | most neutral newspaper right now. Being a California resident, I | have a special "California only" cancel button on my user control | panel. | MAGZine wrote: | Canceling aside, I don't think the WSJ is particularly neutral, | but perhaps it does appeal to your sensibilities (note, | however, those are not the same). | | I find WSJ to take particularly corporatist/capitialist views | on things. Which is fine for things business, I suppose, but | I've read many articles from WSJ that are basically "hey | government sucks, am i rite?" which is not neutral. | jonahhorowitz wrote: | Not that HN is really the place for this discussion, but the | _news_ section of the WSJ is pretty neutral and well written. | The _opinion_ page is very slanted towards | "corporatist/capitalist views". | MAGZine wrote: | That's an easy thing to say because it's more difficult to | disprove. You could say that about the NYT, Al Jazeera, | NPR, CNN, etc etc. | | Of course the topics that an institution choose to talk | about also biases it. If you spend all of your front page | space complaining about unions and talking about business, | that is a different bias than one who dedicates column | inches to stories about the environment. Or different from | once that dedicates column inches to ones about social | issues. | | But even if you go on wsj.com, I see "Biden EV Tax Credit | Puts UAW Over Environment, Nonunion Auto Makers Say," -- | which is such an interesting way to frame the topic, but | certainly not what I would call neutral. The topic pits UAW | versus Nonunion automakers. | | If you want neutral news, in terms of content and in terms | of story coverage, there are better options than the WSJ. | csee wrote: | "but certainly not what I would call neutral. The topic | pits UAW versus Nonunion automakers." | | How is that not neutral? It's an unambiguous statement of | fact that the tax credit is favoring unionized automakers | over non-unionized automakers, and that this particular | distortion/difference in tax credit has no environmental | justification and is designed purely to help out unions. | ghostpepper wrote: | I eventually opened a case with VISA to get them to stop | payment to the Wall Street Journal because every time I called | to cancel, I got a message that their call centers were closed | due to COVID. As far as I can tell there was literally no way | to cancel for several months during 2020. I do enjoy their | reporting as a more right-leaning alternative to the New York | Times but I have learned my lesson and will never again | subscribe to WSJ. | | Meanwhile, the I have cancelled the NYT several times | relatively painlessly (via online chat) and even been offered a | discount to remain a subscriber, which I view as a much more | consumer-friendly retention tactic. | | If anyone from WSJ reads this (unlikely, ha), you should know | that it does not matter how good your reporting is - if you use | predatory tactics to prevent cancellations you will turn off | many potential readers simply out of principle. | brandon272 wrote: | I called to cancel last year. Then I had to call again a | couple months later because I noticed that, despite calling, | waiting on hold, requesting to cancel and then being told | that my subscription was cancelled, they didn't cancel it, | and the charges continued to go through on my card. | patorjk wrote: | I was able to cancel my WSJ subscription last year through an | online chat (it was almost identical to how I unsubscribed | from the NYTimes). I definitely would have preferred a cancel | button though. A few months later I resubscribed after they | offered me a deal. My only issue with them is that they're | kind of expensive. | chirau wrote: | Wall Street Journal robbed me this way. | | I clicked to subscribe to a paid membership for both print and | web. Then when I wanted to cancel, they sent me to a chatbot. | The chatbot told me told it had unsubscribed me. Three months | later (I wasn't at home), I realized WSJ was still charging me | monthly for a WSJ subscription. I called them to see what is | going on, they told me you can only unsubscribe via a call. I | told them I had used the bot which was the only option on the | site and it confirmed that I had been unsubscribed. The person | told me it only unsubscribed you from Barron's not WSJ. | | So yup, after 10 years of loyalty to them, they definitely | burnt me and I will never subscribe to them or any of their | publications ever again. | Humdeee wrote: | Hold on here, does that mean that Cancel button only appears | based on location? | jedberg wrote: | I believe for the New York Times it's based on billing | address. So if you change your billing address to California | you should get the cancel button. | js2 wrote: | I most recently cancelled my NYT sub a couple months ago. I | was able to do so w/o interacting with anyone. I'm in NC. | | I think they've just finally relented on forcing you to | interact with a human. | | They have also allowed me to keep reading past my | subscription termination point, but they keep asking me to | re-subscribe. At some point, I assume I'll start getting | blocked entirely. | waylandsmithers wrote: | Wow. Maybe I'll actually try this. I've wanted to subscribe | at various points but knew it would be basically impossible | to cancel so never bothered | js2 wrote: | I've subscribed and cancelled the NYT several times over | the years. Cancelling has never been "basically | impossible." At worst, I've had to do an online chat and | say "please cancel" three times that took 5 minutes of my | time. | | Most recently (a couple months ago), I was able to cancel | online w/o having to interact with a human at all. | | The NYT is a really mixed bag and regularly infuriates | me, but it also has some columnists I really like, and | occasionally has some terrific long form reporting. Hence | why I've subscribed and cancelled so many times. | jedberg wrote: | Use a burner card from privacy.com, which lets you put | any zip code you want. Then pick your favorite California | zip code (that isn't 90210 because that gets flagged) and | away you go! | volgo wrote: | This is why I always enter a fake address in CA :) | throw10920 wrote: | That doesn't work if they use your billing address, unless | your billing address is in CA, in which case you're | probably located there anyway. | volgo wrote: | You can use Privacy.com to generate a one-time use credit | card number that lets you use any fake address you want. | It will charge properly and you can set limit | detaro wrote: | yes. | MaXtreeM wrote: | After reading the article on Pewdiepie I stopped thinking about | WSJ as a serious newspaper. | ghostpepper wrote: | Can you link to this article? A lot of people consider it a | serious newspaper still so there is an apparent disconnect | here. | MaXtreeM wrote: | I think it's this one [1] and this is the text from it | without WSJ paywall [2], but the main issue was with the | video included in WSJ not in the article text itself. If I | remember it correctly it is few clips from Pewdiepie's | videos stitched together out of context to make him look | bad. Note that I am not saying that he did not push his | jokes too far but still a "serious newspaper" should not | take short clips out of context, like if you took any 10 | seconds from Dave Chappelle last special that would make | him seem like a horrible person. | | [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-severs-ties-with- | youtube... [2]: | https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/disney-severs-ties- | wit... | therealdrag0 wrote: | Sorta off topic but I read a "not that we'll know old | novel" recently and was surprised to find out that PDP | read it as party of his book club (which I didn't know | existed). It changed my view of him a bit that he reads | serious books and talks about them, whereas I thought he | only fucked around to entertain children. | Axien wrote: | That is crazy. I spent 20 minutes trying to cancel the WSJ. It | is infuriating. | strenholme wrote: | The thing the WSJ doesn't get is this: I wouldn't had | subscribed to them if I didn't reside in California and | didn't have my special "California cancel" button. | bicx wrote: | WSJ was the first service I thought of when I saw this | headline. For such a revered publication, WSJ's customer | retention tactics are scummy. | Iefthandrule wrote: | This would seem like an obvious topic for rival publications | to run with. | danlugo92 wrote: | www.privacy.com | b20000 wrote: | finally | m3kw9 wrote: | Good _middle finger_ - > WSJ | nixpulvis wrote: | AT&T is offensively in trouble here. Not only can't you cancel | easily on the web, you can't even go into their stores to cancel | either. Finally, after 45+ minutes on the phone, they have a | habit of hanging up on you. It's now happened to me twice within | a month of each other. | | The FTC better have some real teeth here. | dec0dedab0de wrote: | I might cancel my gym membership, and re-join online just to make | sure I can use this if I need to. | virologist wrote: | "Click to subscribe, mail to cancel". would be more efficient. | virologist wrote: | even better "Click to subscribe, come in person to cancel | (office hours Teuesday, ...)" | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | Around here (Long Island, NY), Cablevision was _notorious_ for | the "crazy, desperate ex" approach. | | In order to cancel the service, you had to call them, and they | would connect you to a "retention specialist." | | They would beg, wheedle, lie, manipulate, even threaten. | | I remember when I changed from them to Verizon, I had to hang up | on the guy. | Axien wrote: | I use Privacy.com and generate virtual credit card numbers. I | cancel the credit card at the time of canceling the service (or | at least trying to cancel the service). | TomGullen wrote: | Won't help if you breach contract and they go to collections | ausername42027 wrote: | exactly. it is really interesting that service even exists. | Canceling a privacy.com card does not magically cancel a | contract. Privacy.com seems like a great way to trick people | into tanking their credit ranking when they think they are | getting back at a company for being hard to cancel. | why-el wrote: | I give them a card I grab from privacy.com that has a set amount, | when I want to cancel, I set the card's amount to zero. They fail | to charge it after a few attempts. The end. | dqpb wrote: | Next, I'd like a law that requires every service that serves ad's | to also have a paid no-ad option. | nickforall wrote: | I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. It has been illegal in | Europe/the Netherlands for years, however it is not enforced at | all. Most newspapers don't let you cancel without calling them, | having to deal with sales people trying to convince you to keep | your subscription. | omnicognate wrote: | Sounds like a juicy class action. | marcvizcaino wrote: | 1 | marcvizcaino wrote: | 1.1 | nunez wrote: | This is amazing. | | I wanted to delete a bunch of services I had passwords for in | 1Password. A significant number of them couldn't be cancelled | online. You couldn't even call. You had to email to ask for a | cancellation. This, in effect, meant that they held your data | hostage. | | Of course, this means nothing if fees aren't associated with non- | compliance. | jdc0589 wrote: | this is only useful for some paid services (and does nothing to | deal with your data they still have), but virtual credit cards | are a life saver. I feel powerful every time I can't cancel | something from a service's website but I can just go kill the | virtual credit card I signed up with. | lostcolony wrote: | Though you still need a documentation trail showing the | attempted cancelation, lest you find your credit history | affected and a some scummy collection agency trying to | collect years later. | metalliqaz wrote: | some of them will continue billing your account, even if they | can't charge your card, and eventually turn it over to | collections | jgsuw wrote: | This is fantastic, I am still bitter from having to wait on the | phone for 45 minutes to cancel my NYT subscription, only to have | an argument with the poor call-center employee about how I was | really resolved to cancel the subscription. | kristopolous wrote: | I dealt with "fax to cancel" I think as recently as 2018. | | The wackiness is almost expected | m3kw9 wrote: | One click cancel link should be required to be given for every | subscription. | pR1vaCy_1000 wrote: | I have a $1 iCloud subscription on an old iCloud account I no | longer use. I could not cancel the subscription from a browser, | so I called apple, and was told I have to do it from an apple | device. The problem is I no longer have an apple device. | Ultimately they escalated the problem, but I never received a | call