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eckesicle

Meanwhile in Scandinavia:

You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in any way that is most comfortable to you. [0]

For example, you can:

* send them a letter

* send them an email

* call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone

* write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee

All are equally legit and legally binding.

Companies obviously do not want to deal with the manual overhead, so services typically have an easily accessible button for you to click.

Furthermore, companies are required to notify you at least 1 month before any contract is extended and offer you an easy way to cancel - and if they don't you can cancel at any point and get refunded. [1]

[0] for example in Finland: https://www.kkv.fi/sv/information-och-anvisningar/kop-forsal...

[1] for example in Sweden: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-f...

EDIT: Just realised Finland isn't Scandinavian, but oh well :)

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Man, I remember the ordeal that was trying to cancel a cell phone plan when I was a broke student studying abroad. Had to plead with them in arcane, formal French (a real pain considering I wasn't even fluent in everyday, conversational French--ended up needing help from a native French friend) on stationary and they still rejected my cancellation and continued to charge my French bank account. I tried closing my French bank account, but they wouldn't let me (IIRC because the cell phone provider was making ongoing withdrawals) so I just moved all of my money back to my US account and let the French account go into the red. The French bank continued sending me demands for money. After several years, they eventually notified me that they would be closing my account because I was delinquent.

Funny, I had the opposite experience. I'm French and I spent 2 years in the US. I had a T-mobile subscription, and it was too painful to cancel my subscription. With my accent I could barely pass the robot that was trying to understand why I was calling. Then when I had someone on the phone, the call just dropped, in the middle of conversations. I did that a few times and then gave up. I assume I'll also receive a notification one day that I'm breaking the law and owe some crazy amount of money.

T-Mobile has stores all over and they can help you cancel in person (I did this in the US, and it's very common to change carriers). I suspect you can also cancel online. You can also pay with credit card, and in extreme cases you can have your credit card company decline/block charges (I had to do this when Hertz tried to defraud me out of hundreds of dollars). I also suspect banks will happily decline/block charges as well, but I'm less sure since I route most of my transactions through my credit card--at the very least it's quite a lot easier to close a bank account in the US.

On the other hand, when I was in France just to open a cell phone account, I had to bring visa paperwork, proof of residence, and a bank account (no cell phone option) and it took 24 hours to open the account (compared with ~15 minutes + a credit card in the US).

I'm sure there are lots of things that are more difficult in the US, but France excels at bureaucracy in my experience. I should also note that I love France in general and its investment in nuclear power in particular. (:

Former Tmobile customer here. I ended up with an account on my credit report because tmobile never actually closed the account and kept right on billing me.

Twice. Once back in the late 90's when they were called something else, I think...and again a few years ago.

> I also suspect banks will happily decline/block charges as well

Yes, I had to do this on my debit card for an autoship that I signed up for.

T-mobile stores are explicitly forbidden to help you cancel service. At the branch I visited, they insisted they were physically unable to cancel anything. It is possible they were lying, but equally possible that corporate did make it impossible for them.

We tried to cancel my mother-in-law's account. Even after they got a copy of the death certificate, they still refused to cancel.

About all you can do, usually, is cancel the credit card they are deducting from, or maybe to get your bank to reverse their charges and refuse any new ones. Do not ever give T-mobile rights to charge for your account, monthly.

So strange. Just before the pandemic, I went into a T-Mobile store and cancelled my hotspot service. No problems. Perhaps it's a regional thing? Or a performance issue for a particular store?

Thankfully living in a big city in the USA there are T mobile stores you can go to and speak to a human being face to face.

I don't think you even need to be in a particularly big city. I think most cities of at least 50k population have one even if it's just a kiosk in a mall.

At the T-mobile branch I went into, they insisted they were physically unable to cancel service there, and refused to call their service center.

The only way I have discovered to cancel T-mobile service is to get your bank to stop honoring their charges.

This isn't really the opposite experience! You had the same experience, with banks headquartered in different countries. I still await the experience of your fellow ex-pat who spent their blood, sweat and tears to sign up for an expensive service but cancelled with the wave of a hand.

> I tried closing my French bank account, but they wouldn't let me (IIRC because the cell phone provider was making ongoing withdrawals)...The French bank continued sending me demands for money.

This is the worst level of fraud. The bank is pretending to be providing you a service here! But instead they funnel your money to someone else.

I had another variation of this, with AIB in Ireland, in case anyone ever thinks of doing business with them. Vodafone started billing me for a defunct account, due to (I charitably believe) an operational error. AIB refused to revoke Vodafone's unlimited access to withdraw funds from my account.

