“Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/the-end-of-click-to-subscribe-call-to-cancel-one-of-the-news-industrys-favorite-retention-tactics-is-illegal-ftc-says/

by spzx • 5 years ago

3192 859 5 years ago

niemanlab.org

zorked• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

[...] 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...

hnbad2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

jaclaz2• 5 years ago

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.

texasbigdata2• 5 years ago

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.

Semaphor• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

mejutoco• 5 years ago

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.

tristanperry• 5 years ago

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.

_Donny• 5 years ago

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 ...

xdfgh1112• 5 years ago

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.

docdeek• 5 years ago

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.

hajhatten• 5 years ago

Now I just wish this was implemented in my country/EU. NYT set the precedence for our national newspapers.

wheels2• 5 years ago

At least in Germany, having to cancel by sending a letter (or, amusingly, sometimes a fax works) is still common.

sorokod• 5 years ago

Was cancelling my cell provider and was required to send a fax - hello Vodafone.de

hnbad2• 5 years ago

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.

Faaak• 5 years ago

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

imtringued• 5 years ago

Stupidly enough, you have to cancel SEPA direct debit mandates with a written document to the merchant.

whazor• 5 years ago

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.

rich_sasha3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

KennyBlanken3• 5 years ago

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.

fundatus• 5 years ago

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/

type_Ben_struct• 5 years ago

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

malka• 5 years ago

That's what 3dsecure is for.

in EU (well, at least in my country, France) a payment without 3dsecure is extremely easy to chargeback.

Xelbair• 5 years ago

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.

nivenkos7• 5 years ago

It's just as bad in Europe! Signed up to O2 Deutschland - had to send a fax or send a physical letter to cancel.

texasbigdata2• 5 years ago

Which is ironic from what I understand to be a mobile phone operator. Clearly they don’t trust their own network

Aardwolf2• 5 years ago

Still better than waiting hours on a "support" phone line

raverbashing• 5 years ago

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)

nasir3• 5 years ago

You can instruct your bank to stop the direct debit payments and they'll cancel your subscription.

hnarn5• 5 years ago

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

tchalla• 5 years ago

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/498264/12cd6ca6ee17a02b9...

t0mas884• 5 years ago

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.

huhtenberg• 5 years ago

Probably no less than 90 days in advance too.

melomal• 5 years ago

Wall Street Journal does the same thing. It's completely mad.

insaneirish• 5 years ago

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.

makach• 5 years ago

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.

nasir3• 5 years ago

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.

Manozco2• 5 years ago

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.

quitit3• 5 years ago

It’s why they hate people that sign up via IAP - literally one click and the subscription is gone.

vojvod2• 5 years ago

What's IAP?

ddek• 5 years ago

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.

kashyapc• 5 years ago

Yeah; I've had this "send us a letter via snail mail to cancel" recently. Saying "it's unreal" doesn't capture the absurdity.

adrianmsmith• 5 years ago

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...

sokoloff• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

the NYT is not a small startup.

capableweb• 5 years ago

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.

forgotmyoldname• 5 years ago

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.

ratww4• 5 years ago

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.

avian• 5 years ago

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."

gwd• 5 years ago

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.

lostgame4• 5 years ago

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.

rexreed2• 5 years ago

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.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

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.

tootie2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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..

lostgame4• 5 years ago

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.

Zanfa• 5 years ago

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.

microtonal2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

mdp20215• 5 years ago

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).

matheusmoreira3• 5 years ago

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_• 5 years ago

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.

flerovium2• 5 years ago

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.

delecti• 5 years ago

Then you will be happy to learn the content in the article this thread is about.

yessirwhatever• 5 years ago

Someone tell NYT.

lode2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

mikevm• 5 years ago

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.

mdp20215• 5 years ago

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.)

romwell• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Great - please inform the NYT immediately so they can stop this incredibly sleazy practice for their own business.

jurassic• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

kieloo• 5 years ago

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.

csee2• 5 years ago

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.

Reason0773• 5 years ago

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

sodality2• 5 years ago

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.

bodge50002• 5 years ago

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

ChrisRR• 5 years ago

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

ookware2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

emdowling• 5 years ago

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.

criddell• 5 years ago

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.

rndgermandude• 5 years ago

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".

aliher1911• 5 years ago

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.

ghaff3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

algesten2• 5 years ago

I'm subscribed digitally using apple app subscription. That means I can just end it whenever and The Guardian wouldn't be involved.

Someone1234• 5 years ago

But can also only read your newspaper subscription using Apple's walled garden rather than a web browser.

dspillett2• 5 years ago

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.

3guk• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

barbazoo2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

scruti• 5 years ago

The Economist reached the point of calling me to ask if I knew someone who would be interested into a subscription. I love the magazine but their marketing is really invasive and annoying.

Last time I cancelled they were a nightmare calling me every other day.

jffry4• 5 years ago

I don't know if this is the case, but these are exactly the sort of awful "customer retention" strategies I would expect from an organization where somebody is being judged/rewarded based on minimizing customer turnover metrics below some threshold.

aurumpotest• 5 years ago

I had a different experience with the Economist. I forgot to cancel and was billed. I emailed saying I forgot to cancel, could I unsubscribe now? And got a quick reply saying they'd cancelled and also refunded me despite me not asking.

