California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online | Hacker News Reader

California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

niemanlab.org

1,070 pointsdanso536 comments

For places that require a phone call I came up with a trick to cancel via email. If they reply back via email and say I have to call them, I tell them I'm deaf and can't talk on the phone.

Works every time.

I actually have a speech impairment (a stutter) and you’d think people would be willing to accommodate. I can speak just fine when I have complete agency over the words I choose to say, but it’s the absolute worst when I have to read out some long specific access code or account number and say it 100% correct. Stutter even once and they think I meant 2 P’s when I just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes this long drawn out process of “after AF6, it’s just a single P, but the rest of it is right” because I really don’t want to have to read out the entire code again.

But sadly there have been more times than I can count where I told them I have a speech impairment, it’s difficult for me to say certain things in the way they need me to right now, and I’d prefer to send them an email (even offer to send them an email for them to open while we are still talking)... And they said no they cannot do that for one reason or another.

That sucks. I guess "works every time" is an overstatement.

I'm currently 3 for 3 but I guess you have a lot more attempts than I do.

You could always tell them you're halfway through a bottle of Colt 45.

When I lived in the US I would follow the phone menu for 30s or so, but at some point I would always a get annoyed enough and just hit random keys until the robot says: I don't understand let me connect you...

Often hitting # repeatedly did the trick. But lot always.

GetHuman has most companies' information online on how to get a human the fastest and alternate ways to contact them.

I learned the other day that the CA Franchise Tax Board has a live chat via GetHuman [0] which saved an insane amount of time on hold. I was originally just trying to find alternate dial in numbers to actually talk to a person, not a robot.

[0] https://gethuman.com/phone-number/California-Franchise-Tax-B...

this also happens when I’m speaking to actual humans. Sadly.

It isn't SFW (well some), but yelling a couple random swearwords works surprisingly well for getting a human on the line.

I've found multiple systems that go on your tone of voice. No need to swear or even raise it.

> When I lived in the US I would follow the phone menu for 30s or so, but at some point I would always a get annoyed enough and just hit random keys until the robot says: I don't understand let me connect you...

I don't remember which ones, but I've found several companies whose automated systems hang up on you after giving you a certain number of 'tries' to enter a menu option.

> Stutter once and they think you meant 2 P’s when you just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes this long drawn out process of “after AF6, it’s just a single P, but the rest of it is right” because you really don’t want to have to read out the entire code again

Have you tried using the NATO alphabet? I don't know if that would be easier or more difficult for you to say, but it's worth a shot, since it'd be less ambiguous over the phone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Generally speaking people working in call centre, or that deal with client all day long, like the NATO alphabet, especially people that have to deal with random code, or need to get names spelled right. People that I know worked in call centre love it, and carry on using it decades after they left that job.

It seems a bit more tedious, but the slower pace with reduced ambiguity means you almost never have to repeat yourself.

Worth giving it a shot, speech impairment or not.

My name has an unusual spelling, so I always have to spell it on the phone. I've had issues every time I try to use the NATO alphabet for this, because several of the phonetics are names. E.g. someone named Matt might say:

"Matt, spelled Mike-Alpha-Tango-Tango"

And get the response:

"Ok Mike, now I need..."

I am not familiar with NATO standards until I read this post. And I’m not an English native speaker. But what I get from NATO idea is take the first character from the word said in conversation. So when speaking with someone on the phone, sometimes I say “I” as Italy instead of India. And luckily they understand it. You may try “Monaco” instead of “Mike”.

It also avoids similar sounding things, word where it can be hard to figure out what the first letter was & words where the first letter is mute.

There is a joke version of the alphabet that messes with all those rules. http://i.imgur.com/3CbAxSp.jpg

I overheard a co-worker once trying to spell out a mailing list address to a customer using a NATO-like alphabet, but he began, "M as in Mary, L as in Larry..."

We ribbed him pretty good for that. I even created my own Completely Useless Alphabet from that incident:

A as in Aerie

B as in Barry

C as in Carrie

D as in Dairy

etc.

I can do the NATO alphabet when speaking to a human, that’s a good suggestion.

One thing though, when speaking to a robot, they’re not usually programmed for that. They want exact letters and numbers that their speech-to-text engine can convert. Eventually the robot takes me to a human after it fails enough times but there’s usually a queue, which isn’t always great because the wait times can be very long.

Have you tried text to speech dictation? macOS has this built into accessibility options under the speech category. You can assign a keyboard shortcut speak from highlighted text, simple as that. I use it to read faster cause I'm a slow reader.

I wonder if they would accept that.

It's morally OK to just lie about it. If I can tell them "I'm physically unable to speak", you can too.

I suggest creating a form letter where you threaten to file an ADA action against them, as well as notifying your state's attorney, etc. Plus cc: the local TV station consumer reporter. When they give you static, they get a copy of that letter sent to their registered corporate agent, return receipt. Their lawyer has to handle all such legal threats. ADA actions are extremely expensive for corporations.

People without an ADA issue should send their cancellation notice to the registered corporate agent, return receipt, which sets the date of cancellation and gets their (expensive) lawyer involved. Threaten to sue them under your deceptive trade practices statutes if they continue to bill your account. Lawyers shed these kind of nuisance things quickly and cut through the bureaucracy. Your file will be stamped "service terminated" posthaste. There is no better way to communicate your desire to terminate service than to notify their registered agent in writing.

How do you generally go about finding registered agents? It's never been super obvious to me that Sportsmans Guide is represented by "Clarke, Whitehall and Rosenstein, LLP" or some equally stuffy sounding law firm, much less where the firm might be reachable by registered mail...

This[1] just says most states provide free access to their database to find registers agents.

I don’t live in the US, so no idea which department handles that.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_agent#Registered_ag...

Typically the Secretary of State for any given state maintains a registry of businesses that is searchable online. The main purpose for these databases is to verify the status of the Corp and to identify the Agent of Service. You need to know the name of the actual corporation to do the search. I say this because some businesses use a fictitious business name, also know as a DBA (doing business as) for branding purposes. In that case, you’ll need to find where the DBA is filed (maybe the County Registrar for a small company) and look up online or perhaps have to mail a request with a small fee, depending on how well funded the locality is.

This would probably be my go-to from now on when canceling a service. Kind of sucks to have to pay for registered mail but sounds like it’s a sure fire way to cut through the bs and maybe that’s worth the postage.

I’ve once signed up for a service and I didn’t know beforehand that their “delete account” button would take me to a page telling me that in order to shut it off I had to email them at least three business days in advance. I don’t have a general issue with having to inform people to shut things off the old fashioned way like via telephone or email.. but that’s for when I had to communicate over phone or email in order to begin the agreement. Such as with a consultant or contractor.. Not when they made signing up a quick and simple online process and then want to make it difficult to shut off so they can squeeze an extra payment out of you.

So I resorted to CC-ing a fake legal@ email address in the cancellation email, thinking maybe they would think I’ve CC-ed one of my lawyers (I didn’t have a personal lawyer, but they didn’t know that). They took care of it immediately.

The symptoms you describe are what someone I know experiences. In the same situation of making a phone call, he give the handset to his wife. What's pathetic is that the operator insists on talking to him "in person" even if he sits next to her. Some of these trained operators apply their company rules to the letter so much that it feels almost barbaric.

Why blame the operators for management's barbaric rules?

but would not that make you feel a little guilty as you are lying to the person just to cancel a subscription?

Why should we feel guilty when companies like this do their best to hide important things from the people they're billing?

I don't. The only reason why this deception is necessary is because of the company's scummy cancellation policies. Heck, one could argue that it actually reduces labor costs because emails are usually less time consuming than phone calls.

Why would one feel guilty about it?

This is a utility-maximizing lie. You're saving both yourself and the other person time. Unless you subscribe to some belief-system that holds truth-telling to be some sort of moral good in and of itself, everyone is better off.

And that's aside from the fact that the patter you'll hear trying to keep you paying is going to be full of, at the very least, deceptive statements lacking any objective truth or falsity.

As guilty as saying "I can only pay $X" or "$X is my final offer" when buying or selling a car despite knowing it's a negotiation tactic and not a real limitation.

Incidentally the price tag was invented by Quakers who considered haggling immoral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag#History

After yesterdays thread on the anki system I'm tempted to get into that and this bit of trivia is just the sort of thing I'd love to remember.

That is fascinating, thanks for sharing.

An interesting question is whether a car dealer that says "we paid $Y for this car, we're losing money if we sell it to you at $X" is committing fraud if Y is a false figure aka negotiating tactic. I think a lot of people would be unsurprised that such a thing would happen, but should it be a crime?

I was reading a Matt Levine column in which he described some litigation over selling bonds that was very analogous to the car dealer situation. And apparently what happened is that it was decided that lying about the price paid was ok per se, but creating falsified documentation to back it up was fraud. Which seems weird!

Why? Its just a machine. You're trying to find the right buttons to press to get it to give you the desired results. The "person" is just part of the interface. They have no choice at all what to say.

If you saw that a soda machine always dispensed a Coke when you pressed the Dr. Pepper button would you feel bad pressing that button to get the Coke you wanted?

Despite what we teach small children, lying is not immoral. Lying is amoral. The circumstance and motivation of a lie determine whether that particular lie is moral or immoral.

There are times when it's moral to lie, other times when it's immoral to lie, and still other times when morality hardly has anything to do with it at all (such as the above scenario.) We tell small children that it's immoral to lie because we don't trust their moral judgement and would prefer they always tell us the truth.

Reminds me of Kant’s Axe ...

Is it ever morally acceptable to tell a lie? Kant thought not. His example of the would-be murderer explains his reasoning. Read by Harry Shearer. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.

https://youtu.be/x_uUEaeqFog

Thankfully most people have more sense than Kant. In truth, I doubt Kant himself would be so hardline if he were actually put to the test in such a scenario. Talk is cheap, would he actually be so depraved in practice? I can't rule it out, but I doubt it.

Kant's philosophy is universal, not individual. His morality (and many others!) accepts that people may becomes martyrs.

Should you kill a person to save two? Kill two to save one? Does matter who the people involved are? Anti-Kantian philosophies don't have good consistent answers to this -- at least they don't live according to their philosophical answers.

I don't think people grow out of the need to follow moral rules as much as you imply. Sooner or later, there comes a time when it is overwhelmingly in a person's interest to lie (or some other transgression). If they are purely rational, they will do it. If they think deeply about morality, they will rationalize why it is right to do what is in their interest. The point of inculcating honesty and other virtues is so one is habituated to the point that dishonesty is preempted when it really counts. Reasoned moral judgement is not an unmitigated good, because it opens the way for bias and hinders the operation of trust needed for relationships.

Lying isn't bad. Hurting people is bad. There are many totally honest ways of hurting someone.

The way I see it, telling a "harmless" or "justified" lie can destroy trust, which can have substantial or even devastating consequences. Often one faces several choices, all of which may hurt people, and moral rules are a heuristic method by which people avoid the harmful effects of cognitive biases due to self-interest or logical errors.

None of this should suggest I think it's obviously wrong to lie to a stranger about whether you're deaf in order to avoid a conversation - that might be permissible according to generally accepted social rules. My point is more that when you start talking about deciding for yourself when to obey moral rules, you are on shaky ground, no matter how wise or logical you are.

> Lying isn't bad. Hurting people is bad. There are many totally honest ways of hurting someone.

While I agree with your first two sentences and think that they are well said, the third doesn't demonstrate the first; it demonstrates only that "hurting people can be done without lying", not "lying can be done without hurting people."

They bank (much like sales people) on human nature making you feel bad when they’re screwing you.

It’s like the squares/grid stuff used by car salespeople to get you to get a car loan instead of buying the car with cash.

No more guilty than corporations feel for making customers jump through hoops just to cancel a service they no longer need or want.

You can take that as "not at all guilty".

"Make game of that which makes as much of thee." They are playing you, manipulating you, and not dealing with you as a person. They are treating you like a factor to be optimized and played with. It is entirely a moral response to respond in kind and out-play them.

I've found a different method. Email them and tell them they need to call me or they won't be paid anymore. I've actually used the phrase "give me a holler". Got a call the next morning.

You've managed to bypass an automated system and jump the queue, but you're still in a point where you're waiting for their next action, potentially taking a call at a bad moment and then still having to fight the customer retention scripts and getting bounced around a call centre until somebody finally helps.

If your goal is to just end your contract (as permitted), I should not have to jump through any more hoops than telling them we're done.

All you have to do is say you will report the charge as fraudulent in an email.

How about just sending a notification of cancellation by snail mail?

Finding a stamp and a post office box is significantly more annoying than two emails.

Surely there are web business that print and mail documents for you.

That's the point of this law, isn't it? That canceling service should be as easy as activating it?

You can also say: "Because I was convicted and I am going to prison by next week."

I have a different trick: I use Lob.com to send a cancellation request through certified mail. Works every time, and takes 5 minutes.

That's interesting. So I took a look at lob.com's web site and I can't figure out which service you use.

I just use the web GUI to upload a PDF and send the letter.

This was already required in the Visa Merchant agreement. If you signed up online. The merchant must provide an online way to cancel which could be email, webpage or chat. If they don't just call up your card issuer and file a "canceled recurring" dispute as the merchant doesn't provide a visa acceptable way to cancel the subscription.

https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about-visa/15-April-2...

Section: 5.9.8.2

so the solution to having to call a merchant to cancel a subscription is to call your card issuer to cancel a subscription?

I think the implication is that your card issuer won't fight you on the cancellation, whereas the service provider that is trying to make your life difficult has additional, phone-based hoops for you to jump through.

If your vindictive this is a great way to increase their card processing costs.

You seriously believe this will increase processing costs to say Verizon or Comcast?

They are not the only ones using this dark pattern, and it does get escalated to more expensive employees even at Comcast.

Of course it does. With a provider as large as that they surely engage in negotiations with credit card providers, and you can bet that the fraudulent charge rate is a huge part of that discussion.

Verizon/Comcast's handling of recurring cancellations is directly tied to Visa's cost of doing business with them.

My bank doesn't make me sit on hold for 20 minutes and isn't staffed by min wage employees who are incentivized to retain you including lying to you or hanging up on you. I don't blame the employees, they are just trying to make rent.

Also chargebacks penalize the merchants both in fines/fees but if they rack of enough, they'll pay higher processing fees.

> My bank doesn't make me sit on hold for 20 minutes and isn't staffed by min wage employees

Lucky you.

Get a better bank.

There are literally thousands of banks and credit unions in the United States. If your bank sucks, then you have no reason not to take your business to a different one.

Banks seem to occupy a weird space in the minds of consumers. You can open as many accounts as you want at as many banks as you want. If you're paying fees, switch to a bank that doesn't have those fees. If you can't get somebody on the phone, switch to a bank that staffs its call centers. If their website sucks, switch to a bank with a good website.

Try a few out. See what you like. It's just like any other consumer product.

Sometimes you can file the dispute entirely online.

if you/lots of people have call a merchant a lot to cancel, then it doesn't matter. If the bank/credit card companies get lots of calls about one merchant, they might tell the merchant to get it's act together or risk higher fees. "Fix your cancellation process or we'll turn off your ability to charge anyone next month" tends to get more powerful people to take note.

Would this work for Comcast/Xfinity?