I'd guess the scope of this fraud is in the billions to hundreds of billions EU-wide, but it doesn't seem to have come to the attention of regulators yet.

I tried to delete my Spotify account (in Sweden). Not just cancel, but delete because they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full display and I was not even a little bit okay with that.

I think 7 different "yes I'm really sure, yes despite the sad violin music and yes despite the images of sad puppies", a support ticket, several emails going back and forth confirming I'm really sure, and then a few more forms assuring I'm absolutely sure I want to do this.

I don't... know what they think they are accomplishing with this obstacle course. If anything this nonsense makes me want to remove the account even more. If it was just a button I might have come back later, but they can rest assured they will never see me again after that nonsense.

If that means listening to gramophones for the rest of my life, so be it.

> they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full display

Do you mean this page?

https://open.spotify.com/user/daniel

That data is also visible to anyone in the app, and you can mark playlists as private.

See, if they hadn't had such an annoying deletion process, I might have come back after learning that. But I won't. I will never.

I suspect from personal experience that companies underestimate how much business they are truly losing due to spite alone.

I think the general idea is that if they make it difficult enough, some people might just decide that it's not worth canceling. I'm sure there's some metric that says most people canceling a subscription are unlikely to resubscribe, so making it difficult to do so probably increases the likelihood of keeping you by some small percentage, offsetting your likelihood of coming back.

The NY Times is a great and slimy example of this. Canceling the subscription requires a phone call or online chatbot, which make a people less likely to cancel. When you do try to cancel, they offer you a deal to stay. You have to reject that deal to finally cancel your subscription. While this is clearly a bad customer experience, I can almost guarantee that it increases their retention rates.

Ultimately, a business is hurt a lot less by giving a poor experience to someone already canceling their subscription.

I think a lot of businesses greatly overvalue behavioral economics as a means to control people. Nudging doesn't seem to work nearly as well as it's "supposed" to when implemented in real world scenarios. Heck, even in a laboratory setting the effects are honestly pretty sketchy.

And that doesn't even factor in disgruntled ex-customers going around telling everyone they meet about their experiences.

I hate so many companies just because of these “make it difficult” policies… it’s just disgusting. NYT did it to me as well, they will never see a penny from me again. Economist? It was just clicking around in the site! I unsubscribed and resubed from them multiple times and am a happy subscriber right now as well!

I was fortunate enough to subscribe to the Times through the Apple Subscription platform. Only took me one click to unsubscribe.

Thats changed then - several years ago they gave me a right dance involving phone calls and emails. Lost me as a customer for good.

I think anybody’s mileage might vary in these situations. I’m aware of once case with a German publication where I had to call to unsubscribe (and was told to send physical mail!!!) and some other person could just cancel their contract per email… But I like the publication too much to name them :-)

I'm sure it improves retention, but it also negatively affects their subscription rate (probably not as much or they wouldn't do it). The primary reason that I won't subscribe to the NYT is their cancelation policy. Barriers to exit are barriers to entry.

>probably not as much or they wouldn't do it

Bold of you to assume these companies are rational actors

I'm sure their metrics are right overall.

In my case, however, they were wrong: I wanted to pause The Economist as we had a baby and I wasn't going to read a weekly newspaper for a bit... or anything but try to get an infant to survive and try to get some sleep :P

They have a particularly dark pattern where it APPEARS they have an online one-click cancel; they make you go through the whole rigamarole of Yes I'm sure / No I don't want a deal; and only then they send you to an agent, who tries to chat you up about your neighbourhood and build a bond suggest helpful tips to make time to read and generally talk about anything except cancelling your sub.

As a result, my blood is filled with dark seeping hate for The Economist, and what was going to be a 3-month pause is now a life-long mission to dissuade everybody I can from sending them a penny - same as with Goodlife fitness :D.

> Canceling the subscription requires a phone call or online chatbot,

This is a reason I subscribe to thinks using Apple's IAP if I have a choice (eg. equal price). the app gui is great.

The UK Times did the same thing to me, except I had to call at 2am my time (no 24-hour service) in order to sit on hold and then get the "are you aware of all the features?/we can give you a special deal" pitch some poor woman with a cough had to read.

This is a separate problem from that. It's really easy to cancel a Spotify subscription. It's nearly impossible to get your (free) account deleted, though. This is largely because early-stage Spotify delegated account management by allowing people to create accounts in Facebook and Google. Pokemon Go had this issue, too, with a bunch of people opting to create accounts through Google since it was the easiest way if you were using an Android device, but then it became literally impossible for the first two years of the game's existence to extricate the account from Google and make it native to Niantic's own databases or link it to a different Google account.