back. | rexreed wrote: | Vonage is notorious for not only preventing people from canceling | online but making it hell to cancel over the phone. They | frustrate people trying to port numbers and charge ludicrous | cancellation and other fees. Totally extortionate and predatory | behavior. I hope all customers become aware of these practices. | aristophenes wrote: | I had to cancel my gym membership because I was moving, and it | required me to send a physical letter. I did this, but found out | later that somehow I owed like 2 dollars, so they didn't count my | cancellation request because my account wasn't up to date (should | be illegal). They continued to bill me the entire membership fee, | but my credit card had changed, so they sent my account to a | collections agency. Right when I was trying to get a mortgage to | buy a house. Cost me hundreds of dollars and much more in | annoyance. Thanks The Edge for doing that to your previously | loyal customer! It ought to be a law that once a customer informs | you via email, text, phone or mail (and all must be easily found) | subscription services can no longer accrue new charges. | grumple wrote: | I worked at a gym like this once upon a time. What an awful | place. The workplace encouraged scummy behavior like this. | | And boy am I glad I invested in a home gym so I never have to | deal with that industry again. | Axien wrote: | Yup when COVID struck my gym required I cancel in person. | Moeancurly wrote: | I had this almost exact experience with Philadelphia Rock Gym. | They sent a couple emails "threatening" to send my account to | collections over $50 I did not authorize them to bill me for | (repeatedly said in writing to cancel my account, they kept my | membership open anyway). I just ignored them, nothing ever came | of it. | marcosdumay wrote: | Does your country have a small claims court? This is the exact | situation you should sue them for reputational damage. | vinaypai wrote: | In most US states at least, you can only sue for actual | damages in small claims court. Punitive, reputational or | other things have to go through regular court. | starwind wrote: | Small claims cases against gyms are remarkably easy to win. | Judges know the bs gyms put their members through when they | try to cancel so the courts are already inclined to believe | the other party | spaetzleesser wrote: | That's one insanity I don't understand why companies can get | away with. They can set up bureaucratic processes and even when | you follow them, they "lose" your material, raise some weird | objection or ignore it. Same happens with health insurances and | hospitals. They ignore you whenever they feel like it but the | payment and collections clock keeps ticking. I have heard it | was the same in 2008 and later when people requested mortgage | relief and the banks just ignored them for months and years. | Frost1x wrote: | It amazes me how successful consumer hostile strategies are | in recent times. It sort of flies in the face of most | economic models that claim markets self-regulate. This | includes businesses in industries which aren't massive and | monopolistic and even have competitors. When all your | competitors decide to indirectly collude with one business's | successful consumer hostile strategies, it becomes the norm | and another barrier to entry for a competitor to come in with | a better offering. | | In theory, consumer hostile practices should exist at a | discount so a reputable business that isn't consumer hostile | should be able to offer better products/services at a higher | price point and let consumers decide if they want a hostile | or non-hostile market. Some may claim that consumers just | want cheap above all else and the market regulates to that, | hostile or not. I dismiss this and claim the issue is that a | price point signal doesn't give me enough information to tell | me if a business is consumer hostile or not. Paying more | absolutely does not guratentee a better consumer experience, | it could just be a business operating at higher margins and | that seems to be the norm--a business disguised as offering | higher quality products/services or better experience to | justify the price point. This model seems to work just as | well and captures a subset of people willing to risk paying | more for a hopefully more consumer friendly experience. | | The issue with all of this is, as a consumer, you can't know | without trying, and are limited by anecdata of trial and | error while businesses often have significantly larger pools | of information and therefor leverage to work with and | strategize against consumers on price points and margin | padding. Reviews and that sort of shared information are | already gamed with so much misinformation and disinformation | that these consumer hostile strategies continue to hold well | (and are legal). I can try limiting reviews to a trusted | network by word of mouth so I know people aren't hustling me | (mostly, for now) but that only helps when someone in my | trust network has a recommendation. Often, they don't, and | they too have limited selection so their anecdata is a small | sample size as well, meaning a better consumer experience can | exist at a better price point. | | As such, I'm not sure how you resolve this asymmetry in | information in free markets. Consumers almost never have | leverage unless they collude together because they lack scale | and information that come with the resources of owning a | business. Here you have hundreds, thousands, millions of | customers you can sample from and test different strategies | against, optimizing for your margins. As a consumer, I don't | have the resources to do this and since consumer information | is largely disjoint, I'm always left at a disadvantage hoping | some business won't screw me over as many frequently do. | | What's worse is that if a consumer hostile business is | successful enough to accumulate enough resources to play the | continous rebrand/rename game, I can't possibly even build a | reputation against something I consume. I'm instead | encouraged to push to established businesses and further | entrench the massive market share holders where we tend | towards a different set of monopolistic anti-consumer | strategies. | Spooky23 wrote: | Mass market gyms are kind of unique. | | They are selling aspirations and tend to have a local | monopoly based on location. There are many gyms, but there | aren't many gyms in a particular locale convenient for | whatever aspirational schedule exists. | | Because of that, it's really not in a cheap gyms interest | to not be assholes. | | Nicer gyms like the Y or a Country/Social club use things | like childcare or social factors to increase the friction | of leaving. More serious gyms use the trainer relationship | and cost more or have fewer amenities. | daenz wrote: | >so they sent my account to a collections agency | | Important clarification: they _sold_ your account to a | collections agency. They made more than what you actually owed | them by doing that, which is probably why they did that. | vinaypai wrote: | > Important clarification: they sold your account to a | collections agency. They made more than what you actually | owed them by doing that, which is probably why they did that. | | Um, no. Collection agencies buy debt at a discount, and make | a profit if they manage to collect the full amount. It would | make no sense for them to buy debt for more than what is | owed. | daenz wrote: | I can't edit my original post now, but I misread that the | account grew from more than just $2 before it was sold. If | the gym sold a $2 account to a collections agency, the | collection agency buying it lines up with my experience of | them tacking on hundreds of dollars in overhead costs when | they try to collect. | dec0dedab0de wrote: | I think the point is that they didn't actually owe | anything. | drstewart wrote: | > They made more than what you actually owed them by doing | that | | This makes absolutely zero sense and does not happen. Why | would the collections agency pay more for debt than it's | worth? Why wouldn't they sell all their accounts then? Free | increase in profits! | lostcolony wrote: | Yeah; that is absolutely false. | | They make more, across all accounts, than they would in | lost time/expenses -pursuing- those debts. But the | collection agency did not pay them > X to collect on X. Far | from it; the collection agency paid them a small percentage | of the total debt for the 'right' to try and collect on it. | thrwyoilarticle wrote: | They 'owed' zero. | daenz wrote: | I've been pursued by a collection agency for a bogus | account with a very low value. The collections agency | tacked on a ton of additional costs. Hundreds of dollars. | Related to them processing the account, and said that I | owed them for it. So my understanding of how it works, and | maybe I'm completely wrong, that's possible too, is that | collections agency stand to gain far more than just the | original amount owed, if they can add their overhead costs | to the account. | nobody9999 wrote: | >Important clarification: they sold your account to a | collections agency. They made more than what you actually | owed them by doing that, which is probably why they did that. | | I had this experience some years back. | | The obnoxious collections agent (no robocalls for that stuff | back then) tried to bully me. | | I just laughed and wished them luck getting a penny out of | me. Never heard from them again. | | Nothing on my credit report either. | | Perhaps things are different now. | | Something to remember is that corporations (including | collections agencies) have to pay lawyers if they want to | take legal action against you. | | And at $250-$400/hour, unless the "debt" is in the many | thousands, it's generally not worth it to sue. | | Note that I'm not suggesting that anyone stiff their | creditors. Rather, it's useful to keep that bit of | information in mind when dealing with unfair/unethical | attempts to extort money[0] from you. | | [0] Especially when a "collection agency" (read legal | extortion racket) purchases your "debt" for pennies on the | dollar. | | Edit: Added detail about "debt" purchasing. | SavantIdiot wrote: | LA Fitness? | | I had to print and send them a letter. Or talk to the manager. | Who is only there a few days a week. And no one knows when. | | Obligatory: | | "But the plans were on display..." | | "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find | them." | | "That's the display department." | | "With a flashlight." | | "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone." | | "So had the stairs." | | "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" | | "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom | of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a | sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard." | lostgame wrote: | I laughed way too hard at this, having been a gym subscriber | in the past, and also a fan of Douglas Adams. | Taylor_OD wrote: | Gyms are the worst about this. Typically they make it very | difficult to cancel and say something like you have to notify | them 30 days in advanced and pay for 30 days after you cancel. | Effectively making you pay for two months you don't want. | Almost every cheap gym is doing this. | iandinwoodie wrote: | LA Fitness allows you to either mail in the cancellation form | or submit it in person. I was also cancelling due to a move, so | I printed out the form and trekked out to the nearest location | for a final workout and the piece of mind that my cancellation | was complete. | | Lo and behold, you cannot submit your cancellation form without | a Manager present. Okay, when does the Manager arrive? | _Usually_ around 9:00AM is the response I got. I have to get | home for a meeting at 8:30AM, so is there a mailbox I can drop | this in? No. Can I leave it with you (the staff member | attending the front desk) to hand to the Manager? No. Will the | Manager be here around 5:00PM if I come back after work? No. | | Please note that I bear no ill will towards the pleasant staff | member that was helping me. | wil421 wrote: | There was a class action lawsuit against LA Fitness about | sending letters to cancel. I guess they finally allowed it to | be done in person but had you jump through hoops to find a | manager. They "lost" my letter a couple times until I sent it | certified. | toomuchtodo wrote: | There's a business to be had in generating and mailing | those letters certified for someone. For $10, you can have | it printed and mailed by Lob certified and still have a few | bucks margin, without the customer having to leave their | home. They'd then have the certified tracking number to | demonstrate it was delivered. | | This should _absolutely not_ be necessary, but is a shim | until a regulator kicks gyms in the shorts over their | predatory practices. | mcronce wrote: | FWIW, https://www.mailaletter.com can do certified w/ | return receipt, and there's also a service called Trim | (https://www.asktrim.com) that can do cancellations for | you. In my experience, some companies have explicit | policy to not accept cancellation requests on your behalf | from Trim, but it works for many. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | This behavior is everywhere in the gym industry. It is so bad | that the last time I joined a gym, I paid for a year up front | with a physical check. I told them i don't have credit or debit | cards (lie) and can only pay by check. | | At the end of the year, I walked away and never got any letters | about paying a renewal or anything. | RankingMember wrote: | This is the only way to do gym memberships with peace of mind | right now. Gym membership cancellation practices are in | desperate need of regulation. | Bluecobra wrote: | > Gym membership cancellation practices are in desperate | need of regulation. | | Agreed, and I also hate being stuck in 12-month contracts | as well. I will never join a gym that makes me sign a long | term commitment like that. The last local gym I joined was | pretty cool about this. They had higher month to month | prices and discounted longer term memberships. Gives you a | chance to see how you like it after a few months. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | A lot of people will say "paying by check is such a hassle! | I don't even have checks! It's so 1980s!" But you know | what? It's a lot less of a hassle than canceling your | membership when paying by credit/debit card. | | And if you don't have checks for your checking account, you | can get order them online from walmart.com for $10 + | shipping. Or, if you still use a bank that has a local | branch, you can go into the branch and ask for a single | printed check. They cost a couple of bucks. | adrr wrote: | I used to buy prepaid memberships to 24 hour fitness from | Costco. Same with magazines like economist , just bought a | prepaid digit subscription. Most places sell prepaid | memberships because of the gifting aspect. | TedDoesntTalk wrote: | Great idea! For magazines, you can also subscribe through | Amazon and manage the subscription with Amazon. They make | single-click unsubscribe easy. | artursapek wrote: | Crypto would be good for this use case :) | danielvaughn wrote: | Ha, I made a similar comment about my experience with a gym | elsewhere in this thread. Gyms are up near the top of worst | practices when it comes to this kind of thing. There really | should be legal ramifications for companies that do this. | webinvest wrote: | For Crunch Fitness, it took me 5 membership cancellation | requests, 3 calls, 2 in person visits, and 4 months to cancel | my month-to-month gym membership. | Axsuul wrote: | Couldn't you have just blocked the payee from your bank? | mcronce wrote: | It took me seven years to cancel Planet Fitness after I moved a | hundred miles away. Letter after letter, nothing...finally made | a trip back home one day and had time to stop and deal with it. | | Fuck gyms. I can run on the sidewalk for free. | karaterobot wrote: | Had the exact same experience. Moved out of state, had to | continue paying for over a year until I had another reason to | go back there and cancel it. Of course, there was no part of | the process that couldn't have been done over the phone, or | on the web. | | And this is relevant to the article, since Planet Fitness is | specifically called out for being among the shadiest | practitioners of this tactic. | asmos7 wrote: | Seriously regret signing up for that gym. The sales person lied | about so much shit in hindsight. Signed up for the medium of | the road package - tried to downgrade to the basic package told | me I couldn't despite telling me when I signed up I could hop | between them anytime. | Dave_TRS wrote: | My friend had a good suggestion I used. When you're signing | up, I had them write down and sign beside the big lie I | thought they were telling me about cancellation. Then when I | cancelled and mentioned the terms, the manager said | "unfortunately we would need to have that in writing". And | then I produced my contract with it added in writing, signed | by their staff member. Ridiculous the lengths one must go to | have them follow through on what they say. | ransom1538 wrote: | Gyms. Walk in with a wad of cash. Tell them you want to pre-pay | for 6 months. Show them the cash. No credit cards, no atm | numbers, no ssns, no drivers licenses, nothing. They will | refuse. Then give them your phone number and let them know if | they change their mind to call you. Leave. THEY call EVERY | time. | makecheck wrote: | ...and collectively billions of hours of wasted time are returned | to consumers everywhere. | | Generally though, we really need some _efficient_ mechanism for | saying "hell no" to new things that are clearly anti-consumer, | instead of letting them be conceived, implemented, and | insufferable for _years_ before anything can be done. | newshorts wrote: | Nothing is easier than mailing a letter. You don't even need a | router for it! | | Simply click to subscribe and mail us a letter of intent to | cancel when you want. Of course it will take us 60 days to | process mail and if your handwriting isn't great we might not be | able to read your account number. | | To access your account number, simply log in and click the lower | right hand side of the page 5 times while holding the shift key | down. If your account number doesn't show up, call tech support. | [deleted] | subsubzero wrote: | Great job on cracking down on illegal behavior from bad actors. | | The next step I'd like to see is to focus on having deletion of | accounts made very easy for all apps. Alot of web/social media | companies make creating a account dead simple, but when you want | to delete an account the tab is hidden by dark pattern design, or | its made extremely complex and time consuming by sending multiple | emails to different 'departments'. Account deletion should be | legally as simple as account creation. | adamkochanowicz wrote: | Privacy.com card. Set one-time use with limit equal to | subscription price. I do this with shady subscriptions now and I | decide when it's time to cancel. | petilon wrote: | This isn't limited to newspapers! Have you tried canceling | internet service? My internet service did not use internet for | cancelation. I had to call. | | Free ad for t-mobile: their 5G service for home internet is | awesome. | dinvlad wrote: | Can we also make it illegal to send unsolicited marketing mail | (not email, which can be easily filtered/unsubscribed from) | please? It's a pain to have to "opt out" from those annoying | paper-wasting weekly Xfinity mails, when I clearly don't want to | use their service and never signed up for their ads using my new | address anyways (I wonder how they learned about it, huh). | | But no, I have to find a special link to unsubscribe, and they | say it takes them another couple months (!) to actually do it. | zachlatta wrote: | We get letters from Comcast almost every week asking us to | switch to Comcast Business at our office, and we're on Comcast | Business! (they are literally the only internet provider in our | town and their max upload is 40mbps...) | | So frustrating. | Izkata wrote: | > and never signed up for their ads using my new address | anyways (I wonder how they learned about it, huh). | | They target the address and then get the owner's name from | public records. | anandsuresh wrote: | About time this happened. I experienced this with the ACLU, of | all the entities out there using this dark pattern. Enable | subscriptions online to donate to the ACLU, but if you changed | your mind, you have to get the phone to cancel. Needless to say, | I just let my credit card expire. | puyoxyz wrote: | > The new guidelines around "negative option marketing" -- which | includes everything from automatic renewals to free trials that | convert to paid subscriptions if consumers take no action -- go | beyond mandating that companies offer straightforward | cancellation. | | No, fuck this! If I get a free trial I _want it_ to auto renew; | if I have to take another step to make it renew that's a waste of | time, and inconvenient. If I don't want it to renew I'll cancel. | confidantlake wrote: | Most people I talk to say they are against regulation. But | without regulation you get stuff like this. I too am against | having to get a permit for a kid to open a lemonade stand, but I | am pro regulation to allow me to easily cancel subscriptions or | my gym membership. | | Also I wonder if the NYT will ever report on how hard they make | it for their customers to unsubscribe? | enonevets wrote: | I've had gym memberships where calling to cancel wasn't good | enough, you had to come in person to cancel. | glitcher wrote: | The article's framing is a little odd by putting the emphasis on | news organizations. In my experience the worst offenders have | been ISP's and phone providers. And it is such a widespread | practice, it happens with everything from credit cards to gym | memberships. | | Another funny thing I'm wondering now, is if companies might find | they are more profitable by eliminating these manipulative | customer retention departments. Maybe try shifting the focus to | making better products that customers want to stay with in the | first place. | lookalike74 wrote: | Hedge fund dweebs: "We kill newspapers intentionally." Everyone | here: "Fuggin NYT" | flanbiscuit wrote: | There was a skit on SNL recently that satirized this issue, | wonder if the FTC was watching, ha! | | It's about trying to cancel your cable. | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM | xtiansimon wrote: | Maybe OT, but Square (the online merchant processor) has a button | for immediate deposit of funds. | | Click it by mistake and find no verification step and immediate | and irreversible fee for 1.5% of your queued transactions. | slt2021 wrote: | I keep a separate capitalone cc for all "subscriptions" and | always keep it disabled, so that no charges will ever go through. | | just enable it back for 10 seconds when signing up for service | and disable it back. | | so far it kept me safe from annoying services asking for cc and | their unexpected charges | 93po wrote: | I use https://privacy.com/ for disposable numbers for just this | reason. It's nice. | treebot wrote: | Gym memberships are notorious with this. I always wondered how it | was even legal. I cancelled my debit card and they sent me to | collections. | golemotron wrote: | > To comply with the law, businesses must ensure sign-ups are | clear, consensual, and easy to cancel. Specifically, businesses | should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy | to use as the method the customer used to buy the product or | service in the first place. | | That's a tall order with one-click. | MisterBastahrd wrote: | Seems like a lot of box subscription companies are gonna need to | do some work this holiday season. There are a lot of companies | out there who are also posing as US entities when they're really | based overseas and have small LLCs as US affiliates who sell | whitelisted products who will be affected too. | | Recently I purchased a yearly subscription for an app from a | foreign "health" company and after the checkout process, I was | presented with some supplement options. These options were | showing a discount on a per-month basis, but were also | deceptively packaged in such a way that (a) the price was | actually per month, and (b) if you chose ANY of the items on the | screen, you were immediately billed for them without checkout. | | Realizing that they just hit me for $270 for half a year's supply | of supplements, I immediately sent an email to their customer | service that I wanted my money refunded because I did not intend | to pay a quarter grand on what were essentially fiber pills. | These are shipped from a California warehouse. It was past | midnight CST. | | Twenty minutes later, I receive an email telling me that they are | sorry but my order has been processed and there's nothing they | can do, but if I wanted, they could send RMA instructions on the | package. Their terms of service dictates that they have a "no- | refund" policy and will only accept returns if there is physical | damage to the shipped product. I asked again, and was rebutted | again with the same sort of nonsense. Nobody was processing an | order for a small goods company in California after midnight. | | Welp... my next email to them informed the customer service rep | that it was past midnight in California so no shipping had | occurred. That I worked for a company with local and national | news reach and I would be glad to share the