I recently had to cancel an ongoing subscription I had with Equifax, which requires you to call by phone. Unbelievably frustrating. I had to dial the service at least 10 times. Each time, the automated responder would make me go through a very slow menu selection process, only to randomly fail to acknowledge either my correct SSN or zipcode or street number, which I entered using a keypad. As a consumer, I've had to enter info via phone keypad for as long as I can remember, and I've never run into a system (not even small local businesses) that was so randomly buggy.

I thought maybe I had the wrong phone number for cancellation. Turns out, when you google "cancel Equifax phone number", there are several phone numbers listed by Equifax itself, on various sections of its "help" pages.

Took me about half an hour to finally reach a human operator. Surprisingly, the cancellation process was quick with her with no haggling. But I imagine the process is so frustrating overall that a good number of people just give up.

We really need some kind of consumer protection against IVR gauntlets.

Certified mail letter saying that you want to cancel?

There's a thought. The evil of IVRs goes far beyond cancellations, though. Warranties, insurance claims, anything where the company "wins by default" admits labyrinthine IVRs as a dark pattern, and some of those are "interactive" enough that certified mail winds up introducing as much friction as the IVR itself.

The really evil ones hang up on you after you've been on hold for a fixed period of time.

Interactive Voice Response System, to save a trip for others who didn't know the acronym.

Trip saved, thank you

> We really need some kind of consumer protection against IVR gauntlets.

My brain tried really hard to read "IVR gauntlets" as a description of wearables, like AR goggles, before I realised what you meant.

Please listen closely, our menu options have changed

That has got to be the default, right?

I swear some haven’t changed for years but they still say that, argh

>>> Please listen closely, our menu options have changed.

You are missing the "as". Please listen closely, as our menu options have changed. I know it by heart and can hear the same voice over and over again in my head. Crap!

>>> Please listen closely ass, our menu options have changed.

We are experiencing higher than normal call volume.

Every. Single. Day.

I would like to give executives the option to stop this or go to prison for this never ending nonsense. I think most would choose to stop.

Executives should go to prison for not staffing call centers properly?

I think what the parent poster meant is that there is a criminal element to wasting your customers' time on purpose in order to discourage them from, for example, cancelling a service.

There are laws around this in other areas, it's not unprecedented.

No. For lying to their customers.

Correct.

At some point, when it happens day in, day out, day or night, doesn't it become the new normal call volume?

I just assume that they put this in regardless to get some amount of people to think "Oh well I better send an email instead...". Emails are cheaper to deal with.

And in emails they put in "We're experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of support requests and we encourage you to look at the FAQ instead".

Every. Damn. Time.

> And in emails they put in "We're experiencing a higher-than-usual volume of support requests and we encourage you to look at the FAQ instead".

To be fair, you wouldn't believe the number of people that will send a request to support before looking at the FAQ when the item (and resolution) is in the FAQ.

I would :) I also do CS for my company.

I honestly believe almost nobody reads FAQs, and the presence of an item in an FAQ is a symptom of a UX failure somewhere down the line.

And the inability to find it in the FAQ is itself a failure. It seems like almost no one is even trying, no wonder we tend toward monopolies.

As has been pointed out in past threads, the typical HN reader probably only calls on the phone when something has failed or is unavailable on the website, but from the point of view of the call center, most of their incoming calls are going to be people who refuse to use the website for things that could in principle be easily done there. So they are always trying to cut that fraction down or automate it.

Relatedly, I've been flying a lot more than usual in the last couple of months.

Every single flight, the boarding announcements start with something along the lines of "this plane is going to be more full than usual, so we're going to need to check some of your carry-ons".

Well guess what, United? Maybe if you didn't cram passengers into the fuselage like sardines in a goddamn tin can, you'd have enough room for everyone's carry-on luggage in the bins.

Even if most flights are not crowded, the distribution of people on flights is probably such that if your flight preferences are distributed in the same way that people are distributed among flights, you're more likely to be on full flights. For example, say flights either had 10 or 90 people on them, with equal probability, then 90 % of people are on flights that are "more full than usual."

I've learned that storage is rarely the issue - they do this to reduce boarding time to stay on schedule. I often board later in the line and there is still plenty of space. Really they should just ban carry-on rollers for non-elderly, able people, they're the ones people spend ages trying to jam in.

> Really they should just ban carry-on rollers for non-elderly, able people, they're the ones people spend ages trying to jam in.

I would agree, but they charge for checked bags.

Wouldn't it be nice to have that message say "Our options changed on July 1, 2018"? :)

Half a year back I got a check from American Express for $50-ish because of some accounting issue they had. Bank error in your favor. Unfortunately, the local meth heads stole it out of my mailbox and I only got the check stub when someone found it in the street and turned it in to the post office. So I called them up to ask them to reissue the check. Long story short, they dodged and weaved with their phone automation and outsourced call center until I finally gave up and wrote them a letter. Six weeks passed and right when I'd written it off, I got a check.

Only reason you were refunded money was because they originally errored in their favor. You probably would’ve received nothing but a class action was threatened by private or government actor.

I pay for recurring stuff with a CC for this very reason. I had an insurance company refuse to cancel my insurance unless I physically came into their office all the way across town (would have been about two hours of my time when it was all said and done) to show them proof that I had insurance through another agency. I declined that request and explained that they simply weren't getting paid any more. I called the number on my card and explained the situation to them and that I told them to stop billing me and they refused. The rep noted this issue on the account. Sure enough, they didn't stop billing me. I called the card company again to report that the insurance company had billed me again. They immediately reversed the charges and blocked all further charges from the company.

The insurance agent reported me to DMV (the relationship had soured pretty badly before this all happened) for not having insurance. It was a 2 minute call to my new insurance agent to let them to know to send proof of coverage to DMV. Problem solved in ~10 minutes of my time instead of 2 hours.

> The insurance agent reported me to DMV (the relationship had soured pretty badly before this all happened) for not having insurance. It was a 2 minute call to my new insurance agent to let them to know to send proof of coverage to DMV.

This wasn't necessarily a malicious act on their part, most likely regulatory, and you probably didn't have to do anything to rectify the situation.

I don't know what state you live in but when I was working for an insurance broker (~2004) CA, TX, PA, FL, and GA all received at least monthly if not nightly uploads of vehicle coverage.

I also know that GA shares that info and DMV records with FL and NC.

I don't have enough exposure to the product (not available in my region) but I really liked the _idea_ of privacy.com where you can create a credit card proxy for every subscription you have.

This seems extremely valuable for managing subscriptions, tracking your funds, and of course, some modicum of privacy where your original credit card is only shared with one party.

edit: Seems like privacy.com is a direct-to-bank connection instead of depending on a credit card for funding.

CapitalOne offers the same service on their credit cards with a browser plugin. It also disallows charges to the virtual card numbers from any source other than the site it's associated with.

You can do this with (the awesome) Citi 2% cash back card as well, just use their normal website to generate virtual numbers.

Yeah I only wish it was supported in the mobile app also!

Really? How does it work?

I wonder what else their browser plugin does, behind the scenes... :-/

Privacy.com is a really neat service. I'm pretty disappointed that all banks don't already have this feature built in (I know some do).

I'm a frequent user and fan of Privacy.com, however I've had merchants decline charges when I provide a proxy card, only to have the charge succeed when I provide a real card linked to the same account as the aforementioned proxy card.

I suspect that Privacy.com uses gift cards as proxies, and some merchants reject payments made with gift cards. If so, this could be why I experienced the above.

If someone knows better than I do, please correct me. Genuinely curious how the service works under the hood.

Digital Ocean also refuses virtual Visa card. Maybe there is higher amount of fraud with such cards or maybe they want a credit card so they can charge you even if you don't have money. Of course, I would never agree to this.

In Portugal every debit card can be used through the MBWay service, with one-use cards that look like the credit counterpart to the physical one (Maestro -> Mastercard, Visa Electron -> Visa), but can be single use (with a per-card limit) or multi-use (with a limite and an expiration date), locked to the first purchase's merchant.

It also allows instant wire transfers between accounts in different banks using a phone number, and to withdraw cash at virtually any national ATM.

Managing subscriptions is what banks should do and not some third-party company.

Yeah Comcast refused to cancel online about 5 times in a row despite me repeatedly citing their ToS which explicitly says you can cancel by e-mail in section 9b. The parrots on the other end kept repeating that they needed to verify my identity (Ehm, stopping payments should be sufficient verification, thanks.)

I've long deprecated phone calls as a method for businesses to reach me. I don't know why businesses don't get it already.

I got my way after about 7 e-mails with Comcast. Still saved time at ~1 minute per e-mail.

Can Google Assistant please stop working on the haircut reservation systems and make "automatically fight with customer service departments" the priority feature?

Comcast is terrible. They called me 3 hours after I had just returned their modem and cables back to the store and they said "we never got it" and tried to charge me $300 for non-return of equipment. Had I not specifically asked the store rep. for a receipt and taken a video of myself returning it to the store, then it would have been their word against mine over the phone. I'm convinced this is a con they play on purpose to milk customers for extra money when they cancel their service (plus Comcast also had an ISP monopoly over the area, so they just didn't give a shit about their customer service).

> The parrots on the other end kept repeating that they needed to verify my identity (Ehm, stopping payments should be sufficient verification, thanks.)

I don't understand — how does stopping payments verify your identity?

Because I say I am going to do it, and then I do it, which requires me to authenticate myself to my bank. If the e-mail were sent by an impostor, payments would still work.

One of the philosophies at Netflix was that it should be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up, because you should respect your customers enough not to annoy them into keeping your service.

Honestly, it always seemed to me that it was actually easier to cancel than the sign up.

Anyone who has this business philosophy deserves my money

And good services also make it possible to put a subscription on hold for 6-12mo or even indefinitely. I did that with Hulu for a while before upgrading to their no-ad service. If they didn't have hold, I would have cancelled and probably not signed up again.

Of course with Netflix, I've never thought that.

Any company that generates value for a customer doesn't have retention issues. I used to run software engineering at two subscription commerce companies. One company allowed users to cancel and pause/skip online via webpage, chat, email and even social channels. The other forced customers to call up support to cancel. The first company sold for 10 figures, the other company just did a down round and layoffs. Screwing over customers is good for short-term gain, but eventually, you run out of new customers and you burned the bridge for re-aquiring former customers.

This is unfortunately only true in a competitive environment for non essential goods. If you provide services such as internet, or telephone where people can only choose between one or two providers, which are all equally bad, the customers don’t have a choice.

And then there are services where people sign up but only a very small percentage would voluntarily come back no matter how good or bad your service is because they sign up out of impulse. Gyms are good examples for those — people sign up because they want to lose weight/stay fitter, etc but only a small percentage actually goes there after the first few times. This of course sucks for the regular customers who want to pause their membership because they are too busy for a few months or move, etc (but on the other hand, those no-goes also subsidies the regular goers because the gym can offer a lower price for everyone).

For those companies, we need laws that make it equally as easy to cancel as to sign up.

>This of course sucks for the regular customers who want to pause their membership because they are too busy for a few months or move

Yeah, I'd wanted to pause my gym membership for 3 months a couple years back because I was going to be traveling a lot, and wasn't going to be in town. Only option was to cancel, then pay a new "processing fee" to start again months later. Really pissed me off. I'd been a member for 2 years at that point, using regularly. no exceptions to their policy. i left. i did go back a couple years later, when they had a 'sign up and we waive the processing fee!' promotion (closest/best combination of pool/gym - everything else is miles further). They'd have had my monthly money for another couple years with minimal use by me during that time, save for a stupid policy that "we can't change". ugh...

It's too easy to cancel Netflix. Someone called in and gave my first initial + last name @ gmail email address and cancelled for me without any further verification.

I mean, reactivating your account is just a case of hitting a button as well. So while annoying it's not like anything is lost.

Agreed! One thing that impressed me recently is how easy it is to cancel Symantec's (rather useless) LifeLock service. Just write a sentence on their online support page and my service was cancelled in less than 24 hours. They even sent me an email suggesting things I can do to prevent identity theft without using their service.

I know Symantec is unpopular here on HN, because of the certificate authority fiasco and a (quite reasonable) distrust of antivirus software, but really kudos to them for handling the cancellation so well.

Write a sentence on a support page is not simple. You haven't even said what the sentence was.

"I would like to cancel my LifeLock subscription."

There is still tremendous friction in being required to talk to someone. Was "cancel my subscription" an option from your account settings menu? Was it hidden somewhere on the account page? Is there no such button, and instead you had to open a general ticket? Did you have to use google to figure out how to cancel your lifelock subscription? Did the place you post on have a dialogue?

I think your bar is far far too low.

Our policy is that it is easier to cancel than sign up. It should take fewer clicks, or be just a simple email.

People who cancel frequently come back, unless you make canceling hard and you burn the relationship.

I've only used this a couple of times but I think it works: "I'd like to cancel my service. I'm going to say this really clearly for the recording, in case I have to subpoena this for evidence. I want to cancel my service, effective [date]. When I hang up this phone, I want there to be no financial relationship between myself and your company of any kind. None. I don't want any further communication from you other than a final statement showing a zero balance due. Now we can make this call as long as you'd like. No. Financial. Relationship. We're done." Then go silent, and if they try to pitch you any products of any kind, interrupt and ask "Are you refusing to cancel my service? Speak clearly for the recording."

But recording phone conversations is illegal in most states, so unless you live in a state where it's legal, they might know that you are bluffing.

They almost always record your calls for 'quality purposes'.

But you're not exactly right.. you can record phone conversations in the US provided you let them know before you push the 'record' button.

When they say, “this call may be recorded,” aren’t they giving you permission to record it?

I've never thought about it that way, but yes, it does seem like they are giving you permission. Thanks for the new insight!

Apparently not. This Daily Dot article quotes the EFF as saying that, even when a company informs you that your call is being recorded, you don't necessarily have the right to record it yourself:

"Dave Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that what Davis did is likely illegal. 'Just because Comcast told the customer that the call was being recorded, that doesn’t mean it’s legal for him to record the call without notification,' Maass tells the Daily Dot. 'To stay on the right side of the law, everyone has to let everyone else know if they’re recording a conversation.'"

Source- https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/comcast-customer-service-rec...

In some states only one party needs to know about the recording. In some state all parties need to know about it. If you tell them up front, they can refuse, but then it's just evidence that they're being difficult.

Certain keywords like "lawsuit" can break the strictly regimented conversation tree too.

Be a bit careful with the "l" word - many companies instruct their reps to immediately stop dealing with people that threaten legal proceedings over the phone and tell them to contact the company attorneys.

Remember that any company that doesn't empower the phone support people to help you probably didn't empower them enough to go off-script.

If I can contact the company attorneys via email, that would be preferred anyways.

Surely you don't want to speak to a company's attorney to cancel your gym membership, or to dispute a $5 purchase. I worked in retail, and people would threaten court over 10-20 euro purchases. We would immediately end the discussion, record their details and pass them on to our lawyers who would contact them within a few days, and presumably begin some arduous process.

If you had just been polite to me on the phone, I probably could have fixed your issue in 15 minutes.

Isn't it legal in every state so long as you disclose that the call is being recorded?

No. Many states require “two party consent” to record a phone conversation. Notice is not equivalent to consent. Companies do this all the time because none have their eyes sued out for it. Yet. In my experience if you protest the recording they will stop and have two people do the call with you.

Usually the company is recording the call for "quality assurance purposes". They've already notified you of this and by staying on the call you consent to the recording. It is always legal to record if both parties consent.

