The worst one is probably trying to make it hard for users to stop paying for a service, like cancelling a subscription. That shit should be punishable by literal prison time.
Their instructions were login and go to the cancel button but the cancel button was broken and said call this number. But no one ever picked up the number.
I will never buy a NBA branded thing after that obvious bullshit scam.
I guess the law that I would be in favor of is twofold:
1) You must be able to cancel subscriptions from the same website that you created it from. After you cancel, the subscription must last until the end date. (So you aren't forced to set a calendar reminder for the day before.)
2) Sending an account to collections falsely should carry a 100x penalty. If they make a mistake and their billing system sends your account worth $300 to collections, they pay a $30,000 fine. Should motivate someone to write some unit tests for that.
1. The customer intentionally authorized that specific transaction. A specific transaction means one transaction. If a merchant wants to use this approach, they need to ask for authorization each time they charge.
2. The merchant may register a subscription or other recurring charge arrangement with the customer’s bank or card provider. The customer must explicitly authorize this registration at the time it occurs and may, by contacting their bank, revoke the authorization at any time. The merchant may not recreate the authorization without the customer re-authorizing it at the time of creation.
Eventually, the whole pull model of money transfers needs to go away. Taking money from someone by knowing their account number is nonsensical and should not be possible.
An advantage of Direct Debits in the UK is that I see them all in my banking app and can cancel them individually. A company is legally required to gain my consent again before charging again.
They can still send demand letters and "send you to collections".
It would be worthwhile to consider not letting "click agree" create a binding contract. I think I'm in favor of that.
I agree that things like newspapers don't need to be a subscription or have a contract. On the first of the month they should just pop up a dialog that asks if you still want the subscription, and if so, it charges your card for 1 month. I would certainly like that, but it does carry a risk on my end -- if they go out of business on the second of the month, I'm stuck paying for 29 days of the subscription I can't use.
Like I said, the big problem is not being able to cancel. That's why I buy subscriptions through Apple -- there's always a cancel button. I think we should make that mandatory for every subscription provider.
When you pay your medical bills it’s still an explicit payment.
Businesses probably need contracts in order to function, but they are overused in business-to-consumer transactions. That's the underlying problem that we should solve -- you should be able to walk away, no questions asked, from paying for a newspaper or magazine.
Attacking the latter might make a large difference even if the former remains unsolved. The New York Times can get away with making cancellation difficult because they have the power to unilaterally take money from their (former?) customers. But, if anyone could trivially revoke their authorization to charge them money, I doubt that the New York Times would actually try to sue or collect from their customers en masse. Sure, they could try, but that would be a fantastic way to piss everyone off and to recover very little money.
You already have the ability to "audit" the EULA/ToS/PP; it's that link you never click next to the "I agree" button.
The powerful (in money, size, skill, fame, strength, etc.) always try to (ab)use systems to bully the weak. Smart contracts only amplify their ability to do so.
Why would a company, which (reasonably) declines to deploy its limited legal resources negotiating with each user, possibly be interested in deploying its limited engineering resources to negotiate a smart contract with each user—especially when one screw-up can "legally" bankrupt the company? (See The DAO.)
If there can be no negotiation, the options are:
1. You reject their terms and don't use the service.
2. You accept their terms and legally use the service.
3. They accept your terms and you legally use the service. (Usually too risky/costly for them.)
4. You reject their terms and illegally use the service anyway.
More to the point, it should be required that canceling/downgrading is as easy as or easier than signing up/upgrading. Want to offer 1-click-buy, you also need to offer 1-click-cancel.
Be wary if a company avoids Google. For example Tinder started forcing users to subscribe directly instead of using Google. This is because most people cancel almost immediately since once you subscribe you find all your matches are bots.
The entire purpose is to make it just hard enough so you think ohh it's only 10$ a month. Another trick is to offer a month free. Hulu does this. If you cancel on their website you get several pages which try to convince you to stay.
Google also makes it easy to manage all your subscriptions in one place. What is all this crap I'm paying for, I can quickly see what and delete it. Also I'm much more likely to try a service ( I'm studying Chinese right now and have used various apps) if I can do it via Google Play .
First-party trials annoy me since cancelation is instant, unlike trials from third-party apps (those cancel after the trial period if you cancel during). Fortunately, you can go to Report A Problem and just say you didn't mean to have the subscription charged and they'll refund it as long as it's a few days from the charge date.