I recently cancelled again after getting the 1-month renewal warning, and immediately got a 50% off offer, so I'll probably subscribe again.

I had a similarly easy experience with the Guardian a few years ago, based in Europe.

joveian• 5 years ago

They must have changed recently since I subscribed and unsubscribed online earlier this year with no trouble (I unsubscribed because they signed me up to new email lists without my permission, something another newspaper I'm subscribed to (but will likely be canceling) just did as well :().

The one newspaper I've had no issues at all with is Indian Country Today. They use qgiv and while you can make an account with qgiv to edit payment details, they also send you an email every time they bill your card with a link that lets you unsubscribe in one click with no account (so it is easy to just cancel and resubscribe if you need to make changes rather than needing yet another account). All around excellent experience with ICT and qgiv.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news

https://qgiv.com/

askesisdev• 5 years ago

I told the person at the The Economist's live chat that I was unsubscribing due to that dark pattern. The other reason is that even if the content is great their app isn't. The saved articles feature isn't shared between different devices. Another reason is that you need to get into an article and then get out instead of doing continuous reading. Ended up reading/annotating downloaded PDFs because it was a better experience than using their app.

TheTrotters2• 5 years ago

I had very good experience with The Economist but, despite that, I'm still hesitant to re-subscribe because I just don't want to bother e-mailing them if I want to suspend or cancel my subscription (or add/remove print etc.).

chiefgeek• 5 years ago

Same with the New York Times. Having gone through calling to cancel, I vowed never to subscribe again. Now I simply scan the front page to make sure the end of the world isn’t upon us. (Many days, reading it, it appears as though it is!)/s

conductr• 5 years ago

Newspapers are awful. I had one thrown in my yard DAILY, that the previous homeowner had signed up for. I couldn't figure out what the publication even was, or how to contact them. I ended up flagging down the delivery guy (4am), he doesn't know who the publisher is and so I just tell him to stop throwing in my yard (put in trash for all I care). It worked for a while, but probably the turnover happened and the next delivery guy started throwing in my yard again. So I wake up, flag him down, and ask for his bosses info. Call them, they're confrontational about it so I basically went on to say I feel they are littering on my property and I will report them to police if it keeps happening (yep, Karen move). That led to them telling me who the publisher was, they had a corporate holding company website, with an image of text instructing how to cancel (not SEO friendly). I had to call. After calling, I had to write a letter to some PO Box. It was insane.

Meanwhile, I signed up for a magazine 20 years ago for $8/year and still get it monthly as well. I haven't paid since, they send me an annual reminder pay which I ignore. I suppose they like including me in their readership numbers to sell print ads, so they keep sending me magazines. Luckily, I enjoy the magazine. Monthly in my mailbox (not wet out in my yard). I would not want to even think about trying to stop the deliveries, they follow me wherever I live.

rogual2• 5 years ago

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

cutemonster2• 5 years ago

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?

Nextgrid6• 5 years ago

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.

jasonwatkinspdx6• 5 years ago

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.

snakeboy• 5 years ago

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 abusé.

jffry4• 5 years ago

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.

rogual2• 5 years ago

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.

bojan• 5 years ago

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.

Epskampie• 5 years ago

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.

alpaca1282• 5 years ago

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.

totorovirus• 5 years ago

Reminds me of my wsj cancellation. I procrastinated twice calling via hotline and they ripped off three months of subscription from me.

aigo• 5 years ago

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.

Gymkana• 5 years ago

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 £26 a month. They'll drop it to £10 then £5 but they never match my student price. I've had to leave during bachelors and professional qualifications.

dazc• 5 years ago

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.

lagadu• 5 years ago

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.

mdp20215• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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-...

kranke155• 5 years ago

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.

t0mas884• 5 years ago

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.

pantulis2• 5 years ago

I can confirm this is supposed to be the same in Spain. Implementation varies across industries, of course.

anticristi• 5 years ago

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.

toast02• 5 years ago

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.

codingclaws2• 5 years ago

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.

chii• 5 years ago

Another example is prostitution is legal but you can only advertise yourself.

that's an excellent rule - because pimping should be illegal.

mjburgess• 5 years ago

That's essentially the UK's law too -- but many arent aware.

eurasiantiger• 5 years ago

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.

portportport• 5 years ago

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.

bloak• 5 years ago

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?

devilbunny4• 5 years ago

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.

speeder• 5 years ago

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.

throwaway0a5e5• 5 years ago

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.

mig394• 5 years ago

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.

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

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.

i_like_waiting• 5 years ago

What in case that some company doesn't collect your email e.g. they try to sell you only over the phone?

xeromal• 5 years ago

This is the law in California too!