Recording phone conversations secretly without the prior consent of all participants is illegal in many states. No state I am aware of disallows the recording of phone conversations entirely. For instance the law in my "two party consent" state, MA, defines the offense as

> 1. Interception, oral communications prohibited. Except as otherwise specifically provided in this section any person who? willfully commits an interception, attempts to commit an interception, or procures any other person to commit an interception or to attempt to commit an interception of any wire or oral communication shall be fined not more than ten thousand dollars, or imprisoned in the state prison for not more than five years, or imprisoned in a jail or house of correction for not more than two and one half years, or both so fined and given one such imprisonment.

and defines interception as

> 4. The term 'interception' means to secretly hear, secretly record, or aid another to secretly hear or secretly record the contents of any wire or oral communication through the use of any intercepting device by any person other than a person given prior authority by all parties to such communication;...

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Cha...

It is my understanding that 38 of the states are one-party consent states. That is: in most states, it is perfectly legal to record your own phone calls. (It certainly is in my state; I'm taking Wikipedia's word for it for the other states) Though, to be fair, California (the state that TFA is about) is not one of those 38 states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#Unite...

Almost every single call center I've ever called has that, "This call may be monitored for quality assurance." disclaimer.

But does that also mean "You may record this call"? Because it doesn't say by who it is monitored.

AM I BEING DETAINED?

Honestly, the best way to handle these things is to forget even bothering with the company and file a charge-back with your bank or Visa/Mastercard. You have every right to call up your bank and deny a charge for a service you're not using, and didn't ask to renew.

Plus it's guaranteed to get the charge removed immediately, and you'll be hurting the company by adding to their charge-back tally, increasing payment processing costs for them and potentially completely cutting them off.

Ultimately the solution is to let the customer manage their subscriptions via their payment service provider.

PayPal does this.

PayPal tried to take money from my checking account because Consumer Reports "autorenewed" my subscription -- without my knowledge or explicit authorization. As soon as I saw this I reported this as an unauthorized transaction on PayPal. But PayPal failed to stop the payment in time, even though at the time of my flagging it was unpaid. I then called BofA and blocked PayPal and that worked. So at the moment I have a negative balance on PayPal. PayPal called me to try and collect it from me, but I told them to fsck off: I had not explicitly authorized either Consumer Reports or PayPal.

I didn't realize PayPal could dip into my checking account any time they wanted to. I thought it required my manual action. No more PayPal for me.

This is a standard procedure for many merchants these days: Offer an attractive initial price, then add fine print that states your account will autorenew at "then current" rates, and you have to make a phone call (where you have to hold for 20 to 30 minutes for the next available representative) if you want to cancel.

I am glad California is taking action. They still have a for-the-people government in California.

"I didn't realize PayPal could dip into my checking account any time they wanted to."

EBay did this to me once, I think this is an American thing, doesn't happen here in Canada like that.

Oh yeah, this was one of the most insane things I experienced moving to the US.

If someone has your bank account number they can withdraw money from it. For example the errands bank account authentication mechanism is to withdraw some money from your account, and then ask you how much they took. I honestly could not believe it.

It gets better: if you have someone’s bank account number you still cannot transfer money to them. It would literally be easier to tell your bank (say etrade or whatever) that it was your bank account.

That’s why all these absurd abank payment systems exist in America. The act of just giving someone money is incredibly hard.

Yes, though they must be a bank or have an agreement with a bank. Random person can't just do it by just having the numbers. And a bank can get in trouble if it allows shady clients access to ACH.

> bank account authentication mechanism is to withdraw some money from your account, and then ask you how much they took

In my experience, it is usually the reverse - they put a small sum there, and then withdraw it back after auth. But the end result is the same, of course (except if you have less than $1 on your account).

> if you have someone’s bank account number you still cannot transfer money to them

That's indeed weird, because I see no technical reason (at least with my knowledge about ACH - btw HN had recently a couple of nice articles about it) why that would not be possible, but my bank only allows me to transfer money to my accounts. No idea why. Maybe some legal stuff?

OTOH there are apps like venmo which make it easier.

Nope no requirement that they be a bank. Plenty of places allow you to pay online by “direct deposit”, which in every country other than the US involves them providing you with their bank a/c details.

In the US you give them /your/ bank account, and /they/ initiate the withdrawal. Anyone with your account details can pay for something from your account, including to a service they can withdraw from.

Better yet fraud insurance covers credit cards, not debit or “cheque”. Specifically: if someone uses your bank a/c# you are responsible for recovering the money.

> Plenty of places allow you to pay online by “direct deposit”

Looks like you've missed the "or have an agreement with a bank".

> if someone uses your bank a/c# you are responsible for recovering the money.

I do not think this is true. Of course credit card fraud liability policy only covers the credit card, but there are rules about bank transfers. My reading of https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/4A/part_2 is that the customer is liable for the payment only if it is authorized and passes "commercially reasonable" security procedure. If somebody just gets you bank account number, it's clearly not an authorized payment (unless they make it look authorized, i.e. by stealing your identity or passwords, etc.) and you will not be liable for it.

> For example the errands bank account authentication mechanism is to withdraw some money from your account, and then ask you how much they took. I honestly could not believe it.

That is crazy! I remember Paypal doing the opposite in the UK, they made 2 or 3 tiny deposits and asked how much they were.

I'm not sure what "errands bank account" means, but I'm in the US and making a couple random deposits <$1 to confirm an electronically linked bank account is mine is how things are done here in my experience. They always take the deposits back afterwards, too.

Errands bank account = etrade, boo typo!

I had an issue where I accidentally sent an eBay shipment to an old address. It's something that I immediately recognized after clicking "Buy now," and immediately sent a message to the senders; all but one of them corrected the issue and sent the package to the right address, but, one didn't...and it wasn't a big deal -- a $15 package -- but, it was more about the principle...

I followed eBay's "Buyer protection" to the letter...and guess what? I wasn't covered...even after escalating -- and saying, "They have my money and I still don't have my product, I'm trying to understand which part of 'Buyer Protection' I am missing here."

I called my credit card company, explained what was going on, and had my money back in 3 minutes.

Chargebacks are great, whenever they are used effectively...and ebay/paypal is the devil.

Note that PayPal requires that the vendor ship to the confirmed address that the buyer used in the payment. If the seller or shipper ships to a different address, even at the buyers request, they lose all Seller Protection.

It's even worse than you think. Because even if you put a credit card to back up your payments (easier now that PayPal has a deal with VISA), and you are hoping that a passed expiration date on your card will block a transaction from happening, the company will try new dates with one year increment in the future, till eventually the transaction goes thru.

Huh? Does your card number not change when you get a new one in the US?

Unless you specifically ask for a new number, not at all. What's even worse it that the cvv is changing (checksum with the date and card number) but the transaction can go thru without cvv submission in most cases.

what's the point of a cvv then? This seems rather odd

It's up to the merchant; since in the event of fraud they'll be the ones who get hit with the chargeback, it's up to them to decide if they want to require that extra safety or not.

For a recurring subscription, the cvv was verified at the beginning. Cvv is for verifying the card security, not vendor account management.

FYI anyone can dip into your checking account anytime they want to. AFAIK there is literally zero security, all you can do is dispute unauthorized transactions after the fact. Even with a paper check all the info on the check (including recipient and amount) is effectively just a paper trail to be referenced during a dispute.

Not only that, but you only have 60 days to dispute. So don't miss a bank statement or you could be eating the fraudulent charge.

It's crazy how our modern banking system has almost zero security systems in the way of someone draining your account.

The account numbers aren't even secret, they're written on the bottom of every check!

Yes! And you have to catch it within 60 days.

I use examples from a bad embezzlement in my pitch deck. Checks are a joke.

>PayPal tried to take money from my checking account because Consumer Reports "autorenewed" my subscription -- without my knowledge or explicit authorization.

The only way this happens is you create a "billing agreement" when you first signup. Its a feature of Paypal that then lets sites bill more stuff to you without much in terms of prompting. Its useful because services like Steam use it to avoid prompting users over and over again to login but other sites use it....because they can. Problem is its not very obvious to perhaps the majority of users they are creating a billing agreement.

You can terminate these agreements any time in the paypal site. But you have to do it yourself as otherwise it'll just sit there indefinitely.

Yes, I think that is what I use to pay for Netflix.

It is not guaranteed. The company has a chance to respond with the paperwork proving that you in fact received the item you paid for. It's then up to you to prove that you did not.

I am not a lawyer, but this is what happened to me.

You can send the company a written cancellation letter before you file the chargeback, and get a confirmation from the post office (is that called a registered letter?) Then you can prove that you cancelled the contract.

If you respond again reiterating your position, and deny that the "proof" in question is valid (assuming it is), you will almost certainly win.

Not only that, but the business will get an additional chargeback fee before losing the chargeback.

I honestly can not understand how a credit card company call center can claim to legally decide a civil matter like this. I know in the US they regularly do this just as I know of a couple of counties that absolutely don't allow it.

I honestly wonder what legal theory my bank or financial service is using to justify transferring my money or incurring debt under my name to pay someone I explicitly tell them not to simply because a guy at a call center making a snap judgement believes there is a valid contract and that the other party has honored it.

The "legal theory" is that you signed up for the credit card company to be a trusted middle man and to ajudicate exactly these sorts of disputes. This is part of value they provide.

It turns out you can not put anything you want in a contract. You can't contract away fundamental rights, for example you can't contract to vote a certain way.

But perhaps rather than suggesting that everything in a contract is always valid, maybe you are referring to DIRECTV, Inc. v. Imburgia. And somehow that decision can be stretched to cover this case. Even so, it is clear that the call center is not acing as remotely as an arbitration court in any definition of the term because arbitration courts do have to meet some minimal legal set criterion.

So I have a counter theory: the legal theory they're using is they can do whatever they want because the consumer could never afford the legal fees to challenge them on it. And pooling resources by class action is explicitly prohibited by the above decision. So I contend no, it's not legal but it is conveniently un-enforceable now.

You can contract away basic rights. It’s called an arbitration agreement. Whatever is then written into a contract is adjudicated by whoever is defined as arbitrator. There are very limited appeal options.

The a guy at a call center can not act as arbitrator whether the contract says so or not (and I think we can be certain it does not)

For example:

https://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/mfa/Guidelines...

> suggesting that everything in a contract is always valid

I didn't suggest anything like that. Rather, things in contracts are valid by default.

This isn't even a matter of onerous arbitration clauses (for disputes between the business and the consumer) being burried in fine print that no one reads. (Those have been regulated in some jurisdictions, but are mostly legal.) For credit cards, the arbitration is between the consumer and a 3rd party to the consumer's contract (the merchant), and literally is part of the value provided. People would use credit cards less if the service was discontinued.

I wouldn't advise telling people to do chargebacks often. They're meant to be used when venues of negotiation with the company are exhausted and you still believe they're in the wrong. If your bank suspects you're being too liberal with them, they will cut you off, as they'll suspect you're the fraudster.

Do like 5 chargebacks a decade and you’re good.

I mean how often do you have to cancel gym memberships and newspapers?

The disparity between fraudsters and the average person with respect to chargebacks is probably pretty large. You'd need to be cancelling multiple subscriptions per month to start showing up on the fraud radar.

And If you are cancelling multiple subscriptions per month with regularity, then you may want to reflect and consider if you actually are committing fraud.

My trick to avoid the long retentions go around is to tell them I'm leaving their service area.

Why are you looking to cancel your phone plan?

Leaving the country.

They know they can't win me over and so they don't even try.

I did something similar when I moved to get rid of my wired phone service. I told AT&T I had signed a contract with Comcast and told Comcast I had signed a contract with AT&T.

I use "I'm moving back to my parents" always works.

I started doing this after I came back from living in Korea a couple of times. The only one who ever tried was, I think, Sprint or another carrier, who offered to put a hold on my account but they could only do that for some short number of months, so of course my next reply was "I'm not planning on coming back."

I've done this several times with Comcast, but it failed with Time Warner when I moved out of NYC. They demand to know why you are canceling and have some sort of way to extract money out of you for every scenario, including moving out of their service area. In that case, they transfer you to another phone system that helps you find a provider at your new address and, presumably, nets them a referral fee of some kind. Meanwhile, if you try any excuse to quit that they haven't accounted for, they tell you "yes sir" and redirect your call to that service as a fallback catch-all. Truly despicable.

Has anyone tried "none of your business" as an answer to why your are leaving?

Seriously. And if that doesn't work, try "I hate you"

My dad used to use "I'm unemployed and have no money" on telemarketers, with some success.

Though nowadays, in the era of pervasive financing and Wall Street investors that care more about revenue than cash flow, I wonder if that would even work. Maybe "I'm being investigated by the Feds and all of my financial relationships are considered suspect, and so would prefer to have as few of them as possible"?

> I'm unemployed and have no money

I've had people still try to sign me up when I've said this. I had just moved country, had no job, and was literally living off my credit card. I ended up getting stopped by some people on the street trying to sign me up for some charity, because I'm too nice to tell them to fuck off.

Even after I explained that I literally arrived in the country a week ago, and that I literally have no money, they were still trying to get me to sign up for a recurring donation. Sure, I understand that they get commission, so they want to make a sale. But not only is it extremely unethical to try and get unemployed people to sign up, it's also trying to extract blood from a stone.

Saying "I'm unemployed and have no money" will put you in the target market for certain products, like payday loans and diploma mills. Depending on the call center, you could find your contact info sold on to a new set of telemarketers. Win the battle, lose the war.

> My dad used to use "I'm unemployed and have no money" on telemarketers, with some success.

I've tried telling the truth, I've tried assertively stating I'm not interested, I've tried so many things...

...at this point, when I pick up a call, I wait for the other side to introduce themselves, and if they call with an unsolicited offer, I just hang up without saying anything. Am I a bad person?

Not at all. My current method is to block all numbers not in my contact list.. if they are important, they'll leave a voicemail. Works surprisingly well, actually.

Effectively the phone equivalent of grey listing for emails.

I was helping my grandmother cancel her twc cable package since she doesn't watch it and only watches a few shows on Netflix.

I told the agent that same thing, and he said "Is that really what she wants, or is that just what you want?"

I kept things polite, but he really had me boiling by the end of the call, which took way too much time.

Leaving out of the country is generally more effective than leaving the service area - the arrangements you're describing rarely cross international borders, certainly not within North America (EU might be different).

"I'm planning on committing assisted suicide." (Not actually). You're move Time Warner.

We have great offers on caskets in one of our in-house funeral homes - let me connect you with a representative.

"Go on, sign up anyway. Why would you care if you're dead?"

Comcast and SiriusXM are by far the worst I've ever come across. They demand explanations, try to cut you deals, claim they have to transfer you to their manager who attempts to up sale you. I seriously had to get one of my debit cards reissued in order to get charges to stop and to get my XM radio account closed out.

I just cancelled SiriusXM earlier this week. They asked why and I said I just don't listen to it enough. They offered a month of a different package free. I said no. And that was it.

If they ask me questions, I usually just reply "for personal reasons".

Seconded on this.

It's my favorite answer, because it normally creates enough awkwardness on the call to make the other party want it over as quickly as possible.

And getting them on your side is always step 1.

Bonus points if they ask "I hope it's nothing we did" and you respond with an extra long pause and "I think it's best for everyone involved if we get this cancelled as quickly as possible."

I like having a bit of fun with cancellations once I catch on that they're not gonna make it easy.

"Please cancel my service"

"We'd like to retain your business is there anything we can do?"

"Is my service cancelled yet?"

"Why are you cancelling your service?"

"My service is still working, can you cancel it? Is this the cancellation department? Who will be cancelling my service?"

Just pretend like I didn't hear anything they said or asked and keep asking variations of that in an increasingly childlike wondrous tone. Sometimes you can hear the person on the other end getting audibly frustrated until they give in and cancel it just to get you off the phone-and when they finally go "Your service will be cancelled on this date, is there anything else I Can help you with?"

"NOPE THANKS!" and hang up.

Never fails to make me giggle madly. Is it patronizing? Sure. Do I care? No not really-I've asked nicely that I want my service cancelled. That really ought to be the start and end of it. Meeting retention rates is their problem, not mine.

Same thing with upselling at retail establishments. No I'm not a rewards member. No thanks I don't want to sign up. Yep I'm sure. Oh I'm quite aware that I can save 10% over $2500 spent. Hey can I just buy this pair of headphones and gtfo?

"Meeting retention rates is their problem, not mine."

Do you also maliciously fill out surveys with less than "excellent" ratings even after you are told that constitutes failure according to corporate management?

I understand the attitude of refusing to play the game, but that doesn't justify making things worse for other victims.

> Do you also maliciously fill out surveys with less than "excellent" ratings

I've started doing this, although I wouldn't characterize it as malicious. I bought a car last fall and that started a ridiculous number of surveys coming my way. I contacted the dealership, the manufacturer, and the survey company asking for the surveys to stop. The dealer and manufacturer both responded saying they would take car of it. The survey company never responded.

The surveys keep coming so I fill them out randomly and return them. It isn't malicious because I'm genuinely dissatisfied with them because they can't stop the surveys.

It seems ironic to me that I've bought multiple cars from a dealership and I can't get them to update my email or postal address after well over a year. They apparently don't want to send me ads.

I know exactly what you are talking about. When my wife bought her last car, I stopped by the dealership after work to cosign all the papers and for some reason they entered my phone number into their database. They started calling me and each time I would tell them to call my wife because it's her car. It took probably 10 or 12 discussions with various people at the dealership to get our record updated. The general manager seemed to be as frustrated with their system as I was because he had to deal with me asking him over and over to fix the problem.

I fail to understand how repeatedly asking someone to cancel my service is being malicious, beyond depriving the company of the revenue they'd benefit had my membership continued.

It's not my job to go out of my way to help these folks meet their retention KPI. Categorically, full-stop and quite literally, that is not my responsibility. I'm a customer who used to pay money for a service, not a call-taker responsible for meeting certain metrics. I don't work for the cable company. I'm not their employee. I'm their customer.

If I don't want to be a member anymore, and I state as such, and repeatedly state as such when said company makes it as difficult as possible to cancel my membership-then I've satisfied my end of that particular transaction. I've stated my business request, I'm asking them in various manners to please honor that request. Where is the malice? If you want to point out that it's probably immature, then I'll probably agree with you. Comparing it to deliberately trying to tank a call-taker though by giving a deceitful and dishonest review I think is an incredible exercise in reaching.

So can you explain this for me? How are you drawing a parallel from me repeating my request to have my service cancelled with maliciously filling out customer response surveys in such a way that deliberately gives the call-taker a negative score?

Why are you cancelling your service today?

Because I have explosive diarrhea...

"Well, I don't mean to overshare, but if you must know, I've been convicted of aggravated manslaughter and am scheduled for booking tomorrow afternoon. I won't be needing cable TV service for ten to fifteen years."

*Aggravated manslaughter of a particularly persistent customer service rep

That was great!

This used to to be the trick to use with the 10 CDs for a penny offers to get out of buying the remaining required full price CDs. After you got the promo-priced CDs, you could send in a change of address form with an address where shipping costs made it unprofitable for them to send the remaining purchases. They'd send a letter back where they regretfully informed you that you membership was being canceled because they didn't support your new address. All you had to do was figure out some address in rural Africa or Asia. Everyone in my freshman dorm used that trick to fill out their music collections.

Great tip!! (which I knew it 25 years ago, but still...)

Thank god for that.

I made the mistake of joining a Goodlife gym in Canada many moons ago...

The place was disgusting. Always crowded. Mould growing in the bathrooms. Stunk very badly, etc...

So I stopped going regularly... and one day I was in the area I decided to stop in and cancel my membership.

"Oh sorry, you'll need to make an appointment with management in order to cancel."

"OK, is a manager in right now?"

"Yes, the manager is in but I was told not to disturb her right now."

"OK, well can you tell her a customer is waiting paitiently to cancel his account?"

"No, sorry, I am not allowed to disturb her. You're going to need to make an appointment and come back."

So I did that...

And about 3 weeks later I went in at the agreed upon time to cancel my subscription and I was just sitting... waiting... for over 1 hour...

Right beside a poor old lady that was trying to cancel her subscription as well!!!

She was overly polite and was dealing with this overagressive meathead trying to keep her locked into the service...

"I hate coming here... I never come... I never should have signed up... I just want to cancel..."

"But do you have any friends that might want to take on your subscription? It's at a discounted rate and you might be able to help them out by transferring it over to them."

"No, I do know know anyone who wants to come here."

"Ok, let me go talk to my manager about this."

And he left for like 20 minutes and came back and gave her the gears again.

When my turn came... I just said "I'm moving to england and I don't know a single person here who might want to absorb my contract".

It was a total lie... but it was the only answer that would get me out of there in under 10 minutes.

Companies abusing politeness really are terrible to society.

The abuse of politeness appears to be the cornerstone of our society.

My name is MEGACORP. I am a member of the polite society that contains us both. A polite person follows the rules with a smile. The rules say that I get to eat you.

Politeness is not a problem. You can be very polite and still insist on doing what you want. You just need to realize the person who's selling you crap is not your friend and you don't owe them anything, and politely refuse to take it. Saying "no, I do not want this, thank you" is not impolite.

> When my turn came... I just said "I'm moving to england and I don't know a single person here who might want to absorb my contract".

I actually came here to say the same thing. I realized “I’m moving” was the best way to get results in these situations when I was actually moving out of the country for a bit. It’s like a magical incantation that immediately gets them to stop trying to upsell or retain you, no questions asked.

Recent renewal contract for LA Fitness has this cover. If you moving away you have to provide some sort of a proof, like new lease contract, job letter etc so that they still will try to find the gym within 15 miles and move you over. I was told in LA Fitness you cannot cancel without any sort of proof if you want to use "moving away" as a reason.

>If you moving away you have to provide some sort of a proof, like new lease contract, job letter etc so that they still will try to find the gym within 15 miles and move you over.

Just tell them you're moving to another continent then... or Antarctica!

Strange you would have to suggest that. To me, it shows how some American people can't even imagine that living in another country (or even lying about it) would be taken seriously.

Or, like, don't sign a long term contract at all. It's pretty easy to find an affordable monthly gym which has all the basics pretty much everywhere.

images.google.com contains zillions of nice form letter rental contracts. Ditto job offer letters.

Please keep in mind the difference between counterfeit vs fraudulent. Making your own currency is inherently illegal; making your own lease contract or job offer is not. Its very easy for the people/orgs named on a contract to sue for fraud if a counterfeit contract is attempted to be used, very difficult for an unrelated 3rd party. If you use google to make sure your counterparty or property do not exist, its very difficult for the contract counterparty to sue you, given they don't exist and there are no financial damages. Note that bank collateral or financial industry KYC verification or accounting revenue / SOX or insurance fraud is obviously not "unrelated". If you own a small company, which is cheap and you probably should, you can easily issue yourself a job offer in any location; wanna winter over in Antarctica?

They almost intentionally are not trying very hard; they could trivially demand state ID card / drivers license from the new address. Obviously they just want a speed bump as a dark pattern of customer retention.

I've actually started mastering this technique and using it where it makes sense. When a salesperson tries to get you - always be a buyer but a buyer of something they aren't selling. I think it's like the Benjamin Franklin technique where you build up immediate rapport and control by getting the other person to do something for you. So by asking for something it's like saying "parlay" in Pirates of the Caribbean. It stops them from their normal process.

Example: on the Vegas strip they always have people selling strip clubs and pestering you. I'll say "can't do that tonight but do you have any (insert legit magician) tickets?"

They'll go oh man sorry don't have those tonight. Was going to get some, oh shoot. Have a nice night and take care!!!!

It's like the sale that got away. You're still cool to them so they back off.

I do this with the CD artists - don't have a CD player, you streaming? Nah man.

So always be a buyer of whatever they don't have to sell haha.

Good on you!

Why waste any of your precious time with some scheming/sleezy salesman of that level?

The best thing to do is issue a chargeback. You tell the credit card company that you 1) tried to cancel, and they wouldn't do it; and 2) you did not get any service from them since you tried to cancel.

They have to pay you back AND THEY GET CHARGED an additional $20-$30 that your credit card company takes from them as punishment.

Please don't abuse chargebacks unless the merchant deserves it, though.

Maybe in Canada but in USA you have companies like "ABC Financing" (real name) that process majority of membership for most of the gyms I ever visited, including LA Fitness, Golds Gym, Balleys Total Fitness.

The way it works (cause I tried) is that you call (or in bank to dispute membership) and guess what? they made you wait on the line/ in the branch until they contact ABC customer support that knows exactly what membership you have when you have it etc. They were even able to fax over my photo (!!) to the banker to prove it wasn't a fraud. I was actually quite happy because I need that kind of chargeback service for my companies when anyone can call (and does) and usually says "my child ordered this". Unfortunately banks will only work this way with merchants pushing hundreds of millions of dollars in memberships, as I was told by a friend of mine who works for Bank of America.

I don't know in Canada, but in USA most membership programs are continue to be a cancer on our society (despite the fact its easier to dispute transaction than it was years ago) and most banks will help in this bad behavior because they don't want too many disputes for credit card companies they underwrite and represent.

Will banks accept a faxed photograph to rebut a claim that the membership was cancelled?

>The best thing to do is issue a chargeback.

They had me sign over my direct withdrawal banking details the day I signed up. I regret doing that.

Fucking assholes. I guess that's why we need these stupid laws.

Don't let the libertarians hear you say that

Charging people who do not need the service and not letting them cancel looks like fraud, certainly not a voluntary transaction of two willing individuals. I do not see any problem from the point of libertarian for the state to protect the right of a person who does not consent to a business relationship anymore to withdraw from it - just as it is true for any other relationship. Just as libertarians would not object to the laws allowing people to leave a job or divorce, they should not object - from purely libertarian grounds - to laws that allow people to dissolve business relationship without undue burden and involuntary money transactions.

Now, if the gym in question would fully inform the person that they have nearly impossible cancellation procedure and obtained informed prior consent, that would be different. But that never happens.

Made sense until the last paragraph and everything turned upside down.

"Fully inform" is that not simply what we in real life call "the small print"?

Taking advantage of people is never ok in my book. If you think you're allowed just because you are a little smarter than us I would question your moral and welcome any basic consumer protection.

> "Fully inform" is that not simply what we in real life call "the small print"?

It depends. We can easily get into the sophistry of "what is understanding", "what's the nature of knowledge" and "how many gains of sand makes it a heap". But usually the most common, though definitely imperfect, test would be whether a random reasonable commoner would be able to understand it. I.e., if somebody is told "we have a contract for 12 months, for X dollars per month, if you want out earlier, you'd have to pay fee of Y dollars" and you say "yes, I agree" - that is voluntary transaction. If you are told "the price is X per month, don't worry about cancelling, it's easy" and then you have to jump through hoops and pay Y dollars because it was printed in unreadable font somewhere in the 2-inch pile of documents you've been given to sign - it's not voluntary, because average reasonable person wouldn't realize it.

> Taking advantage of people is never ok in my book.

Neither it is in mine. There is, however, a wide area of situations where some consider it to be "taking advantage", while others, sometimes including the individuals supposedly being taken advantage of, consider it a free choice. I am against paternalistic approach which says some people can define for other people what's best for them and must protect them from voluntary transactions because it looks to the paternalists like "taking advantage". On the other hand, if it looks for everybody, including the participants, as "taking advantage", and involves hiding substantial information that alters the meaning of the deal, then it's not voluntary. I know it's a more complicated position than fits on a bumper sticker, but life is complicated, so there's no reason not to have complicated positions.

To put it maybe too bluntly: but I do not see the difference between "randomly reasonable commoner" and a "paternalistic approach".

And more importantly I think you put in too much trust in the good will of people. To me it is important to factor in the "human nature" which not always conform to higher ideals. And that does put me firmly in the paternalistic camp.

Not to say I want to remove all liberty. But with the gym examples they clearly show they need to be regulated. They've shown no intent to listen to reasonable random commoners.

I live a place with better consumer protection. I have never in my life had to do a charge back. And have the same bank account. Reasonable consumer protection makes life better - not worse. With the added benefit of making the market more fair for the reasonable players and not cater for the buccaneers.

I'm a libertarian and I don't know what to say. There will be shitty companies as well I guess, but when they lose customers due to such practices, they will learn? If they don't learn they will go out of business.

You're stuck with a bad govt law, no efficient weeding out process exists.

“If they don’t learn they will go out of business” sounds nice, but in reality, we can all point to hundreds and hundreds of different companies that show that that simply does not happen. Otherwise, the US would have the best and friendliest companies in the world, since that’s where capitalism runs the most rampant, and where you can really see that “the market will sort itself out” philosophy in action.

That only works if they let you cancel. Otherwise they can't lose customers.

The thing about the invisible hand is that it works really well if you buy a chocolate bar that you don't like. The next day, you won't buy that same chocolate bar. However, when a handsome man in a suit offers my cousin a loan for a house that she can't afford and puts her in severe financial trouble, she might very well not use that bank again the next time she's looking for a loan (in maybe 30 years), but that doesn't help much.

The free market self regulates well in some areas. Others need some assistance.

The fact that banks are allowed to give loans with money they don't have to people who can't repay them is mostly because of that "assistance".

Oof, that seems like a bad thing to do in America. In the EU thanks to SEPA regulations banks allow you do withdraw direct withdrawal consent at any time luckily.

I could have blocked my bank from allowing them to debit me... but I would be in breach of contract at that point and they would ding my credit score.

Can you not cancel? In the UK its a matter of logging into the bank and pressing "cancel" on the list of direct debits.

Not only that but any mistaken withdrawal is refunded.

This is actually not always reliable, many larger institutions are able to re-enable the DD and continue charging you. I had this with my council tax after I moved out and cancelled it from my end. There are many complaints about the same behaviour from phone companies, insurance companies, and others.

Fitness First did this to me, probably a genuine error their side that they didn't cancel my account properly but I'd cancelled the DD with my bank and it re-appeared. I contacted the bank about it and they offered to put a lock on my account so I have to be contacted about any future Direct Debits which seems like it should be the default.

>Can you not cancel?

If I cancelled without formally ending our contract (with their demanded appointment in order to cancel)... they would have dinged my credit score with a complaint of non-payment for an agreed upon contract.

I wish I was joking.

I got new accounts once because of that. Not fun.

There are companies that provide discounts if you provide direct debit information. Something tells me this is related.

My credit union has a charge dispute process that is pretty straight forward and has worked well for me over the years. Consider moving your services to another bank/credit union if they don't provide services like that.

The problem was though that if I just stopped paying them without adhering to the contract which stated I must meet with them before cancelling... they would have dinged my credit report for non payment.

It's a real racket they have going!

I had the same experience. I was straight up lied to by the salesmen. I talked about it to my bank, they were aware of the problem as it happens to a lot of people. BMO offered to open a new bank account, and move all my funds to it and close my account that goodlife tricked me into using.

I was told that I could cancel any time after a free trial. It turns out I was lied to. I went to see the salesman again as it was on my way. Telling him that I switched my accounts made shut up and look defeated. Felt so good.

>I had the same experience. I was straight up lied to by the salesmen.

My appointment was for 2pm... when the rep showed up at 3pm... his first response was literally "oh hey... you're actually 30 minutes late for our 2:30pm appointment so I'm going to have to cancel.."

I told him I had been waiting there since 2pm (and he had seen me waiting there since 2pm) and then he began to take my fraudulent cancellation data of my moving to another country.

You seem like a patient person. That first visit should have ended with the cancellation or an unambiguous announcement of your intention to issue chargebacks for any future charges by said gym as far as I'm concerned.

There's no way I'd be relying on a manager's schedule to cancel their services.

I'm not that patient...

That first visit ended with my berating the staffer for being useless and working for a shitty company.

I was not proud of that moment, but what I said was not untrue.

They really had me in their grips... if I just stopped paying without formally ending the contract with the agreed upon "cancellation appointment" (that I apparently agreed to in the original contract) then they would have dinged my credit score for not paying my bills on time essentially.

Yeah, this is the sleaziest tricks by gyms, especially in Canada/US

No thanks, no bank details. I'll pay by cash, every month. I don't care if I'm paying "double" because that "half price" is accounting for crap like this.

>I don't care if I'm paying "double" because that "half price" is accounting for crap like this.

That's exactly how they got me iirc.

I could have paid a few dollars more per month to be pay as you go... but I was "gonna do this" and I was going to "stick to my gym habits" and keep at this for years so why not sign my life away???

Lesson learned.

I now happily badmouth Goodlife Fitness whenever I get a chance like this.

Gyms are a whole other level of insanity for unwanted charges. Planet Fitness's entire business model is essentially counting on people to forget they entered their checking account number, and missing the bill. They wont even allow you to sign up with a credit card.

> They wont even allow you to sign up with a credit card.

This has not been true for years now. I have a Planet Fitness account happily billed to my credit card right now. I actually go 2 times a week, though, and the one time that I did have to cancel it, the process was painless and quick.

I'd probably call the police. That's what they would presumably do if a customer was repeatedly trying to sneak in without an account, so it doesn't feel like overkill to me.

The New York Times doesn't allow you to cancel your subscription online.

Interesting. I had subscribed via Amazon for Kindle and did it automatically. I wonder if the same thing would be true if you bought your subscription through the app.

Apple iTunes based subscriptions also have a very easy way to unsubscribe, probably to the chagrin to companies which use them.

I wouldn't call "having to open a separate, unrelated app, visiting its homepage, entering your Account area, finding the Subscriptions list" easy.

Easy would be:

    - Open app with subscription 
    - Go to settings  
    - Find subscriptions

It’s far easier than having to call anyone

Perhaps not easy, but it is (a) online, (b) consistent from one app to the next, and (c) pretty much guaranteed to work correctly and work immediately.

Considering the sort of problems people are discussing in the wider thread, this is pretty idealistic.

Same with Wall Steet Journal if you don’t live in CA. Even for CA residents, the cancellation option is buried in the interface.

Two years ago I lived in CA, tried to cancel, ended up submitting a ticket and was told I have to call for "security purposes".

If I didn't have anything better to do I would have loved to submit about 40 tickets a day asking to close my account until they finally did and banned me.

As with someone else's report about the LA Times: they say they don't, but you don't have to care what they say.

I did it this way. I went to their live help chat. The moment I said "cancel", I was redirected to another representative, who was clearly trained in customer retention. I held my ground (which is so much easier for me in chat than on a phone call!) and cancelled.

They’ll cancel it over email if you’re insistent enough, or at least they did for me.

Yes they do, just chat them. Keep insisting. Worked for me.

Worked for me too over chat.

I found this out after I signed up, and realized the offer was time-limited (illegal business practice).

But I managed to cancel through online chat..

It surprised me that a supposedly reputable news outlet is so quick to sell out its credibility. (guess I'll stick with the guardian)

I had this issue with a water delivery service when I lived on the East Coast US. In the end I sent an email saying that I was moving back to Italy, stopping any further charges from them on my CC, blocking them by email, and they could do whatever the hell they wanted with my account.

That worked.

I am surprised. I have a current subscription and my online account allows me to cancel. I also paid via PayPal so canceling the recurring payments would also cancel the subscription. Edit: looked it up and saw the link to cancel in Account->Subscription - https://myaccount.nytimes.com/seg/cancel .

This is exactly why I changed my payment method with them to a virtual credit card. When I want to stop my sub I'll just block the VCC via my online banking. There is no way I'm spending time and money calling internationally to unsubscribe.

Not only do they not allow you to cancel online, they autorenew your annual subscription to the tune of HUNDREDS of dollars. This happened to me and I'm certain I didn't explicitly opt-in to autorenewal, as I would never consciously opt-in to autorenewal of such a costly service. The told me the following: "by choosing to pay by credit card, you opted into autorenewal." !!??

I moved out out of the country, they autorenewed, I called them, and they refused to cancel the rest of my year's subscription! They insisted upon continuing to send papers to my old address for an entire year.

Completely scammy, I will never do business with them again.

you should issue a chargeback.

There have been a few times where I didn't sign up for a service because I anticipated cancelling would be a pain. The fact that trials often autorenew makes me reluctant to even do a trial. I wonder how much business is lost this way vs. how much is gained from making cancelling hard.

Cable TV is a classic example. If you ask how much it'll cost after the promotion ends, they'll go on repeat, "It'll be $20 for the first three months".

There's this company that offers internet service on flights also claims to offer secure hotspots, (it's a gimmick) around cities all over the US they're based in Los Angeles: Boingo Wireless. The only way to cancel the service is to call in, that's their whole scheme. When you call in they treat that as if you were doing something extremely complicated and that takes time. One of the customer service representative told me that he would have to contact the engineering department to cancel my account...Like that would be necessary. I was getting impatient, on the phone for about 40 minutes. This new law will be the end of them.

I canceled my LA Times subscription online last week. The website says you have to call to cancel. I thought I'd just give it a try online, fully expecting to fail, but to my surprise it all went through easily. They asked for the reason, and when I gave it (excessive ads+tracking) they canceled.

Simply telling the merchant I will do a chargeback has worked every time for me (provided it's a credit card charge).

Some merchants have it in their contract (for subscriptions) that any chargebacks will go to a collection agency, which dings your credit.

Do you have a link for this? I’d like to read more.

http://blog.credit.com/2015/06/think-you-won-your-credit-car...

It's probably disputable as in violation of their merchant agreement, but yeah most people will just suffer under the consequences instead of pushing back.

“However that doesn’t stop them from trying to collect payment directly from consumers. A review of some merchant agreements found online were silent on the issue of whether they can subsequently try to collect from consumers. And when we asked the major card companies whether their merchant agreements restrict this practice, only American Express responded, saying in an email that, “American Express has an established charge dispute process in place that takes into account both the Card Member and the merchant perspectives. Our policies do not prohibit a merchant from seeking to collect payment from a Card Member for a transaction that is charged back to a merchant.”

http://blog.credit.com/2015/06/think-you-won-your-credit-car...

Interesting. I guess it doesn't violate the merchant agreement...

...which makes sense in that a valid debt can't be invalidated by a chargeback. But it doesn't turn an invalid debt into a valid one either.

And if you have a contract that you cancel in accordance with the contract (e.g. making the required request to the required phone number then limiting your call to a reasonable duration after doing so), charging back charges for periods after your payment obligation ends shouldn't give them a valid basis to send you to collections, contract or no contract.

They would be unable to prove a valid debt in that case, so a dispute with the debt collector and/or credit bureaus would get it off your credit.

Yes, if he merchant is not operating in good faith, it’s easy to outmaneuver their collections efforts provided you’ve kept good documentation.

If they are operating in good faith, and your chargeback is not legitimate, expect a blemish on your credit until you settle the debt (if sent to collections).

Yup. And a smaller blemish even once paid, for something like 7 to 10 years after that. (That's the retention period for collections information on credit reports.)

That works until the merchant you’re dealing with is a monopoly or duopoly and you need them more than they need you.

I did this with Skype and now I can't refill credit from that card anymore.

Last week I spent 1 hour and 20 minutes waiting for a Zipcar rep to answer my call. Creating my account was as simple as taking a photo of my license within the app and getting into a car. Companies that make signing up easy and cancellation difficult are the worst.

OK now here's an excellent use for Google Duplex. Using a robot to fool a person: annoying. Using a robot to fool someone annoying: fine!

Yes! This what excited me when 8 first heard about it and I was perplexed why people focused on reservations. That's just the door, and companies on the other end are interested in lowering the barrier for customers.

I'm curious what this does for in person issues, and if gyms will take a hit in CA.

Only applies if you sign up online, not in-person.

Google has since changed this. Google Duplex will not "fool" humans any more. They announce that they're the "Google Assistant" calling on behalf of a customer.

I think unfortunately what will happen is that people will just hang up on the google assistant because it's not a real human.

It'll be kind of like what happened to the "glassholes". Maybe not as mean though.

Refusing customers and irritating Google probably isn’t in their best interest.

Why? If I were a business that took phone orders, why would I care what's on the other end?

As long as it's reliable and intelligent enough, I don't think people will mind. I know I wouldn't.

Because you want to make it difficult for customers to cancel.

> Because you want to make it difficult for customers to cancel.

Explain to me, in detail, how you arrived to this conclusion from my previous statement. If anything, a business accepting robocalls from customers would make canceling easier.

I await your explanation, s73v3r_.

Which is why you, as a business, would not accept those robocalls.

If I was a scummy business, sure but you're omitting the other side of the coin: making it easier for customers to do reservations. I still think that businesses would welcome robocall reservations (if they're reliable and efficient) just as they have the internet.

I think it's a legal requirement, regarding automated calling.

I don't think it would be a problem if a business explicitly indicated that robocalls on behalf of customers are acceptable. It's convenient for both businesses who don't want to invest in online booking systems, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle involved in making calls. Win win.

That's a good question. But we have to remember what happened with Google Glass.

Glassholes were inconsiderate google glass users that refused to take google glass off when interacting with people. Duplex will end up like Google Glass for a similar reason -- people will force other people to interact with robots.

I think if I'm a human on the phone more than a few minutes a day, I might take exception to that. Especially if more than a few calls come in that way and there are enough bugs in the system to make it annoying.

One particular countermeasure will be to require a credit card number (or some other personal information) for cancellation... which I'm not sure Google Duplex would be willing to hand out over the phone.

While I like the spirit of this law (rare for me with CA laws), I expect it to be ruled unconstitutional as attempting to regulate interstate commerce, whose so jurisdiction is under US Congress.

Not sure it would hold up in the Supreme Court. Provided the law is worded strictly to apply to CA citizens / only when corporations are serving CA citizens there is little to make an interstate regulation argument on. And there is also international precedence (EU GDPR) which could guide court opinion.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking but that's my $0.02.

It may well even be limited to businesses that have a presence in California; there are tons of precedents for crafting this kind of law to survive an interstate commerce challenge, even when the Internet is involved.

GDPR isn't a relevant precedent as there isn't a precedent -- GDPR hasn't been challenged in court, not the least, a US court.

GDPR also has no relevance for US interstate commerce.

South Dakota vs. Wayfair overturned the Quill decision, and, the Quill decision would have been the controlling precedent in any constitutional challenge, based on physical nexus. However, that all changed with Wayfair.

One of the key arguments in the overturn of Quill were that Quill created, rather than resolved market distortions. Essentially, Quill (according to the ruling in SD v Wayfair,) created a tax shelter for businesses that limit their physical presence in a state. The problem with Quill is that it disadvantaged economically identical actors for arbitrary reasons -- a small shop with a few items in a warehouse in a state would have to pay taxes on everything they sold in the state, while a large business (such as Wayfair) with no physical presence in the state would be advantaged by not having to charge a tax on the exact same items. Helping customers evade a lawful tax unfairly shifts an increased share of the taxes to those consumers who buy from competitors with a physical presence in the State.

"Quill’s physical presence rule has limited States’ ability to seek long-term prosperity and has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field."

So now, we look at the California law requiring online cancellations. It would be an extremely difficult argument to cite SD vs. Wayfair since the online cancellation requirement isn't creating a disadvantage on market participants or the states themselves. Lost economic development due to the imbalance created by Quill was cited repeatedly as a flaw in Quill. An online cancellation requirement is going to be very difficult to prove as having a deleterious effect on economic activity/growth/development as was clearly demonstrated in the majority opinion for Wayfair. Wayfair was essentially about tax shelters. The California law doesn't correct any particular economic harm.

However, that being said, any constitutional challenge to the California Law would likely fall short because the Supreme Court interpretation of the Commerce Clause essentially says that laws ought not present an "undue burden" on interstate trade. Allowing for online cancellation, would be, to say the least, a stretch to argue that it places an undue burden on doing business with people within the state. That's why, if this law were to go to court, it would be upheld since someone like the New York Times would have a hard time proving an "undue burden." Ironically (to me,) being required to collect sales tax in all 50 states as well as the thousands of individual jurisdictions (including multiple jurisdictions even within cities, thanks to economic reinvestment zones) -- that to me, seems like a massively undue burden. However, as the court rules in Wayfair, that burden is less important than the economic discrimination that was happening (i.e. a local online shop vs. an out of state online shop being burdened unequally despite selling the exact same product.)

As an aside, I might argue that a business without a physical presence in the state isn't availing themselves to the infrastructure or public services of that state, however they are being asked to pay for those infrastructure and services. Shipping companies actually do the deliveries and they, of course, are paying the taxes for their locality. But that's another debate. Incidentally, justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer joined Roberts's Wayfair dissent, in which he stated that Congress ought to be making the laws and not the courts. I never thought I'd agree with Kagan and Sotomayor on anything, but it is strange times in which we live.

In anyone's interested, Ginsburg, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Kennedy were in the majority on the Wayfair case while Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts and Kagan were in the dissent. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/south-dakota-v-wa...

It was a 5-4 but not how you would have expected!

Anyway, to the point, Quill would have made a challenge to the California law rather easy, but now, the California law will likely pass a Constitutional challenge based on the "undue burden" test established by the courts.

This is a very detailed response! I appreciate your attention detail, but I did want to address initial comment reading my comment as proposing GDPR as legal precedence.

I never intended to forward the notion that the GDPR would serve as precedence. Indeed in a judicial context "precedence" has a very specific meaning and a piece of legislature from an international body of government would not be considered legal precedence in a U.S. court. I chose the phrasing "guide court opinion" carefully to specifically avoid confusion with the legal meaning of the term.

I agree with your analysis of SD v. Wayfair in that this is not likely a piece of legislation that would make it to the Supreme Court on interstate commerce grounds (at least in a post-Quill world). But if it did I would speculate the argument would center around the need for online firms to alter their behavior in other States as a result of the California law. To which I made the leap to suggest that the GDPR, as a current event, and it's affect on altering firms behavior even outside of the EU would be something that would likely be referenced in a Court opinion. Although, if you wanted to find an example limited to the US, you could also refer to the current status of EPA car emission regulations to demonstrate a similar single state regulation altering firm behavior across state lines without running afoul of interstate commerce.

But at the end of the day you and I are in agreement, this would not have much of an interstate commerce leg to stand on.

P.S. For those interested in the South Dakota vs. Wayfair opinion here is a link:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf

I found it interesting like /u/briandear and it is especially relevant for the tech sector.

Generally, laws made by the legislature are well thought out. It's that nearly-immutable laws passed through initiative that screw up California law.

Specifically, the legislative analysts working for the legislature who draft and edit proposed laws are generally very good. The wisdom of what is trying to be accomplished may be questionable, but the text of the law usually is defensible and accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Recurring payments are implemented in the worst way possible. You cannot see a list of your subscriptions online, cannot see how much you have spent, cannot stop or cancel them. And even if you don't use some service anymore, they still can charge you. That is because systems like Visa earn money only when you spend and have no motivation to make cancelling easier.

That's why you need a virtual credit card solution.

Why not just use Privacy [1] when you sign up? It allows you to generate virtual cards on a per-merchant basis anytime you want. You can simply shutoff the card(s) when you want to cancel. No phone calls, emails, or faking deafness required. I’ve been a big fan of it ever since I discovered them.

[1] https://privacy.com

The EU's new data privacy law (GDPR) allows you to withdraw consent, and "it must be as easy to withdraw consent as to give it". A perfectly clear and powerful way to describe what is wanted.

"It must be as easy to cancel a subscription as to subscribe" would a similar, effective way to do it here.

There are some built in problems when it comes to this sort of regulator-esque legislation.

If a company doesn't want to "do X," but is being forced to, the specific, legalistically deconstructed definition of 'X' gets very important. On the path between the kind of grand moral statements politicians trade in to the way corporate lawyers use language... a lot gets lost

A common 'X' is "inform customers of something": pharmaceutical side effects, the real interest rate on a loan, etc. This often leads to a cat and mouse game, where companies "inform" customers by way of 10,000 word small print documents they know no one reads. Then the regulator tries to stop it, saying this information must be part of all advertising. Then we get verbal small print. Etc.

This is why regulators exist, to play this cat and mouse game.

GDPR, cookie laws, and a lot of the laws which effectively govern business have these issues. Our legislative/political system just doesn't deal with this well. On one hand we have politics, that hates detail. On the other hand, a legal bureaucracy that hates principle. It also doesn't care for economics and isn't too worried about creating environments devoid of real competition, which is an unwanted side effect of getting "regulatory."

In any case, the real underlying problem here, IMO, is that 3rd parties should not have this kind of control in their hands in the first place.

HNers will probably reach for blockchains and smart contracts, but this could be build into credit cards or any payment method. It doesn't really matter.

Just put the ability to turn payments on/off in customer's hands. Send the service a notice. Done. We've built up all these "convenient" ways for customers to authorize repeat payment, without building in an off button. Now they're regulating the use of them instead They should have an off button. That's it.

Alternatively, don’t force the company to accept/deny specific forms of communication; simply make it clear that any communication is sufficient to cancel a contract.

There’s no point for a company to build a convoluted website if any customer knows they can send an email to info@example.com or a direct message or a text "I cancel my contract with you, my account number is 1234." and the only claim the company could make to counter that is that it didn’t receive the e-mail/message. Not that it’s internal processes didn’t allow for the message to be received, but that its infrastructure never actually received it (in which case the user would have received an email bounce message). To be nice, request the company to acknowledge receipt of the notification and, if not received, repeat on multiple channels (including certified snail mail).

Oh, and make it illegal to hide surprising bits in terms and conditions due to the information asymmetry typically accompanying those :)

This is probably the type of suggection a regulatory "hawk" would make. Essentially, make your next cat-and-mouse move big. "Lets see you get around that one, industry.!"

They see how easy/optimized subscriptions are, and how hard/optimized cancellations are. They see the regulatory cat-and-mouse game. Conclude that "industry" is acting in bad faith, and suggest an FU rule like that.

Industry will respond (correctly) that this kind of a proposal puts a big burden on them, and makes managing subscriptions very hard and expensive.

I think it's a bad idea for the same reason you can't stop hyperinflation by yelling at retailers to stop their "greedy price gouging." Swimming directly into a persistant economic incentives current is hard. "Complying" becomes implementing the minimum standard which is still legal.

A better approach (IMO, I am not a policy maker) would be to (1) recognize the major economic incentives (2) avoid leaving low level decision making (implementation) in the hands of those whose economic incentives are opposed to your goals. (3) if you absolutely must force companies to act against their own interest, be extremely prescriptive. Leave nothing open ended and do as little of this as possible.

In this case, I don't think it's that hard. Regulate payment providers, particularly CCs. They already have a regulator, so no structural changes (or even legislation, possibly) is necessary.

(1) Make subscriptions an explicit type of thing. (2) Enforce a minimum amount of information that the payment provider must receive, in order to honour the subscription. (3) display this information to customers. Monthly paper statements are fine. (4) Enforce a standard whereby consumers can cancel recurring payments by contacting the payment provider.

A credit card service, bank, bitcoin wallet or whatever has no incentive to make cancelations clunky. Simply putting the onus on them is probably sufficient regulation. The better ones will probably give you a nice app/web view with extra user friendly features the regulator never even thought of. For example, they might alert you when "introductory price" periods end or keep track of "minimum durations" to let you know when your contract expires.

A have a similar view on cookie laws & parts of GDPR. Instead of leaving everything up to websites (who have an incentive to make you give up all your rights), regulate the data browsers & ISPs share with a website. They're not as vested in minimizing user rights.

Yes, they should play more cat-and-mouse at the government, before releasing anything to the public.

I'm not sure there is a requirement to cancel subscriptions online as the article suggests. From the bill itself (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...):

> (b) A business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer shall provide a toll-free telephone number, electronic mail address, a postal address if the seller directly bills the consumer, or it shall provide another cost-effective, timely, and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation that shall be described in the acknowledgment specified in paragraph (3) of subdivision (a).

I'm not a lawyer of course.

IANAL, but just after that:

    17602...
    (c) In addition to the requirements of subdivision (b), 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.

though it seems to only apply if the agreement was made online.

I can't begin to describe the number of companies that set me up for auto-renewal without any form of billing or invoice.

I run a software business myself here in CA, and allowing users to manage their subscription easily was one of my first priorities. Nothing frustrates me more than companies that make this process difficult. If a user doesn't like your service and wants to cancel, they deserve an easy in-app/in-web experience to do it.

Cancelling by phone sound bad? Planet Fitness will only let you cancel in person or by certified mail. I moved to California recently, and I still had a Planet Fitness subscription (it was the closest gym to me and it was open 24/7, I won't be doing it again) and now I'm curious if I can use this against them.

They'll likely find some loophole around not calling it a subscription. "You're timesharing with our gyms"

They already do. It's not a subscription, it's a membership.

LA Fitness is another that lets you sign up online, and cancel only via certified mail.

At least with LA Fitness, I said I wanted to cancel and the guy at the desk printed out the letter for me. It was pretty low hassle. There are other gyms that make it a more insane process.

Well lucky for us, the law doesn’t call it a subscription either.

Did you sign up online? The article says that they have to offer a way for you to cancel online if you originally signed up online.

I did, yes. I both signed up for a plan and entered my payment information online.

Tivo, based in California, is clearly in violation.

https://www.tivo.com/contact-us

"Please note: At this time, it is not possible to use chat to cancel" ... and same for email, leaving phone as the only option.

Very good! Businesses always say they focus on the customer but part of that is also to allow the customer to get rid of them. I still remember the impossibility of cancelling AOL. I had to do chargebacks on my amex for a few months until they got the message.

We europeans better block every access from California due to this overreaching undemocratic GDPR style law. /s

European law is years beyond this. Consumer laws in some EU countries stipulate that a person can cancel a subscription simply by vocalizing this intention out their front door between the hours of 9am-3pm. "Heyy, I'm cancelling."

Hah, nice one.

Where i live (The Netherlands, Europe) you are allowed by law to cancel subscriptions in the same way you signed up. That seems fair... so if you sign up via internet then you can cancel via internet. No more cancel-bullying.

Ring (the video doorbell) is exactly like this and I haven't gotten rid of my subscription because I keep forgetting and their hours are like 9 to 5pm. Hopefully this changes so that I can get rid of that crap.

I'm sorry, maybe it's my IoT-get-off-my-network/lawn hackles being raised here, but why does your doorbell need a subscription in the first place?

Cloud based DVR functions, the doorbell can record whenever there is a ring or on motion. The subscription isn't mandatory.

Basically because of NAT. Because the devices on your network can't all have public IP addressed, you have to have them all connect to a central public server. Public servers cost money->ring costs money.

Of course the reason things are architected this way is so that more people can make money...

Can this be solved by using IPv6 and addressing everything publicly?

Won't be fun if there is a vulnerability.

Probably not:

1. NAT provides a basic level of security for your network. The same could be achieved with a firewall, but it isnt the norm.

2. Even without nat, there would still have to be _some_ computer that does the processing on the raw data from the IoT device. There is no reason that couldnt be your PC or Phone, but the precedent has been set that these tasks are performed on a managed device in the "cloud".

3. The companies involved will make less money.

A better solution would be to have an IoT gateway device publicly accessible that proxies access to the individual IoT devices. This would create a better security story. If this device were standards based, then each IoT vendor could integrate with it, and router vendors could add the capability to their devices. Of course there is no financial incentive for things to work this way.

I guess I only bring up NAT because it is yet another example of the "server" lie. There is no such thing as a computer that is a "server". Programs act as servers. Computers might be "server-class", but all that means is that they are high quality. Driving a wedge between "servers" and normal PCs just pushes more control out of individual's hands.

1. It would be the norm with an IPv6 gateway. It's not like it takes anything special to replace NAT with a firewall: allow outbound, allow established/related inbound, and replace port forwarding in the UX with allow rules for (host, port).

2. No argument, does seem odd that it wouldn't be the app though. Figure a door bell wouldn't be all that intensive.

3. Yeah, recurring revenue is pretty much the gold standard.

A device that stands between your device and the public internet, provides security and access control, and is standards based... so a perimeter firewall? But with an API to allow internal devices to punch their own holes. Ehh don't get me wrong I like the spirit, but that would immediately get used by malware.

If you can convince your monopoly ISP to implement IPv6, among other hurdles.

And interestingly "9 to 5pm" CENTRAL time. So here is my theory. Most service calls for the same company will be 24/7 out of India, Philippines, etc, where cost is low but ROI is good. Then cancellation done in the USA at "normal" biz hours to make it a real PITA.

Unless this is some other type of support, their official page seems to indicate 24/7 phone support[1]. Also, aren't they owned by Amazon now?

[1] https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/213608406-Phone-N...

I recently switched from Ring to the Nest Hello, and I was able to cancel my subscription directly from the Ring app on my phone.

No I can't find out where I can cancel my subscription on the Ring app. Where in the app is it found?

I wish this applied to banks too.

I tried to pay off my mortgage this week and I had to go to a physical bank and handle them a check for seven hundred dollars. So stupid.

That seems very weird to me. I'd think it's more expensive for the bank to process a check than an electronic transaction.

Not if there is fraud involved.

Let me clarify. The bank accepted a 7 figure wire transfer but I wasn't allowed to pay the full amount. I had to pay the leftover in person, even after I got the payoff statement.

I had one of those 80-10-10 mortgages and was trying to pay off the 2nd mortgage. Had to go in person, give them a check, and then had to HANDWRITE A LETTER to be sent to corporate (I think?) saying that "yes, I really would like to close out the account that held this mortgage". No template and a "sign here" or anything. They just gave me printer paper and a "just write something" attitude. It was a very odd experience as I wasn't sure how formal it was suppose to be.

Reminds me of this arcane tidbit: you can write your own checks...

> you can write a “negotiable instrument,” bank talk for a valid check, on just about anything. According to the Uniform Commercial Code, the body of law that governs these things, all you have to include are the name of the payee, the dollar amount, the name of your bank, your signature, the date, and some suitable words of conveyance, such as “pay to the order of.” You don’t need the account number or the bank ID number you find on preprinted checks.

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/562/can-you-write-...

What bank doesn't allow ACH transfer to pay off mortgages? Even most small banks have this now.

As a European, I ran into this with WSJ. Subscribing is easy and online, cancelling is only by phone. Their Dutch access number didn't work either, forcing me to use their international numbers at the cost of international phone call.

There's this company that offers internet service on flights also claims to offer secure hotspots, (it's a gimmick) around cities all over the US they're based in Los Angeles: Boingo Wireless. The only way to cancel the service is to call in, that's their whole scheme. When you they treat that as if you were doing something extremely complicated and that takes time. One of the customer service representative told me that he would have to contact the engineering department to cancel my account...Like that would be necessary. I was getting impatient, on the phone for about 40 minutes. This new law will be the end of them.

https://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/boingo-wireless-c...

I apologize for not proofreading my post.

I hope this forces the NYTimes to allow online cancellations too.

I got rid of them when my card was stolen and then cancelled. They couldn't bill me anymore and my account was downgraded.

Better than WSJ, which continues to let you use the service but threatens to send the bill to collections.

You can unsubscribe via chat. The caveat is that it's a horrible experience which takes over an hour. I guess they want to make sure that if you leave you never want to come back. This makes them feel like such a shady company.

Funny that NYT came up on two separate threads here. I know they made me go through hell to cancel, sounds like I'm not the only one.

Media outlets in general. I know they make the argument about GDPR and ad tracking that they need it because nobody pays for them, but maybe more people would pay if it wasn't so foolish to trust them with your payment details.

Another consumer first law I would like to see is that if a service detects you haven’t used it in the previous period, they refund your subscription fee.

There is so much wasted money on zombie subscriptions that people forget about.

It’s not wasted, the money goes to the business.

Doesn't work for services like Dropbox where they are giving you non refundable goods.

I understand where you're coming from (though I would never legislate it), but compare it to insurance. Should your car insurance company have to refund your premiums if you don't "use" their service in some time period, i.e. you don't file a claim? Should a life insurance company return all your premiums if you don't die during the covered term? I'm going to say no. In the case of insurance, you're paying for someone else to take on a risk that you either can't afford to take on, or that it doesn't make financial sense for you to take on. In the case of a streaming subscription (for example), you're paying for the ability to, at any moment, start streaming whatever content the service is making available. Even if you never use that ability within a given month, you still had the option, and that's what you were paying for. In fact, you could frame that this way: you're paying to remove the "risk" that you'll want to stream something at some point and won't be able to because you don't have an active subscription.

And on a more personal level, I don't understand why people can't just manage their subscriptions better. Dark patterns that make canceling subscriptions difficult are one thing, but if a service makes it easy for you to cancel, and you just haven't done it, that's on you.

That said, if a service wants to refund subscribers for unused service periods, that would be a great feature. Or, as a middle ground, send an email saying, "You haven't logged in in X months; do you want to cancel your subscription?" X could even be configurable, and cancellation could be automatic, e.g. cancel the subscription if the user hasn't logged in for 3 months.

The email with an easy action to take would be a good compromise.

Insurance’s value is that any moment they are willing to pay out.

With subscription services, if you only use them occasionally, the smart thing is to let them expire and then resubscrive when you need their services. However the hassle in subscribing and unsubscribing is too high to make practical.

I knew a guy that bought World of Warcraft and chose the six-month subscription. He played for about 3 months, then stopped and forgot about it and didn't cancel his subscription. Three months later, he got charged the $78 for another six months. He called support and they refused to refund his money even though he wasn't playing anymore.