And yet there are scams that are costing users $5 million a year, or more, on the iOS App Store[1].
Of course, the app's premise is a scam, but my comment was about the ease of canceling and managing subscriptions. Dare I say that apps like this would be even more bold and prevalent if alternative app stores were available.
1: https://youtu.be/VrKW58MS12g (it’s the Mark Rober phone scammer video)
More likely it's because Google takes a 30% cut. Adyen takes a ~4% cut. I still maintain that if Apple and Google took a 5% cut from their app stores, no one would have complained.
Me: what’s their contact info? Agent: inquiries@nymag.com Me: This is a third party but they have an NY Mag email address? Agent: Yes. Me: ... How are they a third party then? Agent: One second, I’m transferring you to my supervisor.
Nothing turns me off a brand I like and want to support more than 1) autorenewals at 2x your intro price and 2) making cancellations both arbitrarily difficult and insulting.
They intentionally make it extremely high friction.
This was about 2 years ago so maybe they've changed since.
If you have problems cancelling a subscription, you can simply cancel the temporary card that privacy.com created for you
Related, I really hate Apple taking a permanent 30% cut of iOS subs, but I will use that route whenever possible. Canceling an iOS sub is always a painless single click experience from a known location. In fact I usually subscribe and immediately cancel so I’ll renew only if I actively choose to do so.
How long ago was your experience?
I informed the person who canceled my subscription over the phone that I'd never consider doing business with them again, unless they fixed the problem.
I hope it's fixed now! That'd be a great improvement
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/opinion/dark-pattern-inte...
I did have to interact with a chat window, which was of course annoying.
I also made damn sure I received a cancellation email. Too many horror stories to not do my due diligence.
Just repeat the phrase "I want to cancel my subscription" to any question they ask. They'll get the message pretty quickly.
I wonder if someone can start a service to facilitate this for people. So many dark patterns, so many opportunities to ease the transaction costs/friction of disentangling? ;)
It's also a pretty big negative mark for merchants that get charge-backs issued against them, if just a small percentage of people used charge backs to cancel these "subscriptions" it would make their processing fees skyrocket or even get them dropped by the major processors
This actually works quite well. I've had no trouble cancelling any subscriptions in the past few years, including the New York Times, which took maybe 3 or 4 clicks from the account screen (IIRC, there was an optional "why are you cancelling?" screen, then they offered a discount, and that was it).
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Yup
Of course, it's a different story if you signed some kind of contract, but for the pay-montly kind of things, it's a no brainer. You also keep your real cards number private in case the service gets hacked and Privacy doesn't seem to check the name, so you can give a fake name to the service.
While this works, depending on the service and what it says, they can send your debt to collectors.
And that’s why there needs to exist regulation around it.
Edit: crap, looks like it's US-only :/
I'd be interested to hear about any other UK/EU firms offering similar.
My Nord subscription went from $5/month to $200/month recently. When I complained, the CSR told me to just cancel the account and sign up using the special offer link and a throwaway e-mail address.
That tells me there are deeper problems, and I'm not interested in doing business with that company.
Dev builds it the user-friendly way. PM uses Google Tag Manager to inject JS that changes the stylesheets to the evil way.
I haven't used the Scribd app, but cancelling the service through the web similarly takes more than one extra page of customer retention "special offer" pages.
I’m SOL on this month’s charges but you’d better believe I disputed the original charge with Amex. Scribd even sent me a “receipt” for my “free” trial showing a total of $0.00 at the exact time they charged me $9.99.
It’s just bad business. I should have heeded the many warnings about Scribd’s deceptive billing and now they’ve added yet another unhappy customer who will complain about their shady business practices at every opportunity I get.
However in my experience, you can usually accomplish it with a phone call and can often dispute the most recent charge as well.
IMHO, chargebacks are the best way to fight back against companies that use dark patterns in their billing/cancelation process.
https://twocents.lifehacker.com/heres-why-everyone-already-h...
Forcible corporate dissolution, chapter 7 style.
Once its real skin in the game, I'd imagine they would have a real good look at their company-level actions.
If it takes more than a couple of clicks from the accounts section, or so ambiguously states the cancellation process that it suddenly seems hazardous, then I just cancel the temporary privacy.com card.
It's not like it would have to be super technical, most judges would have no problem interpreting it.