ClikeX• 5 years ago

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.

cgriswald3• 5 years ago

In that case, it seems that they should have people going door-to-door offering cancellation as well.

flanbiscuit2• 5 years ago

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

nickforall• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Sounds like a juicy class action.

puyoxyz• 5 years ago

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.

lookalike74• 5 years ago

Hedge fund dweebs: "We kill newspapers intentionally." Everyone here: "Fuggin NYT"

alex_h• 5 years ago

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.

danuker2• 5 years ago

Perhaps "small claims court" would fit the bill. Maybe there are lawyers specialized in that.

mdp20215• 5 years ago

Should not you only use anonymous / pre-paid / virtual / revocable credit cards for those operations?

yosito• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

German law knows “Dauerschuldverhältnis” (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.

danuker2• 5 years ago

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.

littlecranky673• 5 years ago

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.

Nextgrid6• 5 years ago

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).

neya• 5 years ago

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.

bedobi• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

jgb1984• 5 years ago

Why would I want to read their woke hysteria anyway...

op00to• 5 years ago

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.

Puts• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Subscribing through something like Amazon also makes it easy to cancel.

hnburnsy2• 5 years ago

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.

drexlspivey• 5 years ago

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?

Nextgrid6• 5 years ago

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.

SkyMarshal• 5 years ago

I fell for this trap once, and instead of going through their rigamarole, I reported my credit card lost and got a new one with a new number. Of course I had to update the subscriptions I wanted to keep with the new number, but that was less hassle than cancelling that one service.

Yizahi• 5 years ago

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.

algesten2• 5 years ago

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.

DarthNebo• 5 years ago

Stripe can be a good enforcer of this. A lot of banking accounts opened online refuse to close the same way too.

swyx• 5 years ago

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.

marcvizcaino2• 5 years ago

1.1

enonevets• 5 years ago

I’ve had gym memberships where calling to cancel wasn’t good enough, you had to come in person to cancel.

LadyCailin• 5 years ago

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.

yodsanklai2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I wonder if this strategy could impact your credit rating though?

acnops• 5 years ago

Does it? I'm having the same issue

ajb2• 5 years ago

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.

ds2• 5 years ago

You cant ding a credit rating unless you have a users SSN, which the NYT almost certainly does not.

adrr2• 5 years ago

Don't these subscriptions charge at the start of the bill cycle and not rears? You're not incurring debt.

lexapro• 5 years ago

You still owe them the money technically.

wonderwonder6• 5 years ago

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.

yodsanklai2• 5 years ago

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.

usrusr• 5 years ago

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.

b20000• 5 years ago

finally

xg156• 5 years ago

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.

darkwizard422• 5 years ago

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.

alpaca1282• 5 years ago

Maybe they confused it with detention.

chriskanan• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Or even better. Send a fax. :D

xg156• 5 years ago

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.

rolandog• 5 years ago

It should have been stipulated that unsubscribing should be offered immediately after the option to subscribe.

logfromblammo• 5 years ago

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.

onionisafruit2• 5 years ago

“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.”

koheripbal3• 5 years ago

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

JTbane• 5 years ago

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.

htek• 5 years ago

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.

asddubs• 5 years ago

that's not even mentioning seperately fetching, parsing and evaluating the html, css and javascript code, decoding the image formats, often multiple different ones, to render any images on the page and still having to also render the page itself. god help you if it's an SPA and you have to asynchronously make further requests, only to then have to parse those resources also

Johnythree2• 5 years ago

Perhaps you are being cynical, but..

I absolutely detest having to make phone calls, especially when a simple email (or web page click) will do the job.

My main hate is companies that make a big fuss about their availability on the web, right up to when you need to contact them, when suddenly they are absolutely uncontactable, unless you are prepared to hang in a phone queue for hours.

hwers• 5 years ago

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.

eropple• 5 years ago

Other countries do, and it works fine. Why not?

xg156• 5 years ago

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.

GrinningFool2• 5 years ago

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.

HelixEndeavor2• 5 years ago

I would like to see 1 reason you would find that this UI restriction would be a bad thing.

genocidicbunny2• 5 years ago

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.

lrem• 5 years ago

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?

ketralnis• 5 years ago

What's your super innovative cancellation UI that's being held back by all of this overzealous regulation?

amyjess• 5 years ago

Tough. We live in a society, and that means we all have to follow rules that protect the less-well-off members of society.

IanSanders• 5 years ago

There's also a "genuinely super easy way to unsubscribe, except it unfortunately is experiencing technical problems"

Humdeee3• 5 years ago

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).

selcuka• 5 years ago

That's what happens with many of the Unsubscribe (from mailing lists, that is) buttons unless they are provided by a reputable third party such as Mailchimp etc.

chadash• 5 years ago

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...

xg156• 5 years ago

Ah, this sounds a lot better. Thanks for digging in!

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

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.

suifbwish2• 5 years ago

The bottom line is if I call up on the phone and tell a company to stop billing me or send them an email from the registered email on file THEY SHOULD BE LEGALLY LIABLE for every time they debit an account after that time. The fact this is not the case completely dumbfounds me.

cheggisguilty• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

mercy_dude• 5 years ago

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.

bakoo• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I my home country the law says that you must be allowed to unsubscribe the same way you subscribed. Which makes sense.

88913527• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

photo ID will get you a free library card

Results may vary.

xattt• 5 years ago

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.

koheripbal3• 5 years ago

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.

badwolf• 5 years ago

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.

chefandy2• 5 years ago

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.

blago• 5 years ago

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.

la6471• 5 years ago

Not only news sites , but all kinds of business should adhere to this. Good job!

wonderwonder6• 5 years ago

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.

maskros• 5 years ago

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.

koheripbal3• 5 years ago

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.

foobarbecue• 5 years ago

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.

beckman466• 5 years ago

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

Axien4• 5 years ago

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.

bborud2• 5 years ago

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?

tzs2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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?

analog31• 5 years ago

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.

linspace• 5 years ago

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 €. 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.

Humdeee3• 5 years ago

nice discount if you, instead of paying upfront, finance the purchase

Save $3,000 today so you can spend $12,000 tomorrow!

nickpp• 5 years ago

You took a loan and "the draconian interest rate" was a surprise?! I would've thought that was the most important factor.

mbg721• 5 years ago

In the US, financing is also a lucrative profit source for car sales, but I think prepayment penalties are less common.

silicon2401• 5 years ago

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.

havelhovel• 5 years ago

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.

TedDoesntTalk8• 5 years ago

The economist also does not have unsubscribe links in their marketing emails, the ones that you get after you’re a subscriber.

JacobThreeThree• 5 years ago

Yep, I had this experience with The Economist as well.

It was very difficult to cancel and it was by phone only.

bborud2• 5 years ago

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.

cossatot• 5 years ago

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.

kemitche• 5 years ago

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.

bigmattystyles• 5 years ago

When they want you to call, tell them you’re deaf. Works every time.

simion314• 5 years ago

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).

IAmGraydon• 5 years ago

Someone needs to inform TMobile’s Home Internet division of this.

john373862• 5 years ago

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.

xg156• 5 years ago

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.

john373862• 5 years ago

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.

heliodor• 5 years ago

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.

wonderwonder6• 5 years ago

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.

jffry4• 5 years ago

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.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 5 years ago

Can you name the meal kit place ( asking only, because I was debating the heavily advertised one about fruits and veggies )?

darkwizard422• 5 years ago

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)

werdnapk• 5 years ago

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.

ghaff3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

rexreed2• 5 years ago

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.

dudul• 5 years ago

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.

virologist2• 5 years ago

“Click to subscribe, mail to cancel”. would be more efficient.

virologist2• 5 years ago

even better “Click to subscribe, come in person to cancel (office hours Teuesday, ...)”

adamkochanowicz• 5 years ago

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.

xtiansimon• 5 years ago

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.

4monthsaway• 5 years ago

Finally. Now let's see how often it goes unenforced, just like affiliate link disclosure.

PaulHoule2• 5 years ago

Yes!

dwighttk• 5 years ago

Is nytimes going to go out of business?

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

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.

Havoc• 5 years ago

Just had to sit on a phone call forever to get rid of uk beer52 sub.

It’s evil AF. Real life dark pattern

why-el• 5 years ago

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.

glitcher• 5 years ago

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.

dqpb3• 5 years ago

Finally! FU NYT

mrfusion2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Some ask you to mail them a letter.

watchdogtimer• 5 years ago

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.

petilon2• 5 years ago

Not quite. Now the business can send you to collections.

0des• 5 years ago

Which company sent you to collections?

throwawaycuriou• 5 years ago

If you provided a pseudonym, how would they associate it with you?

1shooner• 5 years ago

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.

danlugo923• 5 years ago

Use a prepaid gift card, give a pseudonym.

GuB-42• 5 years ago

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.

danielvaughn2• 5 years ago

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.

pR1vaCy_1000• 5 years ago

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.

aristophenes• 5 years ago

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.

asmos7• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

Axien4• 5 years ago

Yup when COVID struck my gym required I cancel in person.

Moeancurly• 5 years ago

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.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

iandinwoodie• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

TedDoesntTalk8• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

artursapek• 5 years ago

Crypto would be good for this use case :)

grumple• 5 years ago

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.

danielvaughn2• 5 years ago

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.

mcronce2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

ransom1538• 5 years ago

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.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

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.”

lostgame4• 5 years ago

I laughed way too hard at this, having been a gym subscriber in the past, and also a fan of Douglas Adams.

webinvest• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Couldn’t you have just blocked the payee from your bank?

marcosdumay2• 5 years ago

Does your country have a small claims court? This is the exact situation you should sue them for reputational damage.

starwind• 5 years ago

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

vinaypai2• 5 years ago

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.

daenz3• 5 years ago

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.

drstewart• 5 years ago

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!

nobody99992• 5 years ago

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.

vinaypai2• 5 years ago

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.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

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.

petilon2• 5 years ago

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.

jihadjihad2• 5 years ago

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.

dqpb3• 5 years ago

Do you live in California?

jihadjihad2• 5 years ago

I do not.

dboreham• 5 years ago

Ah, I fondly recall when the CTO of AOL tried to cancel his AOL account...

josefresco• 5 years ago

I wonder if this will apply to Network Solutions, which requires you call to cancel services.

strenholme2• 5 years ago

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.