information of my | story, the app, the company name, and the parent company name | with reporters who would be interested in covering deceptive | business practices. | | 10 minutes later, I received an email apologizing for their | transgression and another confirming that the charges were | reversed. | twothamendment wrote: | I've only had one good experience with call to cancel. Ok, one | company and many good calls. Drumroll please, for AOL. Every time | I'd try to cancel they'd give me another two or three months for | free. Then I'd pay them for a month and call again. | | I was a teen and paying for this new fangled internet myself | because my parents didn't get it yet. Paying 4 months out of the | year was affordable! | indus wrote: | Last week I analyzed thousands of SaaS vendors that are using | _dark patterns_ in their billing loop [O]. | | Found out that many of the practices are borderline illegal..more | so now. | | Notables: | | 1. No notification when free trial converts to paid | | 2. Silent recurring renewals | | 3. Shady card authorization to bypass rule engines | | 4. Upsize during billing updates! | | 5. Charges during training and onboarding | | [O] https://quolum.com/blog/saas/i-analyzed-saas-billing-dark- | pa... | taxyz23 wrote: | I totally agree that call to cancel is a PITA and companies | should be called on the carpet for it. The prime example of this | is when I tried to cancel my Consumer Reports subscription a few | years ago and it required me to Snail Mail a cancellation. What | hypocrisy. But government intervention and more red tape is not | the answer. Public shaming and taking your business elsewhere | works better and maintains freedom. Otherwise we are only | inviting in the long, inflexible, and political arm of the | bureaucracy (and even worse in this case federal bureaucracy) to | get involved in every facet of how a business structures its | interactions with its customers. It encourages wasteful | litigation, clutters our life with mountains made from molehills, | incentivizes running to the government for the answer to every | annoyance, and makes starting and running a small business the | equivalent of running a minefield not knowing which local, state, | or federal law or regulation it may violate with any particular | action. | unethical_ban wrote: | Ah yes, that free market where any rapscallion can create a | multi-hundred-reporter corps filled with publisher and Nobel | prize winning staff spread across the globe to report on | current events and politics. | | You can't fork the NYT. | sneak wrote: | > _Public shaming and taking your business elsewhere works | better and maintains freedom._ | | This was not borne out in practice. I, too, wish more consumers | were discerning and picky, and I, too, dislike regulation, but | this part of the argument against it isn't valid. | LadyCailin wrote: | I found a loophole for NYT and The Economist. Convert your | payment to PayPal (they allow you to edit payments, but not | remove them), and then go into PayPal to cancel the active | payment agreement. Easier than cancelling the card, or calling | them. | simion314 wrote: | I want to see the anti-regulation individuals explaining how this | is bad and is affecting the poor small guy, and they need to do | more work to implement this (the usual bullshit when a regulation | they don't like like GDPR is discussed). | goodluckchuck wrote: | You don't have to wait for them to agree that your subscription | is cancelled. When I call I tell them I'm cancelling and they're | no longer authorized to charge my card. If they don't stop the | charges, then it's much easier to talk to my own credit card | company and do a charge-back. | zorked wrote: | Also a common practice in Europe (Germany, France, | Switzerland...), but frequently even worse: click to subscribe, | send a fucking letter to cancel it. Le Monde and Der Spiegel both | do it. | | I'm a news junkie, I think paying for news is important, but I | don't have even 1/4 of the subscriptions I would have if it | wasn't for scummy tactics and/or the fear that I will be subject | to them in the future. | chmod775 wrote: | >[...] and Der Spiegel both do it. | | They might have changed. When I checked just now, they offer a | phone number and an E-Mail address to cancel a physical paper | subscription (there's no account, so that makes sense). | | An online "Spiegel+" subscription can be cancelled via their | website. | | https://abo.spiegel.de/de/c/abo-service/spiegel-abo-kuendige... | | It may be different for their non-German publication, but I had | trouble finding any English information - which may be saying | something... | hnbad wrote: | I live in Germany and have cancelled several physical | magazine and newspaper subscriptions and even political party | memberships via e-mail after signing up online. I can't say | anything about Der Spiegel but I would be surprised if they | did it any different given that German consumer protection | agencies have some teeth. | koilke wrote: | Fortunately I have been able to cancel my Le Monde Diplomatique | for many years through email. I did not get a confirmation | email but they stopped billing me at least. | jaclaz wrote: | To be picky, at least here in Italy, not "send a letter", but | rather "send a registered letter with delivery receipt", which | plainly means that you have a non-trivial cost (several Euro, I | believe in Italy it is now 10 or 12 Euro) and you have to | physically go to the post office to send it. | | Recently many companies are (finally) allowing to use the PEC | (which is a form of Certified Electronic Mail) which has the | same legal value as the registered mail, but that the average | citizens do not have (unless they have it for other reasons), | which however has a (small) yearly cost, but that may be | "dangerous" in the sense that it becomes your "legal address" | so it needs to be monitored as anything that arrives there has | legal value and is considered delivered to you the moment it | arrives in the inbox. | texasbigdata wrote: | Shouldn't the company bear the burden of that cost, not the | consumer? That's kinda silly. | | Oh you require it by certified air pigeon? Great, happy to; | pay for it. | tremon wrote: | The recommendation for using a certified letter is that you | (as customer) have an independent paper trail to make your | case should it go to court. At least in NL, a certified | letter should not be required by the company itself. | Ekaros wrote: | In Finland cancelling rental contract can be fun, if you | don't manage to contact your landlord. Your regular | certified letter technically isn't enough. You need even | more expensive version "registered with advice of | receipt". Which is probably only way to prove in court | that person received it... | | Though I haven't had issues in cancelling stuff. Online | services work nicely for all other stuff. | jaclaz wrote: | ... and if we want to get even pickier (again at least | here in Italy) a Law firm will likely send you not (still | by certified mail with receipt) a "normal" letter (i.e. | one or more sheets of paper inside an envelope) but | rather a "piego" (literally "fold") i.e. the sheets of | papers folded in three, with the address (and the stamp) | written on the back. | | The rationale is that you could claim that you received | the letter, but upon opening the envelope you found just | some blank sheets, with the piego there is no way to deny | that it has been received. | | And viceversa, there have been cases of envelopes sent | intentionally with blank sheets inside, only to get the | receipt and then be able to claim that "document X" has | been sent within a required deadline (and actually | fabricating the document later). | mejutoco wrote: | Check the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. They do not even | allow to subscribe by credit/ debit card, only by sharing your | bank details. What a joke. | Semaphor wrote: | I thought that was illegal already, and has been for a few | years? Not sure if by EU or German regulation. | | FWIW, from 2022 on, Germany will have a 2-click unsubscribe law | [0]. It requires clearly labeled buttons and forbids a lot of | dark patterns. | | [0]: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two- | click... | tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: | Most importantly, Germany has the Verbraucherzentralen which | have the right to sue on behalf of (all) consumers. | | Many countries that don't have that will have consumer | protection laws that simply get ignored, because simply | ignoring them works for the company. | [deleted] | evancoop wrote: | There's something odd about legislation of this ilk. Virtually | every comment here bemoans these nefarious activities, and the | commenters themselves try to avoid companies that utilize these | dark patterns. The market, therefore, seems to be working - the | companies that pull this type of nefarious BS find their way into | the dumpster of failed ventures (as they should!). Would a law, | in effect, force companies to mask their unsavory dispositions? | Customer LTV is actually _higher_ when they are given the | opportunity to control their subscriptions... | dahart wrote: | > the companies that pull this type of nefarious BS find their | way into the dumpster of failed ventures | | What are some examples of companies that failed over this? All | I'm seeing here are very large very healthy companies being | named like NYT, WSJ, Sirius, etc. | | Seeing anecdotes of a few people trying to avoid being scammed | doesn't demonstrate a functioning market. If anything, the | evidence here is the opposite of what you suggest: that dark | patterns are working on the public at large and companies can | easily get away with bad behavior indefinitely if allowed to. | | > Would a law, in effect, force companies to mask their | unsavory dispositions? | | How would that work here, exactly? If there's a cancel button, | then there's a cancel button. | | Regulation has worked well for many, many things. Companies | sometimes do need to be told what's not acceptable, and they | have in the past complied once told. | evancoop wrote: | Can we truly scour the internet for small-time violators? | Sure, if a massive entity like NYT or WSJ fail to comply, | that could be called-out and addressed. But are we prepared | to enforce such a paradigm at scale? | dahart wrote: | Yes, we are prepared to enforce this. That's precisely what | laws, courts, and an enforcement agency are for. This | process has worked many times in the past and it will work | now and in the future. | | I don't understand your implied objection. Yes, small time | violators, and big time violators alike, will be reported | by their customers. Currently, customers don't have any | place at all to take their complaints, because it's not | illegal for a company to attempt to prevent a subscription | cancellation. | | How do you propose to call out and address the issue | without a law? How are you proposing to enforce individual | violations, and what is the violation exactly? You claimed | that market forces were taking care of this already, but | that's not true, and runs in direct contradiction to the | mountain of evidence in this thread alone. | cblconfederate wrote: | the major difference is that so far, if a company provides the | honest service, they are at a disadvantage. But since the law | equalizes the process for everyone, they are not at a | disadvantage anymore. | evancoop wrote: | Are the companies that offer honest service disadvantaged in | the long-run? Sure, in the short-term, a captive audience is | profitable, but eventually, this should harm LTV? | cblconfederate wrote: | I don't see how they would be advantaged. Their users are | leaving, the chances of re-subscribing are small, while the | users of their competitors are not leaving. Their honest | service is a small thing to matter in the overall | perception of their product, especially when the biggest | names in the sector are using dark patterns. | sempron64 wrote: | I subscribed to Verizon Fios service entirely online but when | moving I found out there was no way to cancel except to call | their support and bounce through several numbers. Quite annoying. | However, because when signing up you do need to have a technician | come to your residence, so there is some non-online interaction, | it might not be against the rules. | Havoc wrote: | Just had to sit on a phone call forever to get rid of uk beer52 | sub. | | It's evil AF. Real life dark pattern | synergy20 wrote: | What about IRS's pay me when you profit over stock, deduct 3000 | per year if you lose money until you're dead? not symmetric to | me, not at all. | vaidhy wrote: | Great job FTC/Lima. We need it and you delivered. | | On a separate note. Why is it really hard for HN community to | make a