Dark Patterns by the Boston Globe
rationalconspiracy.com
rationalconspiracy.com
In Australia the full price for a product has to be displayed equally or more prominently than any other price. So that $6.93 has to be just as visible other pricing claims (like $0.99 for 4 weeks).
The same law also requires companies to include tax prominently in their pricing. More generally, a business cannot engage in misleading or deceptive conduct.
The rationale behind this is it makes things fair for consumers, and helps businesses compete fairly.
These laws probably don't exist in places like the US as businesses complain about compliance costs, and the governments have other priorities.
If you're interested, the main underlying EU rules are in Directive 2011/83/EU.
"Prices displayed by a business must be clear, accurate and not misleading to consumers. You should always display the total price of a product or service. When you present prices to your customers, you must state the total price of the good or service as a single figure, which is the minimum total cost that is able to be calculated."
It's illegal not to comply.
Interesting. Suppose you go into a fast food place and say "I'll have a burger, medium onion rings, and a small soft drink". Assume onion rings come in medium and large, soft drinks come in small, medium, and large, and fries come in small, medium, and large. Assume onion rings and fries of the same size cost the same, and one can be substituted for the other in a combo with no price change.
The clerk could ring this up as those three separate items as ordered, giving price P1.
A second option is to ring it up as a medium combo (Burger, medium fries, medium drink), substitute onion rings for fries, and downgrade the drink to small, giving price P2 which is less than P1.
A third option is to ring it up as a small combo (Burger, small fries, small drink), upgrade to medium fries, and then substitute onion rings for fries, giving price P3 which is less than p2.
Is the seller in violation of the law if the clerk does not figure out and use option three?
How about an order for multiple people but all on the same ticket? For example here in the US Arby's has gyros for a limited time. They are something like a little over $4 each, but they have a 2 for $6 deal. Suppose a family of 5 comes in. The husband orders, then each kid orders, then the wife orders and pays. Suppose 3 of the 5 people ordered a single gyro each. If this were in Australia, would the clerk be required to notice that he can put two of those gyros together and ring them up as 2 for $6?
In reality though, these laws are intended to prevent misleading price representations, not to force businesses to calculate the best deal for their customers.
The most degenerate example I'm aware of, is that my boss lives on a county border. On the other side of his street, sales taxes are 7.5%. His are 9%. The zip code, city (kind of - technically one side is part of another city, but the post office recognizes it as the same city), and street name is all the same, but the county is different, which you don't collect for shipping reasons.
Every online retailer I've seen collects it wrong, including Amazon, although maybe their backend for reporting purposes calculates it right. When searching for software solutions to sales tax, most of them seem to get it wrong too.
They do often ask for a post code at the checkout to calculate shipping, however.
After raising the flag too many times without being heard, I finally quit. But is there a more scalable way to protest / stop this?
What about a browser extension that warns when you try to sign up for a service that you can only cancel by phone?
As for trust, the US case is simple: report it to BBB.
> Another of these little-known facts about the BBB: “We are not a consumer watchdog.” While the BBB offers consumers many services—lists of popular scams to watch out for and such—the organization’s mission isn’t to have your back. From top to bottom, the BBB is funded by the annual dues paid by businesses it anoints with “accreditation,” which allows the companies to put those iconic BBB stamps of approval on their storefronts and websites. This fact raises obvious questions about an inherent conflict of interest: The organization’s customers are businesses, not taxpayers or consumers. How can the BBB serve as an honest broker between businesses and consumers when it is fully funded by one of these parties? Many argue that it cannot — that there’s a natural incentive to paint its paying clients in the best possible light.
> Whether or not a business is accredited, it can be graded by the BBB. The grading system, ranging from A+ to F, is confusing at best, useless at worst. Business grades are determined by 16 factors, including how many complaints have been filed with the BBB against the business, and if and how the business responded. Notably, however, a business’s grade won’t necessarily be hurt if nothing much comes of a complaint and the customer is left unsatisfied. Rather, all that matters, grading-wise, is that the business responded and made a “good faith effort to resolve complaints,” according to the BBB. This means that a business could have a good grade even if it is the subject of lots of complaints, as long as the business dutifully responds — even in a pro forma way.
> On the flip side, a business that is committed to handling complaints directly with customers in a substantive way, but does so outside the purview of the BBB, will get a poor grade because the BBB is not involved. So a company can have a B or C rating, or even an F, simply because it doesn’t play by the BBB’s rules, which include looping in the organization with complaint responses and providing the BBB with background information about the company.
http://business.time.com/2013/03/19/why-the-better-business-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Business_Bureau#Critici...
Zynga survived for a while but eventually their "gamification-only" games flopped. Similarly, there are examples where real businesses tried to play the "short term online growth at the expense of trust" game and flopped.
(I say this as a customer acquisition consultant.)
With that said, engineers are notoriously more sensitive to marketing and sales than the general population, and therefore overestimate the negative impact of a marketing or sales tactic.
(I say this as a former engineer.)
Case in point:
I once consulted for a popular NoSQL DB company. When I came along, they were letting anyone download a trial of the DB without providing any contact information—not even an email. So even as more and more people learned about them, the sales team had no leads to sell to.
I set up a test in which a random 50% of people who clicked "Download" would be prompted for their email before the download could start.
We _knew_ the download rates would drop, but that's a tradeoff the company was willing to make to fill up its sales pipeline (and survive). After some discussion and back-of-the-envelope math, we decided that anything less than a 60% drop would be worth it if it meant the sales team got leads.
The test ran for two months. The drop-off rate was just 30%, meaning 70% of those who were prompted for an email went on to download. What's more, the average usage frequency went _up_ for the test group. It turns out the email form was mostly screening out the people with little interest in using the product, who would've only looked at it once or twice and never return.
With all that said, dark patterns and "growth hackers" are a scourge that I wish would go away.
"The goal of the app development profession is to take money from phone users."
"The goal of software engineering is to control users' computers."
And so on... Reductio ad absurdum. You can do this to any profession you choose.
Your story sounds like a classic case of chasing bad metrics like conversion percentage instead of bottom line.
Yes. The awareness was growing but sales was not keeping up. It was a business decision to focus more on sales and less on awareness.
The sales team suddenly had 470% more sales leads to work with than the month before, for the price of 30% low-interest downloaders. I don't see how you can think that would result in _less_ sales.
Publishing is in a very uncomfortable place right now - at the bottom of this comment I've attached a 2014 report from Adobe which, TL;DR, says that most people are unwilling to pay for content online and also unwilling to see ads online. This sort of behavior is forcing publishers to squeeze revenue of any stone they can find.
I understand that this may not be a popular opinion here, but content doesn't create itself, people do, and people need to make a living. Maybe before we all start admonishing the Boston Globe (founded in 1872, btw) for making a close button on a modal perhaps a tick too light, we should consider why these practices are becoming more and more common place.
http://downloads.pagefair.com/reports/adblocking_goes_mainst...
Sure, ad blockers aren't helping, but are a response to highly annoying crap, malware, etc. being shoveled by the increasingly desperate. It is an arms race, but not one newspapers can win.
Also, little hint: having your revenue threatened isn't an excuse for being unethical. Nobody (even corporations, slowly becoming more equal than others) has a right to a profit, or even staying in business.
Yes.
I say this as a former editor (photo) of a college paper who grew up loving the news and knowing that journalism is a tough and important business.
This might be a reaction to The Boston Globe having trouble with the "older" paper copy version too. For those that don't know by trying to save money by switching to a cheaper deliverer; end result nobody was getting their papers. Nobody could get through on the phone lines to cancel.
I don't subscribe the NYTimes for this reason. They always say "99 a week for 4 weeks" and finding out what it costs in he future proved to be frustratingly difficult. Odd because I'd be willing to pay a buck or 2 a week.
I donate and listen to local new on my radio station which is quite good instead.
I would like to pay for more articles if there would be Netflix style subscription where I pay, say, 25 EUR per month for subscription for everything and the only thing I have to do is click.
The current subscription model where you subscribe to the whole paper for long periods of time is not the future. Neither is one where you have to register and pay $5 for articles one by one. I'm not ready to pay 2000 USD per month to subscribe to every magazine I want to read articles from and I'm not willing to pay $5 per article either.
As for the content of the article, it has always seemed anti-user to me for a website to prompt for a subscription 30 seconds into browsing a page. I wonder if anyone has actually investigated the effect it has on traffic properly, because I always go back whenever I get prompted to subscribe.
If someone had told me in 2005 that in the future, intrusive popups would work its way back into the domains of acceptable design to the point where people will gladly have them on their personal blogs I would have laughed in disbelief. Together with "You have an outdated browser" ("Please view this in Netscape 4.0"), "Rotate your device" ("Best viewed in 800x600") this is all a terrible setback in acceptable practices.
Add to that some more recent design patterns like a "share on <social media>" button taking up 1/5 of the screen estate following you through the page only for the benefit of the publisher and the handful of users that also actively use twitter, weird overloading of scrolling behavior, "Continue reading" buttons... It's an awful mess and especially for websites that ideally would just present plain written text with some pictures it seems like designers are over-engineering their solutions for goals that in no way aligned with those of the users.
Acting as if there is a difference in kind gives implicit approval to the behavior that is lower on the scale, and solidifies a dividing line that should be continuously getting pushed downward to move more and more types of deception onto the unacceptable side.
Maybe someone should write a post on "the dark pattern of dark pattern articles."
It is - for reasons that are a conversation unto themselves - uncouth to suggest a business is acting in bad faith without airtight evidence of malice. So the language gets softened.
It's doubly crazy when talking about the press. OP is picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. For all the rah rah "speaking truth to power" of the press, if you question the press you have to go hat-in-hand.
It's disgusting and way too many companies are utilizing these tactics rather than building a solid business model.
More companies that are doing this should be called out. Ive seen naturebox, justfab and others just to name a few.
(disclaimer, I am an investor)
https://www.truebill.com/how-to-cancel
That's pretty awesome. I'm just going to check this list from now on before I put my credit card info into a web form.
We plan to make money by recommending new services (i.e. we see you have X and Y, would you like to try Spotify).
Then I changed address. They might still be billing me for all I know.
Since it is actually a bit challenging to correctly pull your free credit report, start here: https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/get-my-free-cred... (Simply Googling "free credit report" and clicking willy-nilly can lead to sadness.)
In fact I'm overdue to pull mine myself; thanks for reminding me.
Correct. Former vendor, worked with their cell network crew on many occasions.
To be more fair, all the large carriers are mostly laden with corporate procedures and bureaucracy so it's hard for worker bees to make progress even if they know what's needed. T-Mo's procedures are just more broken.
I can't remember the names of most of the companies though. One was definitely Match, because they expect you to call them to cancel (or did at the time)
Essentially, if these things ever get to court if you contacted someone other than the agent they can claim they weren't notified, didn't know, etc, if they are shady, but a registered letter to the registered agent is like the gold standard of having contacted them.
Please be careful. That is not necessarily the case, and depending on your local laws you may be left owing money, going to collections, and/or having your credit damaged for non-payment.
EDIT: If it's just text I'm after, I'll also go in with elinks.
Most of the times the news are loaded without popups and sometimes with wrong CSS but still readable.
Sometimes I need to enable js only for the actual host for it to work. In the end it's worth the hassle.
There's no law to say that you can terminate by email. Most companies won't bother chasing, but there's nothing to stop them really hurting you.
It's a silly situation that arises because of the (almost) zero marginal cost of providing digital media. It makes sense in the physical world: you can't claim your money back because you didn't read the magazine they sent. But these laws are much the same in the virtual world.
If they provided and you agreed to a way to cancel, and you don't use that way, they are totally within their rights to continue (passively) providing access, and charging for it. In perpetuity, yes.
But in the case of a passive web site subscription, if the customer stops accessing the site and stops the method of payment, no services have been rendered, and no cost has been incurred by the company. Web server logs could even prove this (although the company could also falsify them).