Axien4• 5 years ago

That is crazy. I spent 20 minutes trying to cancel the WSJ. It is infuriating.

strenholme2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

This would seem like an obvious topic for rival publications to run with.

danlugo923• 5 years ago

www.privacy.com

taway125• 5 years ago

I recently tried to cancel the WSJ

Them: Hello

Me: Hello, cancel my account

Them: I'm sorry to hear that, what is the cause of

Me: I just want to cancel my account

Them: Lets try and understand what we can improve

Me: I just want to cancel my account

Them: Sir, i understand but perhaps we can explore other options

Me: CANCEL MY ACCOUNT

Them: ....

Me: Are you having a hard time understanding English

<this literally happened this week> receptionist says he was born in America and found it insulting that I suggested he doesn't understand English.

Me: Glad you understand English. Cancel my account.

Them: We have several options available

Me: Cancel my account in 30sec or I'll contest it with the credit card company

<this literally happened this week> receptionist says in that case they will continue to bill me. FYI: False, Ive now made a documented attempt to cancel my account and they didnt. You can contest it with your credit card company.

Me: Cancel my account in 30sec or I'll contest it with the credit card company, note we're speaking at 2:14pm eastern on 15 november 2021 and i'm noting i tried to cancel my account and you are refusing.

Them: cancels account.

Humdeee3• 5 years ago

Hold on here, does that mean that Cancel button only appears based on location?

detaro• 5 years ago

yes.

jedberg2• 5 years ago

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.

volgo2• 5 years ago

This is why I always enter a fake address in CA :)

MaXtreeM3• 5 years ago

After reading the article on Pewdiepie I stopped thinking about WSJ as a serious newspaper.

ghostpepper3• 5 years ago

Can you link to this article? A lot of people consider it a serious newspaper still so there is an apparent disconnect here.

ghostpepper3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

MAGZine2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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".

ghostpepper3• 5 years ago

I don't look for a neutral paper, because I don't think it exists.

Instead, I want to hear the smartest people from the left and the smartest people from the right argue their best points in a calm, reasoned way and check their facts before printing.

chirau• 5 years ago

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.

gigantecmedia• 5 years ago

exactly my case. this is why I sometimes subscribe but only on Apple iOS devices, which helps me cancel all those things much easier... and cheers! I also subscribe to the WSJ. A little bit biased here and there but very high quality and neutral. Reading nyt, washpost, etc. can be very exhausting.

nixpulvis• 5 years ago

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.

Axien4• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Won’t help if you breach contract and they go to collections

ausername42027• 5 years ago

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.

EmilioMartinez• 5 years ago

A hard-to-cancel suscription is basically automatic theft, and should be treated as such

viro• 5 years ago

Honestly avoiding stuff like this is why I loved how the App Store did subscriptions.

boringg• 5 years ago

Thank Effing God ... I don't care if your churn metrics go to isht please enforce this decision.

twothamendment2• 5 years ago

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!

evancoop3• 5 years ago

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...

dahart2• 5 years ago

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.

evancoop3• 5 years ago

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?

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

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.

evancoop3• 5 years ago

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?

alexfromapex• 5 years ago

What about snail mail to cancel?

whoknowswhat11• 5 years ago

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).

cblconfederate3• 5 years ago

Ironically, this may make people more likely to subscribe

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

Beautiful. Take that, NYT website, lol

xmorse• 5 years ago

The best thing the FTC did in the last 2 years

flanbiscuit2• 5 years ago

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

taxyz23• 5 years ago

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.

sneak• 5 years ago

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.

unethical_ban• 5 years ago

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.

skyde• 5 years ago

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.

timwis3• 5 years ago

Thank goodness! When trying to cancel NY Times, I had to cancel it in PayPal because I couldn't get through to NYT!

wallzz• 5 years ago

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.

nunez2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

lostcolony2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

some of them will continue billing your account, even if they can't charge your card, and eventually turn it over to collections

nunez2• 5 years ago

I learned about Abine and Privacy while going through that exercise and they have, indeed, changed my life.

Between that, Firefox containers, and iPostal (virtual mailing address that accepts almost any sort of mail), I have much stronger identity protection when I shop online.

Every recurring subscription gets made on isolated Privacy cards. Every website that isn't Amazon gets an independent Blur card. I now never have to worry about overcharges, data breaches, or my data being sold. The adtechs can have it; go nuts!

newshorts• 5 years ago

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.

golemotron• 5 years ago

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.

annoyingnoob• 5 years ago

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.

travisporter• 5 years ago

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

izzydata• 5 years ago

I should have waited to cancel my Spectrum so I could sue them for the ridiculous phone call I had to have.

nobody99992• 5 years ago

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.

edge17• 5 years ago

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.

baby2• 5 years ago

I really really hate this pattern on iOS. This and the app that is completely filled with ads.

iscrewyou• 5 years ago

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.

joelbluminator• 5 years ago

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.

slipheen• 5 years ago

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

b3morales2• 5 years ago

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.

smoe• 5 years ago

I would love to use privacy.com but I couldn't find any alternatives outside the US. Any suggestions?

danlugo923• 5 years ago

www.privacy.com www.revolut.com

derbOac• 5 years ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy2• 5 years ago

This is one reason I miss one-time credit card numbers.

I don't remember those. It sounds awesome.

blacksmith_tb• 5 years ago

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.

llIIllIIllIIl• 5 years ago

privacy.com

ww520• 5 years ago

Citi and Capitol One have the virtual credit card feature.

syspec• 5 years ago

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.

fbanon• 5 years ago

Revolut has those: https://blog.revolut.com/introducing-disposable-virtual-card...

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

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.

GuardianCaveman• 5 years ago

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.

timwis3• 5 years ago

This service is great. I wish they offered it in the UK.

timwis3• 5 years ago

I hope they do something like this for gym memberships!

dec0dedab0de2• 5 years ago

I might cancel my gym membership, and re-join online just to make sure I can use this if I need to.

dqpb3• 5 years ago

Next, I'd like a law that requires every service that serves ad's to also have a paid no-ad option.

ajuc• 5 years ago

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.

flerovium2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

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.

eckesicle2• 5 years ago

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 :)

jpttsn• 5 years ago

[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.

aeternum2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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

rootusrootus5• 5 years ago

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.

throwaway8943453• 5 years ago

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.

napo2• 5 years ago

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.

dmurray2• 5 years ago

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.

elwell4• 5 years ago

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.

ferdowsi• 5 years ago

Seems like smart contracts aren't so smart if they don't support easy cancelation mechanisms.

neltnerb• 5 years ago

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?

topkai22• 5 years ago

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.

antihero• 5 years ago

I don't think the law really cares about this sort of thing.

marginalia_nu4• 5 years ago

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.

dehrmann2• 5 years ago

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.

antasvara• 5 years ago

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.

dgellow• 5 years ago

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.

bjoli2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Avis sends me a monthly statement for $0 dollars, even though I have not rented a car in years. :)

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

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?

jolux• 5 years ago

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?

eckesicle2• 5 years ago

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.

ImPostingOnHN6• 5 years ago

It is money, not any law, which has incentivized this.

For many companies, there's just no financial incentive to let customers easily cancel or contact you once recurring payments are set up.

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #1: Once you have their money, you never give it back

wpietri• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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 :(

napo2• 5 years ago

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.

_2d308• 5 years ago

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.

mynameisvlad5• 5 years ago

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.

detuur• 5 years ago

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.

ImPostingOnHN6• 5 years ago

Many things which make society a better place impose a nonzero cost. Those things will certainly seem bad if you're focusing only on the cost, and ignoring the improvements.

tzs2• 5 years ago

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?

euroderf• 5 years ago

Wellll, Finland IS Scandinavian, in social system if not in language.

Breza• 5 years ago

Sounds like the CANSPAM Act in the United States. You can unsubscribe to an email any number of ways.

daariomj• 5 years ago

The Economist Magazine makes it extremely hard to unsubscribe. I had to change my credit card.

MisterBastahrd• 5 years ago

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.

sempron64• 5 years ago

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.

aczerepinski• 5 years ago

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.

999900000999• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

thrwyoilarticle2• 5 years ago

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?

tombert• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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...

elwell4• 5 years ago

Consequently, our children's children will never appreciate this humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM

bilalq• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

nobodyandproud• 5 years ago

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

makecheck• 5 years ago

…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.

slt2021• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I use https://privacy.com/ for disposable numbers for just this reason. It's nice.

Mountain_Skies• 5 years ago

AOL's revenue would have been much lower if this had been the policy back at their peak.

m3kw92• 5 years ago

Good middle finger -> WSJ

m3kw92• 5 years ago

One click cancel link should be required to be given for every subscription.

vaidhy• 5 years ago

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.

throw109203• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.] à la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

confidantlake• 5 years ago

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?

SubiculumCode• 5 years ago

How about "click to subscribe, click 6 diminutive, threateningly labeled buttons to cancel".

msravi• 5 years ago

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...

stretchwithme• 5 years ago

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.

daertommy• 5 years ago

Is this the most upvoted post on HN?

indus• 5 years ago

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...

edgyquant2• 5 years ago

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.

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

Now, do must click to renew. How many elderly are still paying for magic jack, AOL, or other vampiric services.

swayvil• 5 years ago

Ran into this with Verizon.

jgsuw• 5 years ago

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.

synergy20• 5 years ago

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.

torsday• 5 years ago

Looking at you Economist .

subsubzero• 5 years ago

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.

anandsuresh• 5 years ago

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.

kelp2• 5 years ago

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.

kqr2• 5 years ago

Does this also apply to gym memberships which are notoriously difficult to cancel?

kelp2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

throwawaygh2• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

HeyLaughingBoy• 5 years ago

How can they require it? Your default answer is "do you want to lose the sale because of this?" If they do, well there are lots of other dealerships.

powersnail• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

I had a similar experience, but after picking up and telling them never to call me again, they stopped calling.

genocidicbunny2• 5 years ago

This is the one instance where I absolutely abuse the 'customer service' reps that call.

I had a similar thing with a previous car purchase -- Sirius would not get the hint that I had already canceled and didn't want to renew. At one point I stopped being nice and started being malicious. The calls quickly stopped after that. Amusingly, when I canceled siriusxm on the car I bought after, they never called once. I do so hope that means there's a note somewhere attached to my name that says "don't call."

PaulHoule2• 5 years ago

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?")

smilespray2• 5 years ago

"Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM..."

tvhahn• 5 years ago

New York Times, I'm looking at you...

uncomputation• 5 years ago

This will be great for insurance and gym customers. Both make it as difficult as possible to cancel.

kristopolous• 5 years ago

I dealt with "fax to cancel" I think as recently as 2018.

The wackiness is almost expected

lutorm• 5 years ago

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.

lostgame4• 5 years ago

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.

alixanderwang• 5 years ago

"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.

dinvlad• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

mfrye0• 5 years ago

I believe I read somewhere that mail is trickier. Being that the spam mail essentially subsidizes USPS.

idworks12• 5 years ago

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

Joeri• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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.

robbmorganf• 5 years ago

I think they often benefit one specific person in the company, who happens to be the decision maker, and don't hurt the overall company obviously enough that anyone stops them.

rudian• 5 years ago

I think “companies” have run out of the “benefit of the doubt” as far as I’m concerned. Using the web has become a pain not because companies don’t care about UX, but because they think popup X will increase profits — and it often does.

Certainly there’s a good amount of ignorance in every company, but many choices are purposeful.

Retric• 5 years ago

The third option of hurts the customer and company is also extremely frequent. This can be as low level as developers choosing tools to pad their resume, systematic based on internal metrics, or even very high level internal politics based on which policy ends up making someone or some group look good.

stedolph• 5 years ago

Yes, this is the way. It doesn't makes sense.

jonny_eh• 5 years ago

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"?

idworks12• 5 years ago

oops, that was a typo. Fixed it.

derefr• 5 years ago

Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe.

I mean, that's pretty tautological: unsatisfied customers who become not-customers, aren't part of your metric any more! The lower the barrier-to-exit is for your customers, the more survivorship bias there will be in any customer-satisfaction metrics you're trying to track.

When there's zero friction to quitting (incl. a high availability of alternatives to switch to), any time someone doesn't like your company, they'll just churn, and you'll never hear about it. So you'll think everything is great—despite the churn, customer numbers are growing, and all your non-churning customers love you!—even while there's this huge shadow-population of customers who resent your service for one reason or another, but who took that resentment right out the door with them, never bringing it to you to address.

(Not saying this is a bad way to do things, precisely; just that you have to be aware that it's the siutation you've put yourself in, especially when interpreting customer-success metrics.)

An interesting corollary to that effect, though, is that organizations that are effectively impossible to leave (e.g. utilities) will get a "true measure" of satisfaction, with no survivorship bias. If there's "marketing science" to be done on customer satisfaction, utilities are probably a great "spherical cow" simplified environment to study it in.

firefoxd• 5 years ago

That's incorrect. A customer who unsubscribes is still a customer and is counted towards CSAT scores. Note, that for many services you can make purchases without being a subscriber.

Also, modern helpdesks are a lot like Mailchimp. As in they handle customer service from many different companies and can track customers across services and score them.

ikr678• 5 years ago

You can have low friction exit pathways that still capture that resentment/feedback.

'We're sorry to see you go! Are you cancelling X because (price/UI/technical issues/moving/no longer need/etc)'

hirsin2• 5 years ago

Speaking to this myself - I was blown away by Masterclass letting me do this, after I forgot it would renew. I responded to their "hey you've been charged" email with something like "I forgot about this and didn't mean to renew". In perhaps ten minutes I had a cancelation notice and refund.

Way more likely to get their stuff again. Bonus points for not sending the bill from some faceless "no reply" address.

TheTrotters2• 5 years ago

I had a great experience with Audible. I switched from Audible UK to Audible US but forgot to cancel the former. After six months I noticed I had 6 credits I didn't want. I sent one short e-mail explaining what happened and within 15-30 minutes I got a response that said they'll refund everything.

sreitshamer• 5 years ago

A “you’re about to be charged” email would be friendlier and give the customer a feeling of more control. That’s what we do. (We of course will also refund the charge if you email us after it happens.)

bertil• 5 years ago

For what it’s worth: I’ve been considering trying out Masterclass because their content seem great, but worried that something will come up and I’ll be locked into a yearly contract or something, so I never tried.

Your comment made me confident that I should.

mitchdoogle• 5 years ago

Email is a two-way medium. No reply addresses are a terrible dark pattern

Griffinsauce• 5 years ago

One option supports customers who don't need your service/product _right now_ and the other doesn't.

It's incredibly naive to think that customers are one-and-done for any service. Value is related to context, they may move out of it and back in and your service will make sense again (unless you add costs through shitty unsub. friction that is...)