Maybe next time he'll listen when I tell him to only buy 1 month at a time, especially on something he's not sure he'll enjoy.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity to call his credit card company and start a charge-back.

I've actually closed bank accounts to get away from subscription services. It really is an outrage. What more should it take than telling them you don't want to pay for their service anymore?

I've had a bank (Bank of America), tell me that the only way to stop a recurring, fraudulent ACH charge was to close my account and open a different one.

I did close the account, but saw no reason to reopen one with boa.

The kicker is that a few months later, I get a delinquent negative balance notice from boa. The ACH charge had struck again. I called and asked how in the world I could get an ACH charge on a closed account with $0 in it. The agent said that the account will automatically reopen!!! anytime someone tries to charge it.

They will also automatically charge you overdraft fees, and then an overdraft fee when the overdraft fee bounces, and then a negative balance fee... and an overdraft fee when that one hits.

Just telling the story gets my blood boiling again. Never ever deal with any large corporation if you can help it.

I guess there was some truth to that Friends episode.

Funny.. I actually had to call justfab.com today to cancel my wife’s account. Took me one hour and three different people before they finally managed to shut it down. First attempt they hung up on me when I told them she was a mute. Second time I just told them it was none of their business why she couldn’t talk on the phone. The account was registered with my credit card in my name but they still wouldn’t let me cancel or even have my credit card removed from the account. Shit company...

Frontier is like the easiest company to cancel with. I called and asked to cancel and they didn't even bother with retentions.

Meanwhile stamps.com and SiriusXM were by far the two most difficult with Terminix and ADT coming in a close third.

I usually just tell them I'll issue a chargeback if they bill again and that USUALLY works. It's why now if I can I'll use paypal so I can just easily cancel the payment plan. For stamps I had to have chase stop all payments to them which seemed to eventually work.

It was about time. Anyway, the subscription model is kind of a shitty model for things that are not like Netflix, Spotify or some good designed SaaS.

I mean all that entrepreneur wannabes that copy to "Box of X every month" or "A simple SaaS that took me 5K to hire a freelance to do it but I have a niche" model. Please forget about it. I just want a handful of good subscription services in my life. Because I tend to forget I'm paying them.

Another way to get out of subscriptions is to change your billing credit card to one generated by a service like Privacy.com. Then just close the card out.

Some sites/services are getting more savvy about pre-paid cards though (DigitalOcean won't accept one). I tried to use a burner card on a snail mail advertisement offering a $50 gift card to sign up for a trial of a magazine subscription. Didn't work.

Some cards also offer virtual card numbers, which you can put a time and dollar limit on. I have a 2% back Citi card that happens to offer this handy feature.

I have a Bank of America card with the same feature.

In some ways I’m glad it’s not more widely used, or merchants might start banning the BINs the virtual cards use.

This means they can't process the payment, but it doesn't necessarily cancel the subscription, and if not, you still owe them the money legally, even if they can't get it easily.

I've found these work great for free trials as well. Just use a burner card and enjoy the trial without any worry you might be charged from forgetting to cancel.

In the UK the easiest way is to just cancel your direct debit. This usually promptd the business to cancel your membership and usually follows up with some letters to demand extra payment. You could safely ignore these letters, even if it comes from a credit collection agency, and the court will side with you if you explain the complexity in getting out of these contracts.

Tried to cancel an Upwork account, a message said I should call a number in USA. I called and a message told me I should call between x AM to y PM business days.

It is somewhat expensive to call from Brazil just to hear a recorded message saying the call was useless. In the end I was able to cancel using their web chat. The experience just confirmed my opinion about the company.

I hate to say and use it, but my best tool in situations like this is disposable credit card numbers via the privacy app. I make a best effort to close the account, and if that doesn’t work I cancel the temporary credit card I used to sign up for the service.

Make sure to get your cancelation attempt in writing (email, etc) because some places will still try and collect.

You subscribe online - you can cancel online. Now replace "online" with any other way you can make a contract.

As long as it's not a Spotify subscription :)

Spotify lost me as a customer when they forced me to use some ridiculous chat to explain why I was cancelling my account.

I was actually cancelling to re-sign-up using a non-Facebook account as a paid subscriber..

Add silly friction and you get -1 customer.

When did this happen to you? I've been considering the same, but switching accounts hasn't yet been worth the hassle.

You should be able to just disconnect your facebook account, and login via email, no?

Maybe now? When I tried to swap from a Facebook login to an email login after deleting my FB account a couple of years ago there was literally no way, so I just cancelled my payments and went with Apple Music instead.

You’d think so, right? Nope:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Change-from-Facebo...

A couple of weeks ago. With the backlash against FB recently, you’d think theyd try reducing the friction of shifting from FB login to email, but apparently not.

I dont know whether its their mistakes or not, but the moment I discovered that they have data leak, I immediately cancelled my trial membership and asked then to delete my account.

This is a good law, but I'm genuinely curious...is this really such an issue? Personally, I can't remember the last time (maybe ever?) having this issue. Maybe I don't have a lot of subscriptions. Maybe I don't cancel often. Maybe I come off on the phone as not budging an inch. The last time I recall having even the slightest bit of an issue was cancelling my AOL service ~18 years ago and even that wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be.

Are the individual experiences shared in the article (and here in the comments) exceptions or the norm? Even cancelling my last gym membership was a breeze.

At a previous employer that provides a subscription-based online digital service one task I was given was removing the ability to cancel said subscriptions via the website and replacing everything with calls to customer service. (Apparently it had a quite measurable impact on retention. To quote one of the managers, the people trying to cancel didn't actually want to cancel, what they really needed were "instructional opportunities" that customer service could do over the phone. And to be fair, I do think there was an element of "I don't know how to do thing X, I'll just cancel" in some of the cancellations. But not all.)

It was among a handful of similar reasons that caused me to leave for public sector work which isn't based on used car sales type manipulation and evil BS.

I once hornily punched my credit card number into a camsite to get "200 free coins". After using them all (I gave them all to one cam girl after feeling bad for her), I tried canceling the subscription.

The <form> around the <button>cancel</button> was literally commented out in the html.

I forgot about it, got charged 2 weeks later, and issued a chargeback. Never got charged again.

Watch out your credit score for a few months now. Some online merchants in CNP environment have power to put a negative remark on your credit if your credit card processor (Visa/MC/etc) deems they have higher trustworth score than you do. I seen it happening to people. Your score will not go down,; however there will be derogatory flag that could make it harder for you to get new credit card, etc. I seen those on peoples files for up to 18 months, and then gone.

Edit: here is the phrase that may show up on your credit report: "Account information disputed by consumer, meets FCRA requirements"

Wow, just the right article at the right time: today after seeing SiriusXM charges of ~ $20 monthly for subscription, to my huge surprise, I searched for online cancellation, only to find none exists. I called them to cancel and indeed ended up not canceling, rather getting a promo deal. I really love SiriusXM while driving, but that lack of online cancellation completely annoyed me.

I've found simply emailing them and asking for a call back to be surprisingly effective, or I in a few cases i stop paying them by changing the billing to a card that is about to expire. And if necessary the phrase "I will be contacting my state attorney general's office, consumer fraud division, what was your name again?" is the atomic bomb in getting things resolved.

WSJ is notorious for "you have to call us to cancel".

However I bypassed this by subscribing with amazon where i can cancel subscription online.

I canceled my local newspaper subscription (had to repeat "cancel the account" a dozen times whenever the CSR started speaking until they figured it out), subscribed through Google Play, and took 2/3 off the monthly cost.

I hate calling and going through the hoops and even then what proof do you have you cancelled?

I called a place recently and asked to cancel, first question was.

"Did you read the cancellation date!?!"

Yeah I did and I know you aren't because you didn't even ask my name yet...

So they look it up and ask again what I want, I tell them to cancel it again....

"Ok I updated it"

Damn it....word game city population me.

If you registered online or are getting emails, you should be able to unregister online or through email. Period.

This is how the internet will get better as a hole. There's no way for companies to track lots of different states requirements, so they implement all the requirements for all the states (and EU). I hope that more small states create laws with giant consequences.

This would have been a welcome change when I tried to break my marriage with Verizon. 3 phone calls later and 2 months passed they were still charging me for the my cell phone service and it took repetitive attempts to straighten things up. Bastards!

Woohooooo, I hope this means I can cancel my Morningstar sub. They make it impossible.

I've never been confronted with the "can't cancel service hell" but clearly it must be a problem if CA passed this law. I don't have cable TV. Where else besides cable does one experience this?

Gym memberships are particularly terrible at this in my experience

That was indeed that last one where doing a cancel was "involved". But it only involved sending a letter by certified mail, and all the info/details were on their web site.

I agree with this law, as many of these sort of services are very difficult to cancel. Many gyms require "certified mail" stating you wish to cancel the renewal of your contract.

Great. Pining users a week before an yearly renew would be nice law too.

I've spent 4 months to find a way to cancel my complementary health insurance in France. They were sending me letters with 2 weeks delay asking me for other documents.

I wish that Germany had such law. Self-prolongating contracts that can only be cancelled with a formal letter after N years of paying is a total disaster here.

Brilliant. Freaking. Law. I hope this applies to scammy gym memberships, Comcast, Equifax, TransUnion (their scam of signing you up), newspaper subscriptions etc.

had the same problem with Scribd recently. I've cancelled my subscription in the end of April, but still got a notification from PayPal about the money transfer in the end of May. I had to contact them per email and luckily they were very friendly and accommodating, they've cancelled my subscription on the same day and I've got my money back in two days.

Do you think this law will require the government to offer online opt outs for their subscriptions?

Not strictly equivalent, but one thing I like about GDPR is that withdrawing consent should be as easy as giving it.

Comcast and Verizon will be upset

I cancelled my Comcast service online. I DM'd @comcastcares on Twitter and they gave me no trouble whatsoever. I never spoke to a customer retention specialist or whatever they call those people these days.

I used their web-based chat and had a surprisingly easy time.

I had no problem with the web-based chat either, though when he asked about setting up service at my new address, I said I was moving out of the country.

But still, I'd prefer to use a simple web form to cancel service rather than sit through a 15 minute chat session

As above: Use Twitter. It isn't session-based, so you can come and go from the conversation as you please, and it certainly didn't take me 15 minutes. :)

In my case, I was considering an alternative provider, I tweeted them to ask if they could match a competing offer, they made a different offer that wasn't good enough to keep me. I checked in another time with them on Twitter to confirm my contract was not in effect, which they confirmed. And then after my new service was installed, I informed them that their service had already been physically disconnected, and to please close out the account.

None of this came with muss or fuss, and I just hit up their DMs whenever it was convenient for me.

Cancelling comcast is only moderately hard.

Getting them to ACTUALLY cancel can require more than a single phone call.

The key is to do it in person. Show up at an office, return the modem, receive a receipt, and report any future charges as fraud to your CC provider w/ the cancellation and equipment return receipts as proof.

I cancelled in person, and that didn't even help.

I got calls from Comcast for weeks afterward telling me that I needed to return my equipment. I kept telling them that I did return the equipment and have a receipt. The only thing that made them stop calling is when I described the receipt to the person on the phone as having "that big stupid NBC peacock logo that you stole on the top of it."

I guess without the logo description, none of the other callers would believe me.

My bank allows me to cancel my credit card online, which is good enough for me.

My bank allows me to cancel my credit card online, which is good enough for me.

I tried to cancel a credit card in order to escape a recurring charge I couldn't cancel. I was informed by Chase that because I had a previous auto-bill relationship with that company, its charges would follow me to my new card, and if necessary, my bank accounts.

This is awesome. Is anyone else old enough to remember trying to cancel AOL?

Will this apply to bank accounts and credit cards? That would be fantastic.

Scum like WSJ still practice the call to cancel timewaste practice

Will this be true for gyms as well?? That would be a game-changer.

Is there not a service in the US that does this on your behalf?

I can't see an email or button being any different than the telephone. I would prefer being able to cancel online. But I don't see forcing companies to offer that as being all consumer protectiony.

This is great. It was so hard to cancel Adobe subscription

Does this apply to B2C only or also B2B?

It doesn't matter. Though, to be fair, most B2B sales aren't actually completed online. For example, if you deal with Salesforce, you complete the sale in an offline process. This law states that an online purchase should have an online cancellation. It doesn't apply to "tech" -- it applies to the sales process. So a guy selling you insurance over the phone -- they aren't required to allow online cancellation. However, if you purchased the product/subscription online, then you should be allowed to cancel online. Basically, the venue of the sale needs to be equivalent to the venue of the cancellation.

Does this apply to Comcast?

You know what happened the last time I canceled a magazine subscription in Germany? I sent them an email, and got the confirmation back one day later. End of story.

Perfect! California leading the way, cancelling subscriptions shouldn't be an issue at all, sadly business use fraudulent ways with it.

Are you actually deaf? Or is lying to get exceptions that are meant for the disabled actually legal?

I am fairly certain that it isn't generally illegal to lie to people. Maybe a little shitty, but isn't it shitty to not let people unsubscribe from a service in the same manner they signed up?

This isn't just lying though, it sounds closer to fraud to me (lying go receive services you otherwise wouldn't). It also sounds a bit like parking in the disabled section. And I don't know if there are legal ramifications for using services that are for the disabled but I wouldn't be surprised if there were.

Parking in a handicapped spot takes resources away from people who need it. This gets around an unethical business practice designed to charge money from people who no longer agree to receive services.

> Parking in a handicapped spot takes resources away from people who need it.

And this one does the same? Who says that guy going through the emails for isn't otherwise going to be helping someone who is actually deaf?

> This gets around an unethical business practice designed to charge money from people who no longer agree to receive services.

This sounds like the most legitimate argument here, if this is indeed unethical. Not sure what my stance is on this.

This is not a zero sum equation though. Responding to emails requires FEWER resources relative to having a service representative on a phone call. It creates a more efficient process, which is exactly why subscription based services don't want to do it. Friction in the cancellation process is desirable, because people won't put up with it and will stay with the service longer.

From- Someone who works in billing for a SaaS company.

It's not like that at all, because it encourages more services for people with disabilities, instead of taking them away. Every site should be more prepared to accommodate people who can't or don't want to talk on the phone.

> It's not like that at all, because it encourages more services for people with disabilities, instead of taking them away.

I mean you could argue the same for parking right? If everyone parked in the disabled section then you'd encourage having more such parking. And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.

They could use a thing called a website to help people do it automatically, which probably costs them less than the IVR or human rep on the phone.

They just don't want that. Because they don't want you to cancel.

I'm not saying what they want is good, I'm asking if what you (or OP rather) want is legal.

In most cases (private parking lots) it isn't illegal to take a disabled parking space. The fines a private company levies against you don't have any merit (though of course they can refuse you entry and sue you for damages or whatever).

Parking spaces on public roads is a separate issue, and it's more in line with driving in a bus-only lane (technically illegal but it is because you need a particular permit -- so it requires more than just being disabled).

My point is that your are jumping the gun with discussions of legality here. The litmus test should be wheter it's shitty to lie about a disability in order to cut through reselling bullshit. Other commentors have more than adequately covered this topic though.

No, you cant argue the same thing for parking, because you cant just magic creating parking spaces.

What you can do is facilitate (or mandate) an automated system that allows people to cancel your service with them.

> And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.

Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.

>> And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.

> Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.