compliment? Yes, some companies will try to skirt around. | But most of us seem to agree this is a step in the right | direction and being hopeful is nice. | throw10920 wrote: | > On a separate note. Why is it really hard for HN community to | make a compliment? | | You can find a bunch of compliments in this thread, and others. | Don't portray the "HN community" as a monolithic entity with a | single will. It's not. And trying to guilt-trip the community | into making compliments is bad form, really annoying, boring to | read, and goes against the spirit of intellectual curiosity. | dang wrote: | I agree with you otherwise, but please edit out swipes like | that last sentence. It's not necessary and not in the spirit | of "Be kind" [etc.] a la | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. | jihadjihad wrote: | I went through the effort of canceling my NYT subscription this | morning, and _thankfully_ they have an option to cancel "using | your account," which avoids a pointless phone call or virtual | chat. It's the third option listed, of course, and there are a | couple of guilt-trippy pages you have to slide past, but in all | it took me 2 minutes to do. | dqpb wrote: | Do you live in California? | jihadjihad wrote: | I do not. | SubiculumCode wrote: | How about "click to subscribe, click 6 diminutive, threateningly | labeled buttons to cancel". | alexfromapex wrote: | What about snail mail to cancel? | alex_h wrote: | How would one go about trying to get this law enforced on a | company? I live in California where this tactic has supposedly | been illegal for 3 years already, but when I go to cancel my AT&T | internet subscription, I still can not do it online and am forced | to call. | danuker wrote: | Perhaps "small claims court" would fit the bill. Maybe there | are lawyers specialized in that. | IAmGraydon wrote: | Someone needs to inform TMobile's Home Internet division of this. | dboreham wrote: | Ah, I fondly recall when the CTO of AOL tried to cancel his AOL | account... | EmilioMartinez wrote: | A hard-to-cancel suscription is basically automatic theft, and | should be treated as such | john37386 wrote: | I subscribed to a weekly meal kit. It was very easy to onboard | and I liked the service for many months. My situation changed and | I no longer needed their service. I wanted to cancel my | subscription and it's impossible to do online. It's written in | super small to call their happy representative. I didn't like | this situation so what I'm doing is skipping the meal kit for the | next 4 weeks. Every month I log on their website and skip the | next 4 weeks... I'll do this until my credit card expired. Just | for this, I won't recommend them to anyone. It's sad because I | kind of liked it when it was useful to me. | xg15 wrote: | Question from a non-American. Is it actually legal to "cancel" | a service by having your credit card expire? | | At least here, if there is a subscription with recurring fees | active, you're liable for those fees, whether or not the | provider is able to collect them at this moment. | | This sounds like you risk building up a lot of debt and | eventually having a collections agency come after you. | john37386 wrote: | I might change my strategy and finally call them at some | point. It's just frustrating to be stuck in this situation. | Thanks for the tip. | weswpg wrote: | Many banks will _automatically_ transfer recurring | subscriptions to your new card as a "helpful" measure. | | > Updater services allow merchants to know when your credit | card information changes, and to alter their records | accordingly. If you don't want to continue the | subscription, you'll need to cancel it directly. | | https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/recurring- | charg... | ydant wrote: | You can also try changing your address to a California | address, and then the cancel button might magically appear | in your account, due to different regulations around this | for companies doing business in California. | jffry wrote: | > Is it actually legal to "cancel" a service by having your | credit card expire? | | Especially for services that are paid up-front, they | sometimes specify in the contract that the service is | terminated upon non-payment (my renters insurance is this | way). | | Many services don't contractually specify this, but they are | still in the habit of doing it because documenting debt takes | effort, and selling it to debt collectors only gets you a | fraction of its value. It's relatively easier for them to | just shut down the account and move on. | | That said, the terms of most services I've interacted with | require you to explicitly end your service via one of a | contractually specified set of communications channels (e.g. | "call us or send a letter to XYZ address"). | | So yes, it's also the case here that you risk accumulating | debt and being send to collections. | heliodor wrote: | It depends on whether you have a contact that binds you to | pay until you cancel. Gyms force such a contact. Most SaaS | websites don't. They'll cancel your service if they can't | collect and move on with their lives. | | Some day, someone will offer contract enforcement as a | service that makes it really easy for a SaaS to come after | you for payment and collect. Or maybe the friction of the | legal system makes it untenable and the legal process has to | become easier as a prerequisite. | | And to nitpick on vocabulary, it is _legal_ to break a | contract. It is illegal to break a law. | jffry wrote: | Most SaaS services are pre-paid rather than post-paid, so | if they cannot bill you, it's easy for them to shut off | your service and be out basically no money. | | My experience is that the actual terms of service don't | guarantee that will happen, but rather that it's more cost- | effective for the company to block your account than it is | to allow a debt to accrue, document that debt, and then | attempt to collect on it or sell it to debt collectors for | pennies. | wonderwonder wrote: | Probably not legal, but in the sense that you could get sent | to collections for what you owe vs getting charged with a | crime. If the company wanted to be difficult I think they | could keep billing you and then send you to collections and | likely most people would pay to avoid court costs and | continued credit degradation. | A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: | Can you name the meal kit place ( asking only, because I was | debating the heavily advertised one about fruits and veggies )? | darkwizard42 wrote: | You should honestly just tell your credit card about this | situation and if they are tier 1 (Chase, Amex, etc.) they will | likely deny the charge on your behalf if you can show proof | that you tried to cancel but weren't able to. | | People can say they have you in whatever financial agreement, | but if the processor has evidence you are NOT trying to pay it, | they can at least stop it from going on their rails (and your | card) | ghaff wrote: | My very limited experience with Blue Apron was that it was easy | enough to cancel. But pretty much all the meal services, as far | as I can tell,work on the subscribe and then you have to cancel | model. Which makes them pretty uninteresting to me. | | I _might_ give a service a try for a week here and there but I | definitely don 't want one week in and week out. And I don't | want to deal with signing up and then (hopefully if all goes | well) immediately canceling. Dark pattern. | ericwood wrote: | For a very very long time (I don't know what it's like these | days) Blue Apron's cancellation has been available online, | but not linked anywhere on the site. Contacting support would | either have them cancelling the subscription for you, or just | sending you the link. | | It was an extremely dark pattern intended to combat churn, | which was a huge problem. Practically nobody working there | liked it, but the orders to do things this way came from | execs. | werdnapk wrote: | I used to subscribe to a meal it service (Hello Fresh), but | circumstances changed and I just chatted with the online rep | via the website and was able to cancel rather quickly. | [deleted] | tristanperry wrote: | Good. The more exposure this tactic gets, the better. | | I remember trying to cancel my The Times (of London) subscription | a few years ago. It was a terrible experience - having to ensure | a pushy sales call for 20 minutes, where the call handler kept | ignoring my requests to cancel as they kept reading a hard sell | script. | | The sooner this practice ends, the better. | mdp2021 wrote: | Should not you only use anonymous / pre-paid / virtual / | revocable credit cards for those operations? | _Donny wrote: | Living in Europe, I couldn't believe that if I wanted to | unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their | hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours | were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was | out of order. | | I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ... | docdeek wrote: | I had that exprience with the NYT - I had to time my call right | to hit the office hours on the US east coast. | | That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a | subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24/7 online chat. A | far better and more convenient experience, if one that still | lacks the simplicity of a simple 'unsubscribe' button. | Manozco wrote: | I got this issue with the newspaper "Le Monde" in France a | couple of months ago. Had to send them a 8Euros letter to | cancel the subscription. | hajhatten wrote: | Now I just wish this was implemented in my country/EU. NYT set | the precedence for our national newspapers. | quitit wrote: | It's why they hate people that sign up via IAP - literally one | click and the subscription is gone. | vojvod wrote: | What's IAP? | montag wrote: | In-App Purchase | quitit wrote: | IAP for in app purchase. | | There are currently two ways to sign up for the New York | times online, one is via the website and the other is via a | subscription from the various app stores(an in-app- | purchase). | | To unsubscribe from the website-based subscription requires | a call to NYT's customer service based in New York which | have limited operating hours- here they'll try their best | to convince you not to unsubscribe after waiting in a phone | queue. | | However if you chose to subscribe through an IAP then you | simply browse to your active subscriptions and press a | button - far simpler and on par with how easy it was to | sign up. | | Making subscriptions difficult to cancel is not new in any | industry, NYT's behaviour here isn't unique, or even the | worst example. I use it as a demonstration that even | reputable companies use these tactics. | | This is one of the reasons why certain businesses loathe | IAPs, (regardless of the cost _). When providing your | details to a business there is a lot of added potential for | lock in, follow-on marketing, increasing the cost at | irregular intervals and selling your information to 3rd | parties. | | _ I say "regardless of the cost" because many types of | digital goods have minimal costs to provide them. For | example a 15% or 30% cut of such purchases is negligible | when selling an in-game currency because there is no | genuine cost for providing that currency. Even if the app | store charged 0% instead of the 15% or 30%, the business | would still be missing out on using your personal details | for all of the other valuable ways they can extract money | from you/your data. | | To use Amazon as an example - I receive extreme levels of | spam for the custom email address that I use with Amazon, | many vendors I have purchased from have immediately on sold | my contact information. | vojvod wrote: | Thanks, it hadn't occurred to me that the app stores | would enforce easy cancellation. I'll remember to prefer | in-app sign up over website for any new subscriptions in | future. | quitit wrote: | It's best to check both options before proceeding, as | some businesses do offer a cheaper subscription service | when working directly - however as mentioned that may | come with strings attached. | | I feel the success of small developers relies on IAP, it | means I can purchase from them without needing to trust | them - the app stores do a good job of reviewing the app | for malware and if the app doesn't live up to | expectations it is trivial to get a refund from the | various app stores. | ddek wrote: | Had a similar issue with a US publication recently. They | emailed to say "Your subscription of $120 has automatically | been renewed, please check your card details or contact us to | alter it." | | Fortunately the card they have expired last December. | makach wrote: | THIS. I am thinking that I can finally cancel my nytimes | subscription^^ | | I mean, I really appreciate