It's also the difference between an endorsement and a warning to potential referrals. You're not just burning off this one customer, you're hurting your chances with everyone they know.

loh• 5 years ago

I always treat my customers/clients the way I would want to be treated, and it always seems to work out for the best. I've also given refunds to some customers without them asking for it first because I value their satisfaction more than I value a few dollars. There's no way to know for sure, but I suspect treating customers like this (like humans) increases retention and well-being, and not only for them, but for me (and my company) as well. It's called the golden rule for a reason. :)

alsetmusic• 5 years ago

I had a problem with a large appliance. Guy came and looked at it and recommended a course of action that was free and I took it. The problem came back after a month. When he found out his advice didn’t hold, he came immediately to perform a repair because, as he put it, he didn’t want his reputation to be damaged in my eyes.

He offered what he thought was best. When that wasn’t it, he wasted no time getting to the next step. I tipped him more than I otherwise would because his concern over getting it right seemed genuine, and I care more about that than I do getting it right the first time without really caring one way or the other.

noneeeed• 5 years ago

I wish more companies would get this. I don't continuously subscribe to Netflix or NowTV but knowing that I can unsubscribe with a couple of click is one of the reasons I'm happy to sign up from.ti!e to.time for something specific. If I feel li!e signing up is a.risk, I do t do it.

treebot• 5 years ago

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.

timoth3y• 5 years ago

This might upset those with more libertarian sensibilities, but it will make life better for almost everyone. It's a win for humanity.

thayne2• 5 years ago

This article is talking primarily about publishers. Does it also apply to other subscription services, like say, an ISP?

Trias11• 5 years ago

Click to subscribe.

Chargeback to cancel.

max-ibel• 5 years ago

I hate to be that contrarian guy, but I repeatedly put off calling spectrum to cancel our TV subscription (we never ever used it) because it involved talking to an actual salesperson who clearly used all sort of tricks to get me to upgrade to stuff I don't need.

Note: I can upgrade plans on spectrum just fine, but cancellation or downgrades means talking on the phone.

Based on my anecdata, this technique works just fine for companies - either they can charge longer for things that are not used, and/or they get a chance to personally talk to a customer to upsell them.

I'd very much like to believe these technique does work against companies, but I don't see it.

update• 5 years ago

Spectrum was the first company that came to my mind, too. Last week, my mom recently signed up for spectrum & she bought the traditional TV + Internet + Phone package, when she only needed Internet. I've been putting off calling them since I don't want to deal with talking to anyone.

& yep, it is very easy to upgrade your subscription on spectrum's website but there is no way at all to cancel/downgrade online.

theckel• 5 years ago

NYT - do you see this?

ssharp• 5 years ago

As soon as the cancellation process is any more friction than a few online button clicks or a quick online chat, my move is to just contest their last charge on my AMEX and tell AMEX to permanently ban "merchant xyz" from ever charging me again.

harha• 5 years ago

Germany: you can cancel by mail (which we may not receive) or fax.

eyear• 5 years ago

Be decent, not rogue.

nojs• 5 years ago

Not a newspaper subscriber but can’t you just cut these payments off at the source by calling the bank and telling them it’s fraudulent and unauthorised? PayPal, Apple etc make this pretty easy for most subscriptions.

meitham• 5 years ago

I did that with BSKYB for tv subscription 7 years ago. They were chasing for payment until last year.

metatranca• 5 years ago

I live in Florida and recently subscribed to LA Fitness and after a couple days I "discovered" that it is very difficult to cancel with them: you have to send a letter.

https://www.wikihow.com/Cancel-an-LA-Fitness-Membership

smokey_the_bear• 5 years ago

I just went to cancel my daughter's literati subscription because the books aren't a good fit right now. I was going to keep my son's, but they made me do an online chat to cancel, so I canceled both.

tickerticker• 5 years ago

And a roar goes up from the crowd..... can't remember when I have felt such delight about a government announcement.

Trying to close accounts for my just-deceased brother took HOURS over several days. The retention person at Verizon even said there could be many reasons not to cancel a dead person's account.

postalrat• 5 years ago

Why can't I cancel any subscription through an interface at my credit card's website?

mcbutterbunz• 5 years ago

I don't see why there isn't a rule that requires a method of unsubscription using the same method by which you subscribed (but not only by the same method).

If you can subscribe by their website, you should be able to unsubscribe by their website. Same for phone, in-app, or in person.

xtat• 5 years ago

Every once and a while the FTC does some hero shit

jwilber• 5 years ago

Can finally cancel my nytimes subscription- literally the hardest thing to cancel.

Johnythree2• 5 years ago

Am currently extremely pissed of with Expedia.

They have been sending me a long list of unwanted emails "Because I had dealings with the company". Which I most definitely have not.

And of course there is no way to "unsubscribe" unless I firstly log on. But the trick is that I don't actually have an account. So to unsubscribe from Expedia mailings, I firstly have to create an account.

Needless to say, I will never, ever, be doing any business with Expedia.

“Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says

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