So a better analogy would probably be a gym membership. Imagine a gym refuses to allow a customer to cancel in-person or on the phone, instead requiring the customer to mail a letter. So a customer, justifiably angry at this, calls his bank or credit card and stops future payments, and never sets foot in the gym again. Now, no services have been rendered after that date, and no costs have been incurred by the gym. They are owed nothing--if not legally in all jurisdictions, then ethically and morally, and therefore legally it should be the same.
I would like to see this tested in court, even a small claims court. In the case of a company intentionally making it difficult and time-consuming to unsubscribe, and a customer cancelling the payment method due to that difficulty, I have a feeling that most judges would side with the former customer. And as has been pointed out, in many places this is not legal, and I would not be surprised if that included several U.S. states.
Yep, you'd be screwed there too. If your agreement with the gym said you would unsubscribe by mail, and you just stop paying without doing so, they could recover the money.
Gyms make their money by having people pay without using the gym, so they wouldn't care that they aren't 'rendering services'. That's a big reason many companies, and most gyms, use subscriptions.
You could fight it in court if you want to. You might even win. You might even win the following battle to recover your credit score. But all that's going to be a lot more of a hassle than picking up the phone and cancelling in the first place. It takes a special kind of person to willfully seek such a pyrrhic victory.
In most of Europe, there is.
In Germany, for example, the business has to allow cancelling via the same way as you signed up.
That seems reasonable.
Do you know a lot of companies that will let someone sign up via e-mail? I don't.
For any subscription services I run, if someone mails us asking to cancel, we normally direct them to the on-site cancellation process. This does use all our normal security and log-in procedures, and is fully automated and can be used in moments at any time.
However, if someone did not cancel that way (or in one of the other ways we allow for in our terms) and just blocked their payment, we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us. In practice we're only charging a small amount in these cases so we'd probably just cancel their service when payment didn't go through, but there is no guarantee any other business would make the same decision, so your strategy is risky.
If a real person replies to my mail, it's reasonable to expect that it has been delivered.
They're more than welcome to ask any question via mail or initiate the call in the time I specify (outside of my working hours) - which I wrote. Or they can have an online form to do it as well, just like they did when they accepted my money in the first place.
> we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us
I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to. That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.
Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.
That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.
I don't know where you're from, but in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with, it seems unlikely that would be the case.
From a purely practical point of view, I'm not sure it should be the case either, even though I'm generally in favour of reasonable consumer protection laws. For e-mail specifically, there are too many problems with relying on it, particularly if significant amounts of money or other commitments are affected by whether or not a subscription continues.
Depends on the laws I suppose. I Denmark you cannot bind a consumer to pay for a service for any period except for a few special cases (for instance, phone service up to 6 months).
I'm from Denmark, and we have some fairly strong consumer protection laws exactly to prevent things like this. If I cancel any kind of prepaid service, not only do they have to stop charging me money after the periode is finished, they also have to give me back the money equivalent to the remaining period from the end of month + 1 month and forward.
There is still a question of what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation, though. If you're subscribing to a service based in a country other than your own, there may be other laws that are relevant as well.
Personally, I'm a fan of the symmetry argument: you should be able to cancel a service through equivalent methods to what you could use to sign up for it, and without requiring an unreasonable amount of effort.
While that's one aspect of the situation - and yes, a matching notification requirement is sensible - this discussion of "cancellation" is missing the important question: were goods delivered or services used?
Using a newspaper publisher as an example, if we're talking about a simple contract (for either a predefined period or specific termination criteria) where some amount of money is regularly exchanged for the regular delivery on dead trees or electronic means (email) of their publication, then there is a debt that needs to be repaid. The publisher fulfilled their obligations created by the contract.
However, this is a very different situation if no debt has been created. If the contract was a regular payment to gain access to their back archives, if you haven't used their services, then there isn't a debt[1]. Also, I suspect most businesses using contracts of this type will include some sort of clause that terminates all of their obligations if the payments stop.
The point being that there is going to depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, so it's dangerous to generalize.
[1] Some jurisdictions might treat use of the service separately than a "retainer" for access. This doesn't really change anything, though it might make the situation much more complicated.
That is certainly true. I do think a few people here seem to be taking a rather narrow interpretation of when services have been provided, though.
Say you sign up for access to an on-line newspaper, but then as it happens you're busy and don't actually read it. The newspaper still had reporters writing stories, and servers and Internet bandwidth to pay for, and admin staff dealing with the tax records triggered by your subscription, and so on. I don't see why someone should necessarily expect to get back their money under those circumstances.
Perhaps a more obvious example would be an insurance policy. For obvious reasons, you can't get a refund at the end of the period of insurance just because in practice you didn't need to make a claim.
Whenever I've been putting terms and conditions together for a new service, the lawyers always seem very careful about exactly what constitutes offer and acceptance to form the contract, when provision of services starts, how the agreement can be ended and any terms that survive termination, and other details like that.
You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.
That's a very entitled POV.
What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with? In any business I run, it takes maybe 10 seconds, and the service is completely transparent about how to do it. It's secure, it's fully automated, and it's in the customer's own interests as well because it will also cancel any recurring payment arrangements with other services immediately and automatically.
What is entitled is things like the person who mailed us the other day, after hours on a Friday and just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due, saying very rudely and aggressively that they weren't using the service and they'd forgotten to cancel before but now they wanted to and they didn't authorise any further payments and they'd do all sorts of nasty things to us if we charged their card again. I mean seriously, they were told three times when they signed up what the charging basis was, and they could have cancelled using the normal facility in far less time than it took to write their little rant. It was only through luck that one of us saw their message in time to act on it, and if we hadn't, it would have been entirely their fault.
You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.
There is nothing remotely extortionate about the business practices we are talking about. The services in question are completely transparent and up-front about both what the charging basis is and how to cancel, and our terms are legally unremarkable.
As for "services not rendered", anyone is free to cancel their subscriptions with any service I help to run at any time, and none of those services use any sort of sneaky long term commitments or ever have. But if you stay signed up, and you have access to the services, you don't get to decide later that you want your money back because you didn't actually use them that month. If you think that's unreasonable, I wish you luck in getting all your insurance premiums refunded if you haven't claimed on them at the end of the year.
The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.
> just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due
What's wrong with that? Are customers required to provide notice? It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday. It's your system.
> they were told three times when they signed up
Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights... All that sounds rather entitled to me.
We've spent several years building that particular service. We pay the bills for running it whether or not any particular customer uses it, because we have to have enough computers and bandwidth and so on available so that our subscribers can get what they're paying for. Our expenses don't magically disappear just because someone didn't use a service that they had previously used and were still signed up for during a certain period, nor can we telepathically tell whether intermittent users will not actually use the service during the next billing period.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with sending an e-mail to an address no-one is likely to be monitoring in real time, denying permission for a fully automated scheduled payment to be taken a few hours later? Well, no-one might read the message before the payment gets taken, for one thing.
It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday.
You don't seem to understand how this works. The money would already have been taken by the automated systems at that point. That means we would have to actively refund it, which may in itself incur a charge depending on the payment processing services involved. In any case, it requires significant manual intervention to do that and update all the records accordingly, which is at best wasting time we could otherwise spend on more useful activities.
Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights...
We are perfectly within our rights. That's the point.
As it happens, we often do go out of our way to deal with messages from our subscribers as helpfully as we can. We take considerable pride in offering very good customer service, and we receive far more positive messages than complaints. In some cases, we will even voluntarily refund someone's subscription fee for a month, perhaps if we believe their situation wasn't entirely their fault or they had some honest misunderstanding about something.
But make no mistake, doing these things costs us time and, in some cases, money. We will do it anyway for most people, because that's the kind of business we want to run. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do so, either legally or morally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also had little inclination to do so in the case of someone who by their own admission had known what to do and failed to do it, yet who felt the appropriate reaction to that was to write to us rudely, making an unreasonable demand and immediately threatening us if we failed to comply, instead of simply asking for help if they needed it.
Your of a different opinion, that's your prerogative. Just don't expect everyone to feel the same way. I certainly don't.
I don't care how much you've poured into automating your business processes. That's what you do to increase your profit margins. I only care about two things: My input (time, effort, money), and your output (services provided).
That's just business. If someone is rude, be happy to see the back of them as a customer. Or fire them as a customer. Both those are acceptable. Taking a consumer to court if you think you'd have a case (you wouldn't) is also your right.
It's also their right to take you to small claims, which depending on the state may require you to send an employee to their state, without a lawyer, to justify your actions to a judge. I think you'll probably discover they're not going to be very sympathetic to your perceived right to take people's money just because you have business expenses in predicting future costs.
They probably do if it was a special order placed for a specific customer who then cancelled once the food was already delivered to the store. And why shouldn't they, if it was entirely the customer's fault?
The rest of your post is just wishful thinking, like most of your other comments in this thread, so I see little reason to continue this discussion. Businesses can and do take non-paying customers to court or through a collections process, and routinely win under the kind of circumstances we're talking about.
In particular, cancelling a payment you owe does not in itself relieve you of any contractual obligations you have, it just means you're in default. You might not like it, but it is the law almost everywhere. As I said in another post, try getting a refund on an insurance policy at the end of the year just because you haven't made a claim, or getting part of your phone bill refunded because you didn't need to make a call in a certain period. If you try cancelling your payment without cancelling your service in those cases, and then refuse to pay what you owe, you'll be taken to court or collections, and you'll lose.
And you didn't special order anything. Your argument here is all kinds of moving goal posts.
Bottom line: Unless you have an actual contract, don't expect to win. And even then, be prepared to demonstrate that your product worked as advertised and explain why, despite communicating by email with the customer as routine, that was not sufficient for cancellation. Pretty sure you haven't addressed this at all except to say "because I thought I could sell the things I bought!". Sorry, but no, you don't get to change the rules just because yours is an Internet service. Especially not for a month to month pre-pay authorization. That's just ridiculous. I haven't even seen pre-paid cellular networks try to pull that scam.
https://consumerist.com/2008/01/21/suing-big-companies-in-sm...
We do have an actual contract, the moment someone signs up and pays us money under our advertised terms. It is as clear and legally binding as if we sat down at a table and signed a piece of paper. I suspect that not understanding this is the cause of many of the incorrect things you've been saying in this thread.
Edit: Just to be reiterate in case it wasn't clear from my other comments, one of the points in those terms specifically says what the process for cancelling is and that an e-mail is not sufficient, for precisely the kinds of reasons we've been talking about on HN today.
And you think that'd stand up in small claims. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when that gets tested. ;-) And the collection agency willing to sign on as a co-defendant? That better be some monthly subscription fee.
Also, there's no way you win a chargeback claim in this case: https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnwin1213/stopp...
You're going to have a rough time explaining why you thought you were within your rights to ignore her cancellation notice. Do you also think your ToS would allow you to ignore certified mail? You might want to talk to an actual lawyer.
Since he/she cited a specific case however, doesn't seem like "strawman" qualifies.
A company representative is notified of cancellation. A company offering a month to month pre-pay service isn't entitled to anything else. End of story. IMO. Anything else is unethical.
That seems perfectly reasonable. No you're not within your rights to dick with people in bad faith, no matter what a ToS says. You can put whatever you'd like in there. Doesn't mean it'll pass muster when you're in front of a judge.
Beyond that she (the customer) is perfectly within her rights to cancel at any time. So the "but but but, I spent money!" is the real straw-man here. Silhoutte would have considered it his/her obligation to spend that money either way, the customer could have cancelled at the literal last second, through her/his preferred online method even, and that doesn't change a thing. There's a strawman.
Mostly it's probably because I had AT&T try something similar on me in the past year, trying to hold me liable for $1,300 for UVerse service at an address I've never lived at, going as far as to pursue collections against me.
They and the collections dropped their claim pretty quickly when I made it clear I'd be taking them to small claims over this.
Those are different circumstances. I suppose it just irks me that some people think they have a "right" to your property because you were rude?
It's nobody's "right" to dip into your wallet for a prepaid service. It's not moral. It's not ethical. Can you think of another service where that'd fly? I can't. The utility companies only seek to recover services rendered. Prepaid phone services will simply suspend service until you pay up. It's your right to suspend payments on your credit card to your MVNO whenever you like. It's their right to suspend service if you do. It's not their right to do much else.
That seems totally fair.
Of course, most of the time it never gets that far, because as I said before, we try to provide very good customer service. Among other things, that means we are up-front about our pricing and we give our subscribers quick and effective ways to manage their subscriptions. I wouldn't want to run a business that did the sort of shady things mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. We get very few complaints in the first place, and in reality it's far more common for us to help out someone who made an honest mistake and then get a nice mail back.
All I'm saying here is that we don't have any obligation to go beyond what our terms and the relevant laws require, and in particular, we don't have to accept some random e-mail as cancellation when we explicitly say we won't, for good reasons, and when we provide a quick and effective alternative that is readily available to all subscribers. I honestly can't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
Something approximately the same as that is true across the EU under the recent changes to the consumer protection rules.
On your other points, I'll just mention that this subthread was originally about whether accepting e-mail as a cancellation method was appropriate, not so much the original topic of trying to force people to call as an aggressive way to deter cancellation. It seems we all agree that making it excessively difficult for someone to cancel when they're entitled to is scummy behaviour, and I imagine the law in many places would take a similar view.
But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?
Except to make the customer (especially international customers, which may have to call in the middle of the night and who may incur significant charges) jump through a whole lot of hoops and to make it as difficult as possible to cancel.
To me this reeks like a shit ton of bad faith by the service provider, which has nothing whatsoever to do with security.
I suppose if they had some sort of credentials set up for phone access then that would be a point in its favour. My bank do have well established security procedures for me to contact them by phone, for example.
To be clear, I am not in any way condoning requiring phone cancellation as a technique for making it artificially difficult or frustrating for someone to cancel when they are within their rights to do so. As you say, it stinks of bad faith.
In general, there is nothing that you can ask me over a phone that cannot be asked to someone pretending to be me who can get the details in a variety of ways. To static questions there are static answers. If you perform two factor authentication properly, this is actually easier over a website than the phone.
In any case, one isn't more or less secure than the other. The physological effect of speaking to a phone just makes someone feel one is more safe. I'd say that if you send an email to the address you have on the account details, you can reasonably expect to get the right person to the same degree as you would when calling the phone number on the account.
Of course, you normally can't sign up for services that require payment via e-mail anyway, since no-one credible is going to ask for enough details that they can charge you through an insecure medium like e-mail.
Some people would probably argue that we make it too easy for customers to leave, but as I've said, we prefer to run these services a certain way, and if it doesn't completely maximise profit then that's just too bad. It's not uncommon for some of these services to have a pattern of seasonal memberships, so from an entirely self-interested point of view, the trust we earn by making it easy to sign up and easy to cancel is probably of some value anyway.
That smelled. So instead I signed up for the ETrade checkbook, wrote myself a check for my remaining balance, cashed it, and never dealt with them again.
So yeah, it's not like any of these types of establishments care at all about their reputation. They'll gladly ignore your not-to-their-letter cancellation, stop contacting you, and send your $50 usage fees for no actual usage to collections.
Works every time.
Because the service provider is dishonest already.
There seems to me a somewhat troubling trend of reaction to the widely derided "corporate personhood" principle in law, by deliberately depersonalizing such "persons" to an extent which appears to me to increasingly include not only the "corporate person" per se, but the actual people persons who constitute that corporation, and who implement and act upon its policies - to regard the modern corporation as a faceless alien behemoth, after all, is of necessity to overlook the fact that it is an organization of people, in theory (if to a somewhat greater extent than in practice) around a common goal.
Your comment here is squarely in this line. "There's no person there", after all, is blatantly erroneous: of course there is a person there, otherwise there'd be no one to whom to worry about lying. It's been a while since I last reread The Authoritarians, but I seem to remember this kind of depersonalization being a significant theme in its analysis of how your category of authoritarian followers become willing to countenance human rights abuses. In that light, it surprises me to see you express a perspective which includes precisely that kind of elision, and I'm curious whether you see a substantive difference where I do not.
Miss Manners reports trying to get her newspaper address changed. She called several times, but no result. Finally an agent told her that they are instructed to not do anything unless the customer was angry. She politely asked "Would you put me down as having been livid?" He politely agreed.
Did she lie? We all know we're just trying to get the system to work for us. Today, when you can't even begin to talk to a real person on the other end, you have less (no?) requirement to pretend you're interacting with one.
is it unethical to lie to an automated email form or a chatbot?
Perhaps not to you. Morality is personal, and to me this comment is abhorrent.
Whenever I work from home, there's often a knock at the door from someone trying to sell me solar panels. It's always a hard sell, they don't take "no" for an answer, and I don't have the time to deal with it. So when they ask if I'm the homeowner, I respond, "No, I rent.". They thank me and continue on their way.
It's clearly important to treat people with respect, even when they find themselves in a job position whose description goes against your interests.
But you wouldn't be lying to them, as I can assure you the customer service worker couldn't care less whether you're really deaf or not. As an analogy, telling a lie via telegram only counts as lying to the recipient, not to the post office clerks typing and handling the telegram.
In fact you would be lying to a faceless entity that is not a human being, whose charter clearly states that its purpose is to extract as much money as possible from you and funnel it somewhere else. Where to? Into the (ultimate) pockets of people who have built this entire construction in order to be as removed as possible from the moral and legal implications of the faceless entity's actions. Not to mention remaining very well hidden. Cowards and thieves, at the very least.
Whether you believe I'm lying to the faceless entity or to the cowards and thieves who built it that way (which is a valid philosophical point) I have no qualms whatsoever doing either thing.
You are right. What makes it okay to lie is that no harm is done to anyone I care about not harming. That they made themselves someone I no longer care about harming is their own issue.
I'd like to think that I could do something productive with that time that would make my life or the world slightly better. Plus the frustration of sitting on hold would negatively impact my health and state of mind.
That seems like quite a lot of harm; certainly not worth an empty idealistic gesture that would not help anyone.
Being put on hold does far more damage than lying in this particular case.
Not that they are a great source for morality anyway, but if you're going to use them, at least use them properly, mom.
Sorry, deaf humor. (I agree with you).
On the upside they answered the phone immediately outside office hours and it was all cancelled in less than 30 seconds, so it's not always a hard sell on the phone
My local paper even plays games with invoicing. They bill on a weird cycle (10 week) and will send you out of cycle/overlapping invoices that you don't actually owe. Sometimes those out of cycle invoices casually jack the rate up 20-30% -- if you pay it, you're accepting new terms.
They require you mail a physical letter requesting cancellation via certified mail! And you must prove you are the account holder and then wait 6-8 weeks for them to process your cancellation, so you might just end up auto-renewed for another year unless you cancelled two months in advance.
It's actually a wonder some of these business models based on theft by deception/fraud don't get prosecuted/sued out of existence...
"Petty" issues like this don't light the activists' fire sufficiently to bring the heat required to push thru change. Another similar issue is predator towing operations. Every one agrees they have to go, but they're far down on the list of priorities.
If you use your credit card, you can wiggle your way out of it if you explain that these cancellation processes are absurd. Call the gym and ask if they'll cancel your membership over the phone first. After they refuse, tell your credit card company about it and ask them to try calling the gym with you on the line to get your membership cancelled. If the gym persists in its refusal you should be able to dispute and block the charge.
For me though this happened to be linked to my debit card (and I never ever put monthly billables on my debit card so I'm not sure what I was thinking when I signed up). However, because I had no other services linked to my debit card, I was able to have my bank just send me a new card and that was that.
As annoying as these cancellation procedures are, they are almost always laid out in the up-front contract (especially for a gym, where you signed up in person). The time to object is when you sign the contract, not when you're trying to cancel.
(Not that I don't <strikethrough>hate</strikethrough> like this practice and find it shady and annoying, but wouldn't want people to wind up in deep trouble as a result).
Keep in mind this is 140 year old company which can't change all at once.
I'd do anything to have a different ISP, but my apartment building has the choice of Comcast or 768k ATT DSL for the same price since I'd have to also get a phone line.
I can see why they are focusing on finding subscribers who think they are only paying a fraction of that.
There are people that might find enough value in the journalism of the Boston Globe to want to spend that kind of money on it, compared to the "entire internet" that can be, broadly, not the most reliable source of information (wether the Boston Globe is a good newspaper I have no idea, but it might be for some people).
That is a completely different discussion than looking at the deceptive tactics they use to make people that don't want to pay that amount to actually subscribe.
But the globe has also never charged my that much. They've been charging me roughly $200/year for the last 3 years for a digital subscription.
Me, I use Chaos Computer Club's https://anonbox.net/ :)
Accounts are created on the fly, and last just 24hr.
No affiliation, just enjoy the utility.
CCC is using a self-signed cert, and I haven't vetted it. But then, I'm not using it for anything that requires security. It just allows me to get a confirmation link.
Obviously I take different tacks depending how much I want to access the site. In this case I'm talking about the subscribe-or-close popups, obviously not a real account or anything.
Alternatively a far more interesting (but much more difficult to set up) solution would be to use chrome.runtime.connectNative to execute the native whois command on the user's OS.
Can you elaborate please? I've taken a very brief look at the chrome.runtime API and didn't see how to.
Essentially you need to add a native messaging app manifest to Chrome to tell it about the app on the host, and then Chrome reads that JSON file to find where to execute it, what to use to talk to it (eg stdio), what it's called, etc. On Windows the location of the JSON file has to be added to the registry (which is prohibitively annoying), but on OSX and Linux it's just saved in a specific folder. Once you've done that it's a simple case of calling a method on the chrome.runtime object, or setting up a couple of listeners to actually make the call.
Or for a moderately amusing confirmation of ICANNs assertion that the current model is broken, try to whois microsoft.com, apple.com or google.com (NSFW language).
I think the current plan is to make whois data mandatory for commercial entities, and abolish the current decentralized model, but AFAIK no work has started yet.
Any negativity conveyed is purely by virtue of the grim state of affairs.
Edit: I just checked your profile and you probably know a lot more about the situation than I do. Feel free to correct me where I'm wrong! Your domain "gtld.club" does not work either, by the way :)
Typically, merely putting their letter in the outbox and getting it returned to them is enough to get them to stop, at least after a few times. As a side benefit, it gives money to the USPS, wastes theirs, and saves you have to walk to the trash!
Completely agree with the rest of the approach though. The real question is what to do with the "broadcast" flyers the post office has gotten involved in spamming. Stamp "return to sender" and stuff in blue mailbox? I don't see that employee frustration adding up to any change.
It looks like some of the Globe's practices are toeing the line. They probably have a bunch of lawyers making sure they aren't crossing the line and are obeying the letter of the law but not the spirit.
Newspapers really have missed a trick or two in the transition to the internet.
That being said up until a few months ago, I didnt't read papers or watch the news on TV since it's all stage-managed nonsense but I decided to take out a FT weekend subscription after buying one on a whim one day.
I must say it was very enjoyable reading a newspaper with quality stories and no fluff or click-bait titles and so on.
I don't consider tabloids to be anything other than literary fast-food for the masses but I am thoroughly enjoying reading my FT on a Saturday and Sunday morning with a cup of tea.
Oh, it's only about £10 a month too.
I'd like to say, "$0.99 a week for 4 weeks? Cool, here's a temporary number that expires in exactly one month. Please cut my subscription off after then."
Of course, I suspect that the benefit of the entrenched system in the US for everyone but consumers will guarantee that this will be really difficult to accomplish in reality.
Many banks actually offer exactly this feature. You set a dollar limit and an expiry date. E.g. Bank of America ShopSafe: https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf... My Swedish bank offers the same thing and even has an app to generate card #s
That's a really great idea that I've never seen before - would love to see more banks have this feature
https://myaccount.nytimes.com/mem/cancel.html?id=10434447 We're sorry to see you go. To cancel your subscription quickly and easily, please call Customer Care at 877-698-5635 Hours of Operation: Monday — Friday: 7:30 a.m. ET through 9:00 p.m. ET Saturday and Sunday: 7:30 a.m. ET through 5:00 p.m. ET
I had a terrible experience with a NYT digital-only subscription, and I'll likely never subscribe again.
I had a subscription for a while that I hadn't been using. I only used their site when linked to it from another (like HN). I tried to cancel online, but there's no way to—you need to cancel over the phone. So, I did, sitting on hold for close to a half hour. Bad experience, but I wish it had ended there.
Fast-forward two months, and I started getting emails that my subscription was past-due. Then I come to realize that they had continued to bill me every 2 weeks, but the payments had just started failing because my card expired.
I emailed CS, mentioning that I had cancelled my subscription and I was being billed by mistake, and to make sure my account got cancelled this time. They "couldn't do anything about it" because my account was in their "grace period", and that I would continue to get the past due emails until the grace period ended.
I ended up filing chargebacks for each charge after I had originally cancelled. To my knowledge, they never replied to or contested the chargebacks (does the customer usually get this info, if they do? it's the first and only chargeback I'd ever filed).
I do this because I'm unable to keep up with one audiobook per month, but still really enjoy their service.
Also, Rackspace email (paid hosting by email address) requires you to contact customer service to delete email accounts you are not using. Not quite making a phone, but still requires going through a "wait and communicate with a human being" ten-minute process rather than a simple click to delete an account.
I've been able to both put my account on hold and cancel several times _online_ in the past 5 years.
Next time, I'll try to execute my right to cancel by the same means I subscribed, though. I don't think they will argue with you and if they did, I'd just fill a chargeback with my CCC.
When I was in my first year Econ 101 class I remember the professor telling a story which IIRC was about SF Bus Companies. We were talking about price elasticity and general market pricing mechanisms and doing price curves. The story was essentially that the bus company brought in consultants who evaluated why the company was losing money after it had raised rates. It was a no-brainer of course, that if you sell 5,000 rides a day (made up number) that if you raised prices from 1.00 to 1.10 you would make 10% more.
It turned out, that the company was doing rather poorly after raising rates but critically, they were even priced too high at 1.00. 20,000 people would ride the bus for $0.75 and have less impact on the marginal price as the busses were heavily underused.
The point is that it is possible, I would say likely but I have no data, that a subscription for the Boston Globe might attract 5,000 people at current price(made up number), but like above if they charged $0.99 a month, they could feasibly have 20000-200,000 customers in a biz with virtually 0 marginal cost, and profit tied directly to subscriber size(ads which I assume they show to even paying subscribers after reading the article).
Newspapers are super elastic, and that price curve probably falls steeply after $1.00 a month.
Although a large organization like the Globe will be able to negotiate better rates.
Or aggregate each customer's monthly payments into one larger charge, like Google used to do for Play Store purchases. From memory they waited until you'd reached something like $8 and then charged that in one transaction.
We really need some zero-friction mini-(if not micro) payments solution. I'm imagining a Paypal subscription button that's as frictionless as a Like button (on both subscribe and unsubscribe). Click once to pay $1 for access, without even leaving the page (no logins or signups). Unsubscribe is just a single click away, with no hidden cancellation periods. I love the idea of flattr, but only someone like PayPal has the existing userbase to get any adoption. They also have a balance feature to reduce CC processing fees.
It's actually incredibly dishonest, at each and every step of the way. It's anti-consumer, and makes distrust the organization and it's integrity as a place of good journalism. You never bothered to explain how you thought it wasn't. How is a huge surprise bill at the end of a year not dishonest? Hiding truth is dishonesty. Low level used car lot sales type strategy.
They are completely bonkers. They have absolutely no idea how people consume news; they still believe I'm going to go there first thing in the morning as my first page and 'read the whole newspaper' or something. And that I'll be subscribed just to them, or something equally idiotic.
I'm willing to pay that £10 for netflix for example, or perhaps 2 or 3 /maximum/ service I use /a lot/ -and that will be reviewed very often- but I'm not going to pay that to everyone whose website I go once a week or so.
What are they thinking? Gimme a subscription for £1/month, and I'll take quite a few of them (possibly more than 20 or 30!!) but I'm not willing to shell out that sort of money for occasional visits.
You're right on pricing though. Newspapers need to stop trying to charge nearly the same as a print subscription. Almost no one is going to pay that these days - we don't expect to get all our news from one or two sources now.
I'd love to see a respected news site try a penny under $1/£1 a month sub just to see how the numbers land. I'd wouldn't be at all surprised to see enough subscriber growth that they make more notwithstanding traffic growth. It has to be better than advert supported rates.
I'd pay that, without second thought. I'd be happy paying that across the twenty or so news sites that make up regular reading for me.
The Boston Globe is being intentionally deceptive about the amount they're charging their customers. They're trying to trick people into paying more money than they thought they were consenting to.
You could argue that they'll only "trick" those who don't dig deep enough to figure out the real price, but that's like saying confidence tricks are moral because they only work on naive people.
That should be illegal - accept the same channel for sales also for cancellations.
Also, this crap isn’t limited to web pages. Happens in the mail too. Yet these remain “legal” because every one of them “tells you” exactly what they are: in tiniest print, in the grayest of colors, in the unlikeliest of places and in the most convoluted of words.
These laws have to be cleaned up. In the meantime I am perfectly fine with publicly shaming companies that pull these tricks. We need a lot more articles like this one.
Saw the Star Tribune doing some fun pricing stuff a month or so ago. Just try and compare these prices:
https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/943809_10154050270527...
- Digital: First Month free, then $14.99 a month
- Sunday+Digital: $13.90 for 10 weeks, then $4.54 per week, billed at $59.02 every 13 weeks
- 7 Day+Digital: $39 for 13 weeks, then $7.05 per week, billed at $35.25 every 5 weeks
I'll add that the flipside is that publushers need revenues. I'm aware micropayments are making another go of it (David Brin is publishing an article shortly which I reviewed in draft). My thought is that that's actually the weong way to go and that what we need is superbundling, including possibly at the government level (an income-indexed content tax). Some asskicking in browser and web space to too shake out the cruft.
I may have to manually add "about:reader?url=" to the head of the navigation line. I'm taking to doing that by default.
A small number of sites revert to the default page, but few. NY Times isn't among them.
The Boston Globe publishes some really good long-form investigative journalism from time to time. Not always, but there are regularly some really good pieces coming out of it.
They also weren't doing a lot of local stuff until recently. They had a decent local event listing calendar when the web was newer, but it fell by the wayside and I never went back. Even with the "Boston Pheonix's" closure I didn't go back.
I'm a local radio news listener, and Globe journalists are on the radio talking about the articles they write. So they are getting the word out there. They seem to be trying to get back into the local game.
However, while I was watching the documentary 'Spotlight', which was The Globe's 2002 expose on the Roman Catholic church, it occurred to me - How are good newspapers to survive and turn a profit? Readers are unwilling to pay/subscribe and online ad revenue is falling.
It's a genuine problem and I sure hope some of these newspapers survive and are still around a decade from now. The WSJ, NYT, and WaPos will, but what about some of the the others?
1. Make certain articles freely available. They're not stupid--they can figure out which ones will draw people in.
2. Do it LWN-style: the current week's edition requires a subscription, after that it's free. If it's well-written, people will pay to not be a week behind.
And in some countries they actually are. There are laws in some European countries where you always have to disclose the full price and in case of reductions and offers you have to clearly show the original price.
They might not. It doesn't surprise me, nobody wants to read objective news anymore. They'd rather seek out and read things that confirm their biases. It's one of the paradoxes of choice; more information and we actually learn less.
The only two things are selling relatively well online:
- non-mobile games
- subscription to porn site (friend of mine runs network and he claims that it is a gold mine)
People do not want to pay for online service. People do not want to see ads.
I'm not sure how this is sustainable. We already see that cloud storage providers stop offering ridiculous amount of storage for free.
I don't agree with these practices, but the real price does appear to be on that page. At the right hand side (where I suspect many people would overlook it...), it says:
> At the end of your introductory period, continue on the weekly rate of $3.99 for your first year.
But who are these idiots who sign up when nagged this way?
Are they the same idiots who buy products when spammed?
Or is this all the same 0.1% return for effort that spammers also rely on, where it is zero cost for them to spam even if the return rate is tiny.
Boston Globe is all green though. https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/www.bostonglobe.com
Much, much safer for recurring payments than continuous charge authorisation on a credit card where you have to contact the charger to cancel (or wait for your card to expire).
i think "dark patterns" is a little strong. most of what the globe's doing here is just standard on-boarding marketing stuff IMHO. not stating on the article page itself that the 99c price is temporary hardly seems like a major sin when that fact is clearly communicated on the landing page.
Looking carefully through all the things the blogger is claiming, I think the strongest point he makes is that the globe doesn't make it clear that the "real" price doubles after 1 year.
I am already a subscriber so I couldn't make it through the flow to see exactly how it's communicated, but if that's not clear, obviously it should be and that's not a minor point.
I emailed the globe's editor, brian mcgrory, who is definitely a no-BS kind of guy, telling him lots of boston people are checking this out this morning (since it's on the HP) and he should respond :)
What you are acknowledging, perhaps without realizing it, is that standard on-boarding marketing stuff is deliberately misleading and malicious.
Do you want Prime? No thanks.
DO YOU WANT PRIME‽ NO!
FUCK YOU DO YOU WANT PRIME‽‽‽‽ FUCK OFF!
For EVERY purchase!
Humongous button saying "yes", not even a button, just a discrete link that lets me sheepishly say "not right now".
NO! I do not want prime! EVER! It's hugely expensive, I have patience with my shipping, and I'm completely disinterested in your streaming service.
… and then they change the layout. Now the options are "yes", "yes", and "maybe later".
Yes. After being an amazon customer for maybe 15 years I finally accidentally clicked one of the "yes" buttons. The new one. I just clicked "whatever is not the yes button", but they added a second one.
To their credit, it was pretty easy to say "don't renew after free trial ends".
It's too easy for merchants to re-organize around another platform if needed. Amazon wouldn't lose all customers to that service, but they would no longer be the only place that one buys stuff, which is pretty close to what they are now.
Going membership-only would simply leave too much money on the table for it to not be picked up by others.
Ebay I think would be ready to pick up the slack, if nobody else.
A good example from my own experience was freelancer.com. Their account closing procedure was so bad that now I won't open another one.
Every customer starts out not paying you. What a great way to attract new customers....
That's the one thing that makes the Boston Globe's behaviour unforgivable: they're not just tricking you into thinking the subscription cost is less than 1/4th of what they actually charge you -- they're ramping the price up twice and not telling you about the second jump anywhere throughout the subscription process.
I do think it's pretty normal for the consumer to say "okay well, if that's the price for 4 weeks only, what happens after that?". The fact that that is not made clear immediately is shady, but I'm not sure it's a true deception.
Also, the locution "dark patterns" in the headline is a weird term that is, frankly, more deceptive than anything the writer purports to reveal the Globe does.
> Before you can read the article, there is a pop-up ad asking you to subscribe. By itself, this is annoying, but not deceptive. The real dark pattern is hidden at the top – the ‘Close’ button (circled in red) uses a very low contrast font, making it hard to see. It’s also in the left corner, not the standard right corner. This makes it likely that users won’t see it, causing them to subscribe when they didn’t have to.
> A Boston Globe reader can subscribe online. If they have a question, they can ask over email, or through a convenient live chat service. But if they want to stop paying, they have to call and ask on the phone