This was not the point of my comment. The point wasn't to sympathize with the company for their costs. The subjects of concern were other people with disabilities who may have otherwise been helped by the same representative (who probably also couldn't care about the company's costs either). The point of mentioning the costs was that the costs imply they can't just instantly add representatives to avoid affecting other such customers.

That is a poor analogy, because the service of car parking is already available to everyone.

A better analogy might be sidewalk ramps, which probably get used ten times more often for prams (strollers) than for wheelchairs. If they were absent or faulty, complaints by owners of prams can help grease the wheels of local government.

Sure, the service of cancellation is already available to everyone too. I also don't see how a sidewalk ramp is a better analogy since it's pretty obvious when someone needs to use it at the same time so that you can know you're not getting in their way. Over here you have no idea.

Car parks are a scarce resource. If I use a car space, I am monopolising the resource for the duration.

Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.

Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.

> Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.

> Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.

Wait, what? No, it's like the former. How do you know these agents handling your cancellation weren't assigned to handle similar cancellations from other deaf customers? How do you know the representatives don't have to go through extra procedures (such as documenting and obtaining authorizations for the non-standard cancellation, or bothering more reps to figure out whom to forward the inquiry to) that wouldn't take them far more time than it would take the phone agent? Meaning you could well be taking up a resource that was reserved for disabled folks, slowing down the responses for them in the process. Heck, even if the amount of time spent isn't any more than for a phone call, it's likely to be a separate set of agents handling these special requests than taking calls, meaning you'll still be slowing down this service for those who actually cannot use the phone.

What I find baffling is that neither you nor anybody else is making the most compelling counterargument I can see here, which is that cancellations aren't time-sensitive, so a slower reply would be unlikely to do anyone much harm as a result of slow service. Meaning it's one way you could argue disabled people are not suffering any tangible harm from slow replies. But to argue that it doesn't even affect the service provided to them in the first place is bizarre, especially if you think about what would happen if tomorrow everybody decided to follow this advice and do the same thing.

I see the misunderstanding. You're assuming that cancellations would still be handled by humans shuffling paperwork, whereas I'm optimistically assuming cancellation would be handled by computer software, much like it is when you cancel an exclusively online service like Netflix.

Though even in your scenario, you are assuming that a company wouldn't adjust its resources as telephone usage drops and written submissions increases. And yes, the point you make in your second paragraph also applies—a written cancellation request places the time onus on the company rather than the customer.

But either way, it is always a good thing if the methods used by people with disabilities are mainstreamed rather than treated as oddball special exceptions.

More like pooping in a handicap stall.

Or walking up a sidewalk ramp, or using the headphone jack at the ATM, or using the handicapped stall in the bathroom, or taking the elevator instead of the stairs...

If you use the handicap stall in the bathroom because you like the extra space, and then handicapped person comes in who actually needs the rails, and can’t use them, isn’t that a bad thing?

Sometimes the bathroom is busy, and everybody gets to wait for a stall. Its not the end of the world.

Sure, just like taking an elevator to the 2nd floor because you don't want to take the stairs.

Not really. Handicap bathroom stalls are never handicap exclusive. Sometimes there isn't even a second, non handicap stall.

It isn't like parking, because 99.9% of the time, it's in and out in a couple minutes, and 100% of the time you are physically present in the stall.

But if you take the only parking spot, that person pretty much has to go home. The car could be there for hours, even the whole day. Versus two minutes.

This huge moral difference is accurately reflected in the law- it is absolutely, perfectly legal to use a handicap stall without a disability.

So I didn't downarrow you, but I think I can explain why you have been. You are conflating morality with law. Law can be amoral, and illegal actions can be moral.

Weird, because I thought everything I said was about the legality aspect, at least until other people suddenly started bringing ethics and morality into the discussion. Am I wrong about this?

Bringing up such a minor illegality implies you care about the morality of it. If somebody was speeding and I said “hey, you know speeding is illegal right?” they would rightfully think I have some sort of weird moral problem with speeding.

> Bringing up such a minor illegality implies you care about the morality of it. If somebody was speeding and I said “hey, you know speeding is illegal right?” they would rightfully think I have some sort of weird moral problem with speeding.

Huh... that's actually very much the opposite of how I would interpret that sentence, but okay.

Maybe this is presumptive of me, but you should consider not just the the words you say, but also their implication. Most other people will, and if you don't you can't communicate effectively.

I thought we just concluded that the problem is that we come to different conclusions about what the implications actually are, not that I didn't consider the implications?

When someone asks me if I know something is illegal, to me, it seems they are being quite explicit that they are talking about legality and not morality, since otherwise they could tell me that that something is not cool, not that it's not legal. To me this is obvious, but maybe everyone else finds this strange and this is evidence that I just think weirdly, I don't know. But either way it's certainly not that I don't try to think in the first place.

I really don't understand why people are still down arrowing you. You seem like a reasonable and polite person, there should be room for you to comment here without getting piled on.

Re the topic at hand. I think that people view this as at most trivially illegal. By bringing up the question, people are in some way assuming that you are against the new CA law. Not saying that you said that explicitly, but I think that is what is going on.

"I'm hard of hearing." Prove that I'm not. At that point it's one dark pattern against another.

> "I'm hard of hearing." Prove that I'm not. At that point it's one dark pattern against another.

First of all, he said "deaf", not "hard of hearing".

Second ̶o̶n̶e̶, so you're fine with lying to get services you otherwise wouldn't if no one can actualy prove you're lying?

Profound question: can you act unethically against unethical people?

Yes? I don't see what's profound about this.

Even though it is a lie, it is a lie that is for the greater good. Maybe the company will realize how much time their call center employees are wasting filling out cancellation forms for the deaf and instead just make the form available online. They might lose some customers that might have stayed had a retention agent gave them free HBO for the month but there might be less time wasted on the phones with customers threatening to leave in exchange for free HBO. Either way, only people serious about leaving will leave and the call center will have less call volume and save the company money. In many areas, Comcast is the monopoly. You either have your TV or internet from them or you have nothing. If customers want to leave, then Comcast needs to react to the market and figure out what they are doing wrong.

"Second one, so you're fine with lying to get services you otherwise wouldn't if no one can actualy prove you're lying?"

When it comes to them being dishonest about forcing me to call in order to endure a pitch to upsell me? Absolutely.

Excellent point!

People with fully functioning hearing should have to sit through 2 hours of comcast customer service trying to cancel their service.

Only the lucky people who have handicaps should be able to easily cancel their subscriptions.

When you sign a subscription, no one promised it would be easy to get out of it. They're lucky not to have to pay a cancellation fee.

Is this sarcasm?

> exceptions that are meant for the disabled

The cool thing about disability accommodations is that they're also super handy for the able-bodied, too.

For example: closed captioning on multiple TVs or in loud rooms; curb cuts for people pushing strollers, walking bicycles, using walkers, or pushing shopping carts. Not the intended purpose, but making things more accessible made them more better for everyone.

I'm not super up on the history of computer dictation and voice control but I'm pretty sure some of that was driven for use by people with mobility limits that kept them from using a keyboard and mouse. Now we all have voice controlled virtual assistants.

"exceptions that are meant for the disabled "

Since when was the ability to cancel something online meant for the disabled?

Either you or a loved one is disabled, and that's why you're so sensitive (if so, I cut you some slack). Otherwise, I have no clue why you're throwing such a hiss about this. Many businesses (like cable companies) are being complete assholes by making it hard for you to cancel their service. Sometimes you have to lie and act unethically to get back at people like that. Hey, you wouldn't have to if they were ethical in the first place! They started this whole prisoner's dilemma! Me? I would love to cooperate and be honest all the time!

If more people do this, the scammers may stop supporting this workflow and force deaf users to get their friends to call.

And then they get buried in ADA lawsuits.

Wouldn't that actually be illegal? Deafness is a medical condition and I doubt "get a friend to do it" would be a suitable accomodation.

>Our workplace is illiterate, thus we cannot process your emails.

That excuse isn't going to fly when they get sued for not accommodating a disability. If anything, it'll cause a lawyer to pounce on the case like there's no tomorrow.

Pretty sure the grandparent comment was missing a /s

Well, if they're scammers, do you think they'll care?

This whole thread is about companies that don't support self-serve cancellation and require you to call in, so the "scammers" here would very much care considering it's companies like Comcast and the like.

Sometimes accelerationism is the only way

Then we need to deal with the scammers.

Then in Europe, the US and Canada at least, they’ll be in violation of various laws and open to be sued.

I hope they do, and then they can get shut down.

Not going to comment on whether I have loved ones who are disabled since its really nobody's business here and I don't need anybody "slack", but in any case, I wasn't "throwing such a hiss about this" -- I was asking if it was legal, and if you actually read the rest of my comments, you'll see I explicitly acknowledged that the other side's practice is scummy and that lying to 'get back at people' seems like potentially the most legitimate argument people are making here. Everyone else seems to be raging over this rather than me, so it's weird to give me the credit for it. The companies' practice angers me too; it's not like I'm on their side. But if I'm providing an outlet for everyone's anger then I guess I'm... glad to be of service?

I did think about this, but I don't really think I'm taking anything away from the actually deaf.

It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request.

I agree that it does feel a slight bit scummy, but after thinking about it I decided that I was OK with it. I can see how some others might think differently though.

Finally! It's nice to see an attempt at a level-headed response, and from the person it was actually directed to (and that you had actually put thought into this). Funny enough, though, no one's actually answered the question I actually asked, which I still have... which is whether this is legal?

I'm pretty sure that lying about a disability to a company you have bought a product from is not illegal. But I guess I don't know for sure.

I'm willing to take the risk.

No, it's not illegal. First, under the ADA they can't actually ask you to verify any disabilities: that's between you and your doctor. Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one. I've been to too many concerts over the years, and while no doctor has diagnosed me, I can truthfully say I have a hard time understanding people over bad phone connections.

> First, under the ADA they can't actually ask you to verify any disabilities: that's between you and your doctor.

Wow, that's interesting. They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)? How does that work for companies that give discounts (say) to the disabled? Can everybody lie to get them legally then? This doesn't sound right. (Note that it doesn't have to necessarily be the ADA outlawing this, so I wouldn't just rely on that.)

> Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one.

Do you mean to have one medically or legally? The former is obvious to me but the latter isn't.

> They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)?

That's correct, generally. I mean, if you show up at an airport with an oxygen take, be prepared to demonstrate that you medically require it. It's also different for employment, where your boss may ask you to provide evidence that you need a special accommodation to do your job.

The ADA also covers cases where there's a record of you having a disability - even if the record is wrong! - or where you have been perceived to have a disability. Not only cases where you really do.

Side note: If you look at the ADA language about service animals, it's all about what you as a business cannot do, without doing a good job of specifying what constitutes a service animal... So if abusing vaugely defined legislation aimed at protecting people with disabilities is your thing, $50 on Amazon and you can take your pets just about anywhere ;-)

The current ADA is actually quite clear: it must be a dog or miniature horse professionally trained to mitigate one or more specific disabilities.

What right do they have to know what your disability is?

The ADA has exemptions for when it would be unsafe or unreasonable to provide accommodation, and those are the only places where anyone can discriminate against someone for whatever their condition might be (eg the vision and prescription requirements for pilots). In fact the ADA explicitly disallows asking for any general information about disabilities - an employer can only ask yes/no questions about specific criteria.

I can’t imagine what their argument for not supporting someone cancelling their subscription would be.

Fun question: if you were to say you were cancelling for medical reasons would they be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if the call center asked what it was?

Why would it be illegal? Unless it's written in to a law as something you can't do, it's by-default legal; and why would someone write a law saying that you couldn't pretend to be deaf?

Generally speaking, it's unlawful to make false representations in the course of doing business. There doesn't necessarily need to be a specific law that says "you can't pretend to be deaf", because if you misrepresent such facts, you are very likely exposing a lot of legal attack surface.

IANAL.

> Generally speaking, it's unlawful to make false representations in the course of doing business

You basically described the whole field of advertising, if you make misrepresenting facts illegals, there's not a lot of businesses that would not be fined.

An unlikely best-case representation is not the same as a false one.

There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal. Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].

That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.

But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.

[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.

> There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal.

I agree, but at the same time you probably wouldn't be interested in saying most of these lies, so it's difficult to use that as a basis for assuming the legality of the ones we might be interested in.

> Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].

This is where I'm stuck. Fraud seems to have a wider scope than money (the obvious counterexample being if you're giving someone something other money, it can still result in fraud). What I'm unclear on is how wide the scope gets. Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages? I don't know what the answer is (which is why I asked), and it seems to me that it could go either way.

> Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages

IANAL, to be clear. But yes, fraud is generally defined legally as deception for "gain", which is usually, but not always, denominated in money.

Beyond that, like everything else in law, it gets complicated. Are you asking about civil or criminal fraud? Where?

Also, even if you have a case that is technically civil fraud (say, I tricked you out of a dollar) or criminal fraud (I overstated my income on a mortgage application by a dollar), for small-dollar amounts you'll find you have a lot of difficulty actually bringing a case/no DA will touch it, simply because it is too small to waste court time on.

Incidentally, that final point is why ATT and Comcast want to kill class actions. If the people they cheat can't band together, it is too much trouble for anyone to recover that $2.74 "Up Yours Because We Can ILEC Infrastructure Recovery Fee".

First of all, I agree.

Yet I think I have a stigma claiming illness or disability... don't know. So, next time I'm going to try this:

  I am a foreigner and have serious issues understanding 
  spoken English. Please avoid calling me and let us try to 
  resolve the issue over email.

Being foreign isn't protected, like being disabled, so I'd be surprised if that works.

I always check HN when I want a snitch's perspective.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a ton, and we ban accounts that do this repeatedly.

Please don't take HN on off-topic flamewar tangents. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466555 and marked it off-topic.

dang, could I ask you to review and provide some feedback on your evaluation? I'm very confused at your comment. I was asking if the parent was in fact referring to lying, and if so, whether this was legal. This was a direct response to the parent comment's suggestion that consumers like us should lie on the phone. How is my comment off-topic when I was directly asking about the legality of the parent comment's advice? It seems to me that it was as on-topic as any comment on that suggestion could be.

I'm also confused at your flamewar comment. I saw that people were keen to challenge me on the morality aspect, but it was not what I was actually objecting to or taking the discussion on -- I was asking about the legality. If you look and see where the OP himself finally responded to my question [1], we had quite a nice discussion on that very topic that even got upvotes with no objections so far as I could see (but do let me know if you see otherwise). How this a flamewar, when we had a nice and civil conversation on the exact subject I inquired about?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466984

Probably I just misread your intent. It seemed off-topic and the sort of accusatory nitpicking that users vent on each other when they're feeling flamey.

If that wasn't what you meant, I'm sorry I got it wrong! Moderation is guesswork. We try as hard as we can to guess right, but definitely still get it wrong sometimes.

Yeah, unfortunately not. I meant 100% literally what I wrote as you see there, which was figuring out if the advice to lie like this was actually legal (and I had to confirm they were actually suggesting to lie, since it wasn't clear to me and otherwise the question would've been moot). It was a naturally succinct question so I left it like that instead of trying to worry about actively dispelling anything else people might read into it, but I guess that was a bad idea. It's fine though, thank you for clarifying.

Businesses will likely comply to presert access to California customer business. They will build web frontends for proper account management (cancellation). And they will go out of their way to disable those frontends for non-CA customers, because they crave the money they are stealing.

Even so, outside CA the law will go a long way towards removing plausible deniability, and that's something.

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