the articles but I haven't been | able to follow as closely as I wanted. | nasir wrote: | I immediately instructed my bank to block the upcoming payments | and on the renewal day the subscription was cancelled. This is | pretty much a flow of their cancellation. | wheels wrote: | At least in Germany, having to cancel by sending a letter (or, | amusingly, sometimes a fax works) is still common. | hnbad wrote: | This is true for traditional "contracts", e.g. phone, | apartments, gyms, etc, but these generally also involve | paperwork when signing up (though in some of these cases you | can sign up online and then have the confirmation mailed to | you). | | This is definitely not the case for websites or apps and I'm | pretty sure what the NYT is doing wouldn't amuse German | consumer protection agencies. | joeberon wrote: | Germany operates on way more paper systems than the US though | sorokod wrote: | Was cancelling my cell provider and was required to send a | fax - hello Vodafone.de | littlecranky67 wrote: | Cancellation by mail is always fine, no company can opt out | of it in a legal way. You don't even need to get the | address right, you can mail it to any subsidiary of the | company - it is the companys responsibility to correctly | route it internally. You can even directly address it to | the CEO and at "personlich" to it. My favorite. | pantulis wrote: | You would need proof of receipt and proof of content in | case contract termination does not happen, though. | littlecranky67 wrote: | In theory yes, in practice I had multiple disputes over | contract termination and in 100% of those cases the | counterparty with happy with the photo. And also compare | it to any "phone calls" where you basically have nothing | as a proof (dunno about your jurisdiction, but in Germany | it is illegal to record phone calls without prior consent | and also would require technical means to do so). | | Also, if you ever worked in a large corporation, they | have a lot of means to track incoming mail | ("Posteingangsbuch") and for an enterprise to try to | pretend not to have received a letter would require | maldoing by a lot of employees (who usually are not | commited to giving false statements in court for their | employer). | Faaak wrote: | In general I write an e-mail saying "please don't make us | waste more time by requiring me to send a letter and please | revoke my current subscription". | | Works somewhat | wheels wrote: | There are third party services that handle cancellation | (e.g. Aboalarm) that are more reliable, and don't require | any more time. I honestly just have an online fax account | where I can upload a PDF to send a fax for like 20 cents, | and that almost always works. It's still a dark pattern | though. | imtringued wrote: | Stupidly enough, you have to cancel SEPA direct debit | mandates with a written document to the merchant. | whazor wrote: | In The Netherlands there are companies that will fill in, | print, and send cancellation letters for you as a service. | They rank very high in Google search. | [deleted] | rich_sasha wrote: | A few times I found it was easier to cancel a card than to | cancel a subscription. | | I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for goods | and services is to pass full details of your payment card, | sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust the | merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token they | can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify it. | | It thankfully is now more of a thing of the past, but it used | to be the case in the UK at least that places would take a | telephone card payment, where you recite your card number, | expiry date etc. So not only can they make any future payment | they like, there is even no durable record of them having these | details. | viknesh wrote: | I once had a paper/digital subscription, and at some point I | had cancelled the card linked to it. Unbeknownst to me (my | parents were receiving the subscription), they had kept | sending the paper despite the card being cancelled. When NYT | eventually realized the card had been cancelled, they claimed | that I owed them for the ~year or so that I had been | receiving the paper after the card was cancelled, and | attempted to send this to collections. | | Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me. | soco wrote: | I'm not sure why is this outrageous. You had a contract | with NYT so they deliver you the newspaper for a payment, | contract which you didn't even try to cancel. This is how | contracts work. | manigandham wrote: | That's not outrageous at all. Your failure to pay doesn't | invalidate your contract that you will pay for their | services. | | It's definitely frustrating to cancel, and this is a good | ruling that will help make it easier, but it's still your | responsibility to do so. | matheusmoreira wrote: | How could it _not_ invalidate the contract? Services are | provided after payment is made. If no payment is made, no | service is provided. | soco wrote: | Have you ever read your contracts? Maybe it would be time | to do so now, before you run into troubles with | collectors. | matheusmoreira wrote: | Of course. I just opened up a contract I signed with a | legal firm. It says lack of payment ends the contract. | | Why can't everything be simple and easy? Maybe somebody | needs to pass a law to make it so. | KennyBlanken wrote: | You hand that info to the merchant because your credit card | company can issue chargebacks against them and that costs | them a pretty penny with their payment processor, especially | if it happens often. Credit card disputes almost always slant | in favor of the customer. | | Folks just don't seem to realize: you make a reasonable | effort with the vendor, and then go straight to your credit | card company. | | I caught a restaurant "helping" themselves to a very healthy | tip for delivery; I'd tipped in cash. The owner repeatedly | professed that he didn't know how to issue a refund and | offered cash. | | He was playing stupid because he didn't want to deal with the | transaction fee, nor did he want a paper trail of his fraud; | I strongly suspect he was doing this to other people, too. | Warned him three times and three times he said, gosh, he had | no idea how to issue a refund to my card. | | I asked for just the fraudulent tip back and my credit card | company reversed the entire charge. So not only did he lose | the tip, he lost the cost of the food _and he got dinged with | a chargeback fee._ He also lost my _weekly_ pizza order. | rich_sasha wrote: | I believe this doesn't work with debit cards, which are the | norm in Europe. | | Still though, it's a weird system. Instead of giving | someone just enough permissions to spend my money, I give | them permissions to spend all of it, with some other party | reimbursing me if that goes awry (and I notice). | dotancohen wrote: | > Instead of giving someone just enough permissions to | spend my money, I give them permissions to spend all of | it | | A peeve of mine is that the trust-until-a-screwup system | is used in far more critical places than with a credit | card. For instance, "DOT certification" of tires has no | paper trail until people die. | | If a tire fails while operating within its speed regime | and before five years from manufacture, then it is to be | reported to the DOT (US Department of Transportation). | This usually only happens if the police are reporting on | a fatal accident - most common citizens neither know that | this option exists nor how to report it. If enough | reports of a specific brand or type of tire come in, then | the manufacturer (or importer) must provide proof of the | testing done and pay some fines. | | Many of the cheap Chinese tires are out of business | (read: have changed business names) far before this | critical last step could ever be reached, assuming that | any reports were filed at all. | soco wrote: | I also wouldn't call debit cards "the norm". They are in | majority (1 to 5?), true, maybe also because many are | issued for free by the bank where you have the account | (which doesn't mean they are also used). But still not | really "the norm". | f-jin wrote: | Can't speak for all of Europe, but my bank in the | Netherlands (Rabobank) certainly does offer chargeback | options on debit card purchases. | Nextgrid wrote: | Disputes are enforced by Visa and Mastercard rules and | apply to debit & credit cards equally. Some countries may | have some extra legal protections for credit cards, but | for clear examples of merchant bad faith the card | network's dispute resolution process should be enough. | type_Ben_struct wrote: | I had to resort to cancelling a card once too, but it didn't | fix the problem. My Credit Card Provider (Barclaycard) | implemented the Visa Account Updater service with no way to | turn it off so my new card details went straight to the | merchant. | | Ended up cancelling the account I was so frustrated, lost a | customer of 10 years. | | https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau | ClumsyPilot wrote: | Typically you can call your bank and ask them to block | transactions from a particular merchant that you have an | issue with, I have done that before, once on credit card | and once on a current account. | Xelbair wrote: | >I still find it insane that the "normal" way to pay for | goods and services is to pass full details of your payment | card, sufficient to make any future payment, and just trust | the merchant. Surely the sane way is you generate some token | they can redeem against, but you can e.g. expire it or modify | it. | | That's kinda how Blik payments work in Poland. They generate | one time code that is used to purchase goods, you also have | to confirm it on your device(usually a banking app). | | That code is one time use and expires after 2 minutes - and | it can be safely told out loud. You also get transaction | details before you confirm it on your device. | | Expanding this system to a token that allows recurring | subscription would be pretty convenient. | fundatus wrote: | It's not a token, but similar: Europe has Direct Debit | mandates, which you give to the biller and they can be | revoked. | | https://gocardless.com/guides/sepa/mandates/ | rich_sasha wrote: | That's better, agreed. But can I e.g. limit payment amounts | on these? | | On Direct Debits in the UK, the merchant just charges me | whatever. This is for things like utilities and phone | bills, so I don't have major trust issues, but still it | irks me. | zwaps wrote: | In a way, it's even better than credit card: You can not | set a limit - except contractually, but you can enforce | it. You can do the charge-back yourself (via the Bank's | website) within like 6 or 9 months of the transaction. | This will cost the vendor a lot (relatively speaking) | money and is pretty easy to do. However, if there is any | doubt about who is right, an action like that will lead | them to invoice you all associated costs, send it to | collections and then a legal fight begins. | | Which I guess why many businesses prefer Klarna or other | payment processors. You login with your bank account and | then wire the money to them, instead of them pulling the | money. Then, no chargebacks are possible. | Reason077 wrote: | I haven't seen an option to set a payment limit, but all | banks give you the ability to cancel a direct debit | authorisation at any time. For that reason alone I'd say | it's always better to use direct debit than give a | merchant your credit/debit card for subscription | services. | | In any case, the banks seem to be very good at refunding | direct debits in cases where the merchants appear to be | abusing them. My ex once noticed after several months | that her gym was still charging her even after she'd | cancelled - the bank made it very quick and easy to claim | back all the extra payments! | malka wrote: | That's what 3dsecure is for. | | in EU (well, at least in my country, France) a payment | without 3dsecure is extremely easy to chargeback. | soco wrote: | I don't think 3d protects you in this case of recurring | charges. | nivenkos wrote: | It's just as bad in Europe! Signed up to O2 Deutschland - had | to send a fax or send a physical letter to cancel. | nasir wrote: | You can instruct your bank to stop the direct debit payments | and they'll cancel your subscription. | odiroot wrote: | I had to do exactly that with o2 Germany. They continued to | charge me after the contract expired. And they even tried | to charge for the router that I actually sent back. | hnarn wrote: | You shouldn't say this to people like it's some obvious | truth. There are many cases in which this action will land | you in trouble due to it not being a legally valid | termination of the contract (which of course may be | different by country -- it's very common that cancelling | requires an actual message to the other party). | | One specific example is if your contract has a termination | period, which is pretty common, at least in my part of | Europe. If you simply stop paying, you are denying the | other party N months of revenue (your cancellation period) | that you are contractually obliged to pay. You are now | defaulting on your payments and will likely pay additional | fees. | Nextgrid wrote: | This makes sense if the contract indeed has a minimum | commitment that hasn't been reached. | | But if the contract has no minimum term (or it has since | passed) and you've made a reasonable effort to attempt to | cancel with no success, it'll now be on them to recover | the money through legal means which would require them to | explain to the court why your cancellation attempt was | ignored, demonstrating their bad faith in the process. | That's not something they want to do. | hnarn wrote: | The point of my comment was "this is not good general | advice". The point of your comment seems to be "it can be | good advice in some cases", which makes no sense to me. | Obviously it can be good advice in that exact case where | it makes sense, but it's not good general advice. | Nextgrid wrote: | I'd argue it's good enough general advice and would apply | to most online subscriptions as they typically have no | minimum commitment. The ones with a minimum commitment | would be the outliers and would require special | treatment. | nasir wrote: | I agree with your point that you could get into trouble | for violating your contract terms. I perhaps should have | mentioned specifically about NYTimes which seem to have | designed around people blocking the payments to cancel | their subscription. | nivenkos wrote: | This was the whole issue though. I closed my bank account | and moved country, and they delayed cancelling it and then | chased me up on one month's payments for years - when I had | no easy way of making payments in Germany. | | In the end I paid it though, it was only 20 euros! | hnarn wrote: | This isn't "Europe", it's Germany. Germany is still well | known for using fax for government and corporate | communication, and there was heavy criticism for how the | Covid pandemic was initially handled because faxing records | was so common which meant they could not be easily digitized, | collected and searched. | | In Sweden, sending a fax or physical letter to a government | instance or private companies rather than an e-mail is more | or less unheard of, unless they for some reason need a | physical paper with your signature on it (I've heard this | happen with customs, for example), but in almost all areas of | society this has now also been replaced with Bank-ID, which | is digital.[1] | | [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID | revax wrote: | You have to call or send a letter to cancel your | subscription of the French newspaper LeMonde. | | It's not just Germany. | [deleted] | _Wintermute wrote: | I had this same issue with a number of French companies. | Couldn't figure out why they weren't cancelling my | contract despite repeated letters until someone told me | you have to send the letter with proof of receipt | otherwise they just ignore it. | nivenkos wrote: | Yeah, I live in Sweden now too. | | I think Sweden is the exception here really though (and the | other Scandinavian countries, and possibly the UK). | hnarn wrote: | To me, that's enough exceptions to not generalize about | "Europe". | tchalla wrote: | There are 3 ways to cancel an O2 contract - (1) Online | intimation + phone call, (2) Letter or (3) Fax [0]. Most | routers (like Fritzbox) come with a fax function which you | send an online fax [1]. O2 charges a maximum of 0.14 cents | per fax page or free based on your DSL plan. Alternatively, | you can also send a physical letter online (0.70 cents) [2]. | | Your comment below says that there is no receipt for | confirmation. O2 provides a default PDF form on their website | which to fill for termination. The letter explicitly states | that "o2 should send you a written confirmation of | cancellation". It is illegal for O2 to be in receipt of a | letter and not send a confirmation. I am sorry if that | happened to you! | | Don't get me wrong - the auto-renewal of contract practices | in Germany are predatory for the consumers. Recently, there | has been a change in law that forces providers to extend | contracts by 1 month instead of 1 or 2 years. | | [0] https://www.o2online.de/service/kuendigung/ | | [1] https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ- | Box-7490/... | | [2] https://www.deutschepost.de/de/e/epost.html | | [3] https://static2.o9.de/resource/blob/498264/12cd6ca6ee17a0 | 2b9... | nivenkos wrote: | This was 10 years ago, it definitely wasn't possible by | phone call back then. | | Hopefully it'll get better. I also had a terrible | experience with Vodafone in the UK, charging the higher | rates for data usage with no warning. | t0mas88 wrote: | That's illegal in Europe. You have to be able to cancel via | the same means as you signed up. So if you can signup online | then you must be able to cancel online. | Manozco wrote: | It sure as hell doesn't work like this for the newspaper Le | Monde (in France). Sure you can sign/resign with | Apple/Google but if you sign with e-mail, you have to mail | a physical letter to resign (8Euros one with proof of | delivery and all) | umanwizard wrote: | I subscribe to Der Spiegel (German weekly news magazine) | and as far as I can tell it can't be cancelled without | e-mailing them. | | This is unfortunate because although I can read German, I | can't write or speak it, so figuring out how to write that | e-mail would be a headache. | | Edit: Thanks to aboalarm.de, which I learned about from | this thread, I have learned the correct formula to use: | | > Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, | | > | | > hiermit kundige ich mein oben genanntes Abonnement Ihrer | Zeitschrift fristgerecht zum nachstmoglichen Zeitpunkt. | | so if I do ever decide to cancel, this thread has been | quite useful. | jfk13 wrote: | You could email them in English. Der Spiegel is large and | international enough that it's reasonable to expect them | to cope with that. | umanwizard wrote: | You're probably right. I haven't tried. | llampx wrote: | It probably depends on which country is handling your | subscription. With a German address, they don't have to | consider any request in any language other than German. | hnarn wrote: | Source? | t0mas88 wrote: | Here is the Dutch implementation, because it's the first | I could find in English: | https://business.gov.nl/regulation/automatic-renewal- | subscri... As is says there "Consumers must be able to | cancel their agreement in exactly the same way as they | signed up for them." | | It's based on an EU directive, but a recent one so not | all countries have it live yet. More details on the EU | directive and the German implementation starting next | year: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new- | two-click... | ahartmetz wrote: | IIRC it's a law that is just a few months old. | revax wrote: | That's not really a source. | ahartmetz wrote: | It's a possible explanation for older anecdotes about | having to cancel by fax. | Reason077 wrote: | > _" That's illegal in Europe. You have to be able to | cancel via the same means as you signed up."_ | | Unfortunately I don't think that's true. I'm looking at | you, beer52.com! [1] | | (And yes, they were doing this long before the UK left the | EU, and are still at it today) | | [1] https://ibb.co/r4LfK5F | misnome wrote: | Yes, beer52.com is atrocious for this also. I tried over | a couple of weeks in lunch breaks and never got through. | | Eventually I sent an email to some random customer | support email I found complaining and they actually did | it. | llampx wrote: | Europe is big. This is most definitely not illegal in | Germany, in fact it is the preferred practice by anti- | consumer companies. | sitic wrote: | A recently passed German law requires (among other | changes) an online cancel button, however companies don't | have to implement it until July 2022 unfortunately. | | https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/vertraege- | reklamat... | huhtenberg wrote: | Probably no less than 90 days in advance too. | texasbigdata wrote: | Which is ironic from what I understand to be a mobile phone | operator. Clearly they don't trust their own network | shp0ngle wrote: | No, they just want it to be as hard as possible. | | Although I was surprised how relatively big faxes are in | Germany. I never had sent a fax before I was in Germany. | nivenkos wrote: | From nuclear power, to card payments, to online shopping | - Germany is extremely conservative with regards to | modern technology. | ahartmetz wrote: | Faxes aren't _that_ big either. I never liked them, never | owned one, and I remember sending two faxes in my life. | Maybe a few I don 't remember. The last one was... to | cancel a mobile phone contract. | Aardwolf wrote: | Still better than waiting hours on a "support" phone line | nivenkos wrote: | It's not, because there's no real receipt confirmation. | | They ended up chasing me for 3 years over 20 euros when I | moved to the UK. At least here in Sweden, credit checks | aren't really a thing thankfully. | low_tech_love wrote: | Yeah, but try to cancel an internet subscription here in | Sweden... | nivenkos wrote: | I've always had it included in the BRF or rental | agreement. Only 28 Mb/s mind... | Aardwolf wrote: | You can send a signed letter and that should be legal | proof | raverbashing wrote: | This is not all of Europe, though Germany is known for this | shenanigans (but on the other hand this gives you a | confirmation of when you cancelled it if you send it Advice | of Receipt) | melomal wrote: | Wall Street Journal does the same thing. It's completely mad. | insaneirish wrote: | Tip: when you're ready to cancel, change the physical address | in your account to one in California. Magically, a cancel | button appears (to comply with California law). | | I did this the last time WSJ decided to jack my rate to | something obscene. | kashyapc wrote: | Yeah; I've had this "send us a letter via snail mail to cancel" | recently. Saying "it's unreal" doesn't capture the absurdity. | xdfgh1112 wrote: | I used online chat to do it. It took several attempts to get | connected. They offered me a really good deal to stay but I | declined on principle because I don't want to support such | practices. | adrianmsmith wrote: | If they do something like this, it shows such complete lack of | confidence in their product. "The only reason why people would | continue to use this product is... if we make it sufficiently | difficult to cancel". | | When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I | assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the | product know it... | tootie wrote: | That's not really it. They want a chance to convince you to | stay and/or get feedback on why you're leaving. They can also | offer some kind of one-off promotion or something to retain | people. Subscriber loyalty is the absolute lifeblood of these | kinds of businesses. | | I work at a non-profit and we collect recurring payments from | people who don't actually get anything tangible in return. The | membership are rigidly ethical in all their fundraising and | messaging, but they think of "call to cancel" as being a fair | practice. | histriosum wrote: | If you are concerned that the only way to keep people | subscribed is to offer them a one-off promotion when they've | decided to cancel -- isn't that kind of a tacit | acknowledgement that your product doesn't contain the value | that you are charging for? To me, it seems a bit like you've | actually reinforced the GP's point... | | On the non-profit point of view, that's hard for me to | understand -- I run a small non-profit and I can't imagine | having any other response to someone cancelling their | recurring donation than sending them an e-mail thanking them | for their support and offering a conversation for some | feedback if they'd be willing to tell us how we could do | better. I suppose it depends on the non-profit sector you are | in, but often times people giving low dollar recurring | donations aren't particularly well off and I can't imagine | forcing them to call me and tell me that they love our | organization but they're just too broke for a while to | continue.. | sokoloff wrote: | I also dislike this business practice, but I don't think the | only way it comes about is from lack of confidence in | product/service. | | Let's say you were building a startup and had to prioritize | limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You're | talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get | people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you | could do is 3+ years long. | | You'd build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even | if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history | of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than | that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, | or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded | their cancel page first. | pxndx wrote: | the NYT is not a small startup. | ratww wrote: | You don't have to "build" anything. Just have a button | "cancel subscription" with a mailto: link... or even some | text saying "email us at @ from your account and it will be | cancelled within N hours/days". | | Currently what most companies (including startups) do is | burying the cancellation instructions in some Knowledge Base, | or forcing some back and forth via email or phone. | | You can rationalise bad behaviour all day, but we all know | very well the reason people don't make it easy to cancel. | makapuf wrote: | Well a simple email would be too easy to forge. But I'm | sure its not hard to setup something I "your account" page. | ratww wrote: | > Well a simple email would be too easy to forge. | | Email is how thousands of SaaS handle cancellations today | already. | | > But I'm sure its not hard to setup something I "your | account" page. | | That's the whole point of the subthread... | makapuf wrote: | Email reception, yes. Email sending is different, you | would need to check DKIM that the sender is really the | one, and that has also some setup cost. | ratww wrote: | I'm sorry, I don't think your posts have anything to do | with my message or with this thread. | [deleted] | capableweb wrote: | > You'd build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. | Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the | history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be | older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 | minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt | anyone has coded their cancel page first. | | I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of | "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if | you're not happy". | | I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users | signing up to services I've built that one of the top reasons | they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to | migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock- | in has always been high up on my list of features for every | service I build/am involved in. | kvark wrote: | Exactly this line of reasoning brought me to Obsidian tool, | which manages files you already own. It could be a minority | of users, but we love that attitude! | forgotmyoldname wrote: | Employing people to handle phone cancellations is way more | money and effort than a cancellation script. | | I've never encountered a small startup that relies on call to | cancel--only big companies that actively know they're making | it hard to leave. | rexreed wrote: | So much of the current economy derives benefit from captive | customers who are charged ridiculous fees because they have no | other place to go (think drinks at a movie theater or baggage | fees on an airline, but there are many versions of the captive- | customer squeeze), use extortion-type tactics to retain | customers (you lose functionality of the product you've | "bought" if you leave or otherwise lock you into their product | making it painful to leave), or otherwise strong-arm their | customers from leaving once they have them on board (high | termination fees, impossible cancellation methods, threatening | collections if you do a chargeback). | | Many SaaS compaines even do this -- luring their customers in | with low or even free offerings and then turning off those free | or low priced offerings to force their users into higher paying | brackets without providing any additional functionality. | Pipedrive just announced that they are sunsetting their popular | Esssentials plan for no really good reason than to squeeze | their customers into a higher plan. I have had other companies | decide to arbitrarily double or even quadruple the price of | their offering for the same features because they can't find | any other way to generate more revenues and probably didn't | have the right price to begin with if it can't sustain their | business. | | Are these products good? Yeah they're decent enough. But these | tactics say more about trying to squeeze every nickel not only | out of those who would otherwise want to leave, but even those | who would like to stay. | spaetzleesser wrote: | That would require that there is somebody overseeing the | complete user experience. In reality the people who design the | product probably never meet the people who design the | subscription management systems. | lostgame wrote: | This has nothing to do with confidence. | | It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more | difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give | up partway through the process because they don't want to pick | up the phone. | | It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a | damn about the company's confidence in its product. They care | about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. | The quality of the product is way secondary to that. | avian wrote: | > it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product. | | It can also show complete and utter overconfidence. "The only | reason people would want to unsubscribe is by accident. We're | doing people a favor when making it as hard as possible to make | that mistake." | lostgame wrote: | Gave me a giggle, but yeaaaaah, no. XD | | Let's be real. It's a dark pattern to make people give up on | cancelling, rather than go through with it. | | The more difficult something is, the more likely people are | to give up on any phase of doing that thing. | gwd wrote: | If it's so amazing that people only unsubscribe by accident, | they'll certainly miss it quickly and subscribe again | immediately. The practice of using "dark patterns" to prevent | people from unsubscribing is utterly disrespectful. | edgyquant wrote: | Planet Fitness does this. You can sign up in a couple of minutes | online but they require you to go into the store and request | cancellation. | dqpb wrote: | Finally! FU NYT | Zanfa wrote: | A reasonable legal requirement should be that customers are able | to unsubscribe using the same method used to subscribe and the | process should not require more time and effort than the initial | subscription. | mdp2021 wrote: | Member lagadu nearby (root post) states it is the case of | Portugal. | | Edit: according to member t0mas88, it is not just Portugal, or | the Netherlands as mentioned nearby: it should be a European | directive, not yet implemented by all Members. I guess that | this should push heavily on the service providers for general | compliance (as opposed to changing the options according to | geolocation, as another member here revealed mentioning | California). | matheusmoreira wrote: | Reasonable would be lack payment ending the contract. We should | be able to simply stop paying them with zero repercussions. Let | them deal with the administrative trivia required to cancel a | service. | _pferreir_ wrote: | This TBH, I think we're so used to being taken advantage of | that we don't realize we should be asking for more. | Especially if it's the kind of service which doesn't involve | extra preparation costs for the provider. | flerovium wrote: | The problem is that in the US, one cannot easily stop a | debit/credit card from being billed for a particular service. | | A more general solution is to make the payment infrastructure | allow me to ban a particular merchant. You can implement this | by reissuing a debit card, but there's no reason not to make | it seamless for individual merchants. | danieldk wrote: | This is the case in the Netherlands and a contract cannot | revoke this right (Burgerlijk Wetboek 6:236). If you subscribe | online, you should be able to unsubscribe online. | | Another thing that helps if you don't want to fight someone who | violates this and they require you to send a letter, that an | e-mail also qualifies as legally binding. So, if they ask a | letter to end a subscription, they must also accept an e-mail. | | (IANAL) | grenoire wrote: | T-Mobile Thuis literally delayed the end of my subscription | by _two_ months, and only cancelled it when I called back. | There wasn 't ever a way to cancel online. In practice | they've really been truly garbage, lawful or not. | t0mas88 wrote: | Ziggo is similar, very shitty customer service, and you | have to talk to an aggressive sales person to be allowed to | cancel. The moment fiber was delivered to my area I | cancelled them and just hung up on the sales guy lying to | me about how their speed was higher (it definitely isn't) | than fiber. | danieldk wrote: | Ziggo is terrible. I recently overheard one of their | salespersons (at MediaMarkt) claiming that Ziggo is also | fiber internet (it's cable). Only when the customer | pushed him, he admitted that it is not really fiber, but | then argued that it doesn't really matter, because | 90whatever percent of the route from the data center to | home is fiber. | consp wrote: | > doesn't really matter | | Their 35/50Mbit upload speed says differently. I'm really | looking forward to not having to call them again for | discounts (since you otherwise pay more than new | customers) because I can then actually leave them when | the fiber is installed. | | Good to know I just have to hang up on the sales guy. | delecti wrote: | Then you will be happy to learn the content in the article this | thread is about. | skyde wrote: | I faced this problem with the airport Gogo wifi | | they charge monthly fee but you need to call and spend hours on | the phone to cancel. | annoyingnoob wrote: | Looking at you Consumer Reports and LA Times! | | Any company that forces me to call to cancel, and then works | really really hard to retain me, and then starts offering me | better and better deals loses my business for life. | | If you can't offer me your best rate before I leave then you are | just trying to get over on me and I'm offended. Have fun losing | customers and going out of business. | yessirwhatever wrote: | Someone tell NYT. | lode wrote: | These days you can cancel yourself via myaccount.nytimes.com. | | Go to Subscription overview, and at the very bottom click | "Cancel your subscription". | | You can also use this to get a better deal. Just start the | cancellation, choose "My subscription is too expensive" as | reason, click Continue a couple of times and they'll give you a | reduced rate to keep you. I now pay 2 euros a month for a | digital subscription. | Macha wrote: | My understanding is this is only available in certain | jurisdictions which mandate symmetry between subscribe and | unsubscribe options. Others direct you to phone or Web chat. | lode wrote: | Aha okay I didn't know that. That's just plain evil then. | wly_cdgr wrote: | Beautiful. Take that, NYT website, lol | mikevm wrote: | I'm also annoyed by having to return or mail back routers when | disconnecting from ISPs. When you sign up they are glad to | deliver and install at no cost, but now you have to waste time or | money sending them the equipment back. | mdp2021 wrote: | It is really not the same thing: they lent you equipment. That | <<no cost>> is not really such, but if it were, you cannot | demand further "favours" on the basis of former or other | favours. (Or, they could go along the lines of that "fake" <<no | cost>> and charge you for both equipment deployment and full | equipment costs incorporating them in the general fees, | increasing them.) | cblconfederate wrote: | Ironically, this may make people more likely to subscribe | romwell wrote: | Well, making something illegal doesn't make it non-existent. | | Let's see how this is enforced before putting those "Mission | Accomplished" banners up. | forgingahead wrote: | Great - please inform the NYT immediately so they can stop this | incredibly sleazy practice for their own business. | viro wrote: | Honestly avoiding stuff like this is why I loved how the App | Store did subscriptions. | [deleted] | ajuc wrote: | Another dark pattern - "share my data with these" list, on by | default, 4000 entries, and you have to uncheck them manually one- | by-one or accept. | lutorm wrote: | I got this spiel from someone, don't remember who now. When they | told me I needed to call to cancel, I responded "If you can | process my subscription online, you can process my cancellation | too. If you continue charging my credit card, I will charge back | the transaction." Then it was suddenly possible to cancel online | just fine. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-11-17 23:00 UTC)