It's just something these startups don't even think about when rushing to market. What happens when someone changes or gets rid of their Facebook account?

Send an email mentioning you want to delete your accounts and all your personal information from their system, according to GDPR. They have 30 days to comply.

A non EU resident doing bussiness with a non EU company has no protections under GDPR. Even if you are an EU resident, the scope of GDPR's extra judicial reach is not entirely clear. Merely accessing a foreign site as an EU resident does not subject it to GDPR. The site needs be actively targeting the EU in some way.

Spotify is a Swedish company.

It's nice. I m French living in Hong Kong, and in both I sometimes have to cancel my credit card to get rid of newspaper subscription.

And often, the more the newspaper whines about freedom of the press the harder it is to get rid of their legal warning that I must pay !!! And there was no contract limit during the 1-click 5 minutes sub !!! Mediapart in France was so borderline writing me every week after I had to cancel my second credit card, being unable to send french snail mail from France, the only way they accept ! The first card was for LeMonde.

Totally made me hate the militant press, and in BOTH places, it's really insane. Like they treat their readers way worse than the government treat them, and yes, even in Hong Kong :(

At least NYT didnt threaten me legally and took a simple email. I was so stressed when I cancelled, there was again no frigging button. I will never again sub to newspaper it's just too much worry you ll have a forever parasitic CC bill until you force cancel the CC :(

I also had a terrible experience trying to cancel my subscription to Le Monde. In the end I paid a service something like 6euros so that they would send the proper letter. There's 0 chance I will ever subscribe to a newspaper ever again.

One other thing I'd like: For digital subscriptions, I'd like not using the service for, say, 30 days to automatically pause billing. So if I don't use Netflix or read the NYT for a whole billable month, they don't bill me for the month. If there's no cost to the producer and no value to the (non-)user, there shouldn't be a charge.

[1] decrees that (but not how) consumers can cancel auto-renewing contracts immediately iff the business hasn’t informed the consumer about auto-renewal in writing.

If I write your name on a napkin along with a request to cancel service and hand it to random employee of some company you have a subscription with, how do they verify that it really came from you?

Reading the replies it seems like this law may have incentivized some companies to make themselves extremely difficult to contact in the first place. How does the law deal with this?

It doesn't. The legal framework leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the judge. They look at the law itself, and interpret the intent of the lawmaker.

Suppose I wanted to cancel a service from a firm that was hard to reach. I'd block the payments through my bank and if it ever went to court I'd just need to show I took reasonable steps to attempt to contact them before blocking any payments and then most likely win the case.

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

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

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

How does this law translate to decentralized contracts/subscriptions? It may not be possible to support these analog mediums on an Ethereum smart contract for example.

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

Our future digital overlords might choose to integrate humans into the hivemind to support these analog cancellation requests, but gas costs would certainly spike.

Why? Can't a company make it so that there's a "cancel contract" method? I am not an Ethereum expert, I just don't understand, to be clear.

I'm sure this is far more basic than what you know how to do, but this seems pretty simple to add a "cancel contract" method that seems like it'd meet the requirement to be as easy to cancel as it was to set up. The account status seems like they can at any time just read it off the smart contract, they already do for balance monitoring each month in this example.

https://www.sitepen.com/blog/smart-contracts-a-tutorial

Is the issue that there will be a bunch of extraneous data on the chain or something when, say, Verizon puts their entire customer database onto Ethereum?

I was more so referring to having to support the handing of a napkin to an employee.

You'll probably have to make it so that either party can cancel contracts.

I'm a bit ignorant of smart contracts and I'm not a lawyer, but presumably the service provider would have to take whatever action would invalidate the subscription.

It gets weird with escrow though, because it's possible the law could treat money in escrow (like in a contract account) as already prepaid- if you wrote a contract to be paid every month for 12 months provided that a given key to a service stated valid and funded the escrow for the 12 months, it's possible the court would rule that you bought 12 months of a product, not a subscription.

I'm not aware if this has been litigated.

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

> You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in > any way that is most comfortable to you. [0] > For example, you can: > * send them a letter > * send them an email > * call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone > * write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee

This is bad, actually. Unnecessarily raises costs.

The FTC's perspective is much improved over this.

Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”.

Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.

> Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”.

No it shouldn't and that should be obvious.

> Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.

Yes, this is good, but the FTC's ruling does this as well so it's better. Only way a company could get around offering click to cancel would be to not offer online signup. Best of luck to those companies succeeding!

I imagine though that you'll still have companies trying to stretch the definition of "at least as easy as sign-up" to breaking point.

You didn't just "click to sign up", you probably filled in a sign-up form to create an account, clicked on a link in your email to validate your account, then filled in another form to add payment info.

I wouldn't be surprised to see companies saying we can have multiple, multi-page 'exit' forms and an "Are you sure?" email and still be FTC compliant.

> No it shouldn't and that should be obvious.

Explain why that should be obvious. If you’re building a service for a customer, said customer should be your top priority.

The number of things that could increase the costs of providing a service beyond willingness to pay for the service is essentially unbounded.

Providing customer service, including cancellation requests, is a fundamental part of running any customer-facing service.

If you can't manage that within the "willingness to pay for the service" then perhaps you shouldn't be running said service in the first place. Because soon enough your customers will have issues and nowhere to turn to, and then they won't be customers anymore (unless, you know, you make it a pain in their asses to leave).

Weird straw man. No one said that there shouldn’t be customer service on offer. The statement I originally made was that a company shouldn’t be legally bound to provide customer service in every single possible channel of communication (eg handwritten napkins).

I said that it’s actually good to be required to provide cancellation through the same channel that the service was initiated from. I’m pro customer service, anti absurdist requirements.

Feel free to build your straw men, though!

Processing napkin cancellation requests requires just about as much work as any other form of "manual" request -- whether that's over email, phone, etc.

There is nothing special about processing a "napkin cancellation" or whatever other form, the process is the same: find the account, do whatever verification needs to be done, and cancel it on the backend. In the end, you still have to have a manual cancellation pipeline powered by customer service. Whether that's because a customer can't find the button, wants human confirmation that it's been cancelled, whathaveyou. An automated system will never cover 100% of your customer base.

There is no strawman. Manual cancellation requests, just like any other manual request, is a standard part of Customer Service. If you can't provide CS, then you shouldn't be operating a customer-facing service.

> Processing napkin cancellation requests requires just about as much work as any other form of "manual" request -- whether that's over email, phone, etc.

The costs of running phone support are absurd. You have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Even just spend like 5 seconds considering how you’re going to go through the process you laid out when someone hands you a napkin they wrote on LOL

So, what you’re saying is that you don’t actually want to provide your customers support because it costs too much?

Where’s that straw man now?

You could’ve saved both of us a lot of time by just stating it upfront.

Sorry for claiming you were making straw men. I realize now you have poor reading comprehension.

All the best.

>Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”.

This seems like a very shiftable goalpost, so I would have to understand what situations you think aren’t almost always.

>Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.

This doesn’t work in places like the US, in my experience. I stopped letting people cancel by phone (which a lot of people think is the most convenient way to cancel despite what is said here) after a few incidents in my first years of doing business: one person calling anonymously without identifying themselves saying “Hi I need to cancel my account, thanks bye” and two others who called to cancel and later said they never called to cancel after we terminated their accounts. Oh and the other 10 or so people who said they called to cancel and that we just didn’t cancel their account. It’s extremely hard to prove the negative that they didn’t call. So nah I don’t care about those kinds of customers. Tangible forms of cancellation only: a written notice with your account number and intent or the online cancellation form.

It provides regulatory pressure to make unsubscribing as easy as possible. Those costs are entirely absent if customers can click a button. Otherwise, if the regulation merely prescribes that there has to be a button, there is little consequence if the button doesn't work, or you have to jump through 50 hoops to find it like in cookie banners. The Swedish model ensures that if your button is unsatisfactory, you'll be legally obliged to pay heed to any random letter, phone call, email, or indeed even napkin that comes in.

It's a simple incentive.

> Otherwise, if the regulation merely prescribes that there has to be a button, there is little consequence if the button doesn't work,

This is a ridiculous strawman.

The Swedish model also makes it such that sufficiently motivated ass holes can make a company's life very difficult. Much better to have sensible legislation like the FTC's where your mode of unsubbing is equivalent to your mode of subbing. Really, shockingly good stuff from the FTC here. Unsurprisingly crappy stuff from Sweden.

Also, looks like the Swedish outcomes are pretty shit! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29255702

Will be interesting to see how it goes in the US.

I don't think most companies are maliciously breaking unsubscribe buttons, but there are a lot of websites that don't work on some browsers, are badly maintained to the point of being unusable, are confusing, or simply don't work because the people that maintain them aren't professional web designers.

When your website is broken and you continue to charge me money, I don't think the onus on me to report the broken website, help your (maybe non-existent) IT division to find the bug, wait around for them to come up with a fix, and then help them beta test it. I should be able to file a ticket and say "I don't want your services please stop taking my money".

And how would this case work against you in the FTC’s legislation? Seems pretty clear that if it doesn’t work to unsubscribe but it would work to subscribe then it’s against the ruling.

If the website can’t actually add subscriptions then good luck to that company surviving!

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

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

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

Sixt (car rental) did not follow these rules. The procedure was something like "write a letter to out german head quarters".

I ended up making a GDPR request for them to first send me all data they had and then remove any data (including email addresses) they had on me. I will hopefully never have to use their services again.

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

Are you renting a fleet? How do you even subscribe to car rentals? Is this a thing where if you rent frequently enough, you get a discount to just pay constantly instead of per car?

The swedish laws apply to news letters as well. I rented a car from them in 2015. In 2018 I had enough.

This seems really annoying. You can unsubscribe to most things in writing as well in the US.

The issue is that it takes only a misclick to subscribe, whereas writing and mailing a letter or getting a napkin and travelling to the company's HQ takes considerably more effort (few companies have humans answer the phone).

Seems that Scandinavia needs to change their laws if the goal is to make it easy for the consumer.

I feel like this is missing the point. The point is that it’s illegal to reject a cancellation no matter the medium it was delivered on. So in order to not deal with the overhead and legal trouble of managing napkins that people slip your employees, you’re incentivized to make it as easy as possible

Because it does not solve the problem. Shady online subscription companies can simply put the office somewhere inaccessible and not accept e-mail/calls from customers.

The law should outline mediums that companies must accept. IE have a published webpage or e-mail address that allows unsubscribe.

I believe the point is that this isn’t acceptable in the Nordic countries

> This seems really annoying.

The most annoying part is that in any thread like this the top comment invariably ends up being some smug observation that <insert European country here> is clearly better than the US.

The solution to this is to help the US rise to the occasion, not complain about it on the internet.

Many of us are trying to do exactly that. Can you explain how smugly proclaiming "see how we are better than you!?" furthers the conversation? It is not a constructive comment, it does not offer any meaningful insight to how we might improve the US. It's just divisive.

Showcasing a better system that the US could emulate is a great way to offer insight into how the US could improve.

Interpreting it as "See how we are better than you!?" -- literally no one has said this. Interpreting it like that is just putting insecurity on display.

Given the choice of two reactions:

- "Geez, that system does sound better than what we've got going on here, we should consider adopting it"

and

- "I get it, you think you're better than us! stop being so divisive!"

...which do you think would lead to positive change? which do you think is a more fair interpretation of what the OP actually said?

> Interpreting it like that is just putting insecurity on display.

Of course, that's exactly it. Responding to every single thread about the US with "I don't understand why the US is this way, we do it better" isn't divisive at all. And anybody who suggests so is insecure.

I prefer a constructive discussion. This ain't one.

It really is constructive, sharing how others have solved a particular problem.

You didn't actually address the point of taking it as a negative being an artifact of insecurity, so let me add a second opinion to the same effect. It would be respectful of you to provide a meaningful (non-sarcastic) response.

Is it? We reject this logic in other areas (sexual assault comes to mind). Why is it valid here?

Can you expand? I don't understand what you're trying to communicate.

What's the English word for when you're angry about something but you aim that anger towards a whole other thing?

Who is angry? I am tired of the divisive nature of this kind of rhetoric, and I am invested enough in the HN community that I want it to stop. I do not have a lot of spare emotional capacity for Internet drama, so if it graduates from annoyance to actual anger, I will simply abandon HN.

It's not divisive, our friends in Europe are on team human, same as our friends around the globe, and they're sharing info on how to do a particular thing well

Comments like that though are really just a viable solution in disguise -- make the U.S. more like said country

That's impossible. Said country differs dramatically from the US on almost every meaningful measurement, from population size, density, style of government, cultural history, existing systems, etc.

And it begs the question that said country's system is actually better. In some metrics maybe it is, in others perhaps less so. And there's no reason to believe that US citizens' priorities on that will be the same.

> Said country differs dramatically from the US on almost every meaningful measurement.

Some differencies are relevant, some not. Population density has nothing to do with the regulation re ease or assymetries related to canceling contracts.

I suspect the vast majority of US population would simply want to import the nordic ways of dealing with the discussed topics if there was a bigger discussion on it, as it'll save a lot of frustration/money, while it doesn't seem to unfairly disbenefit companies (for whatever definition of disbenefit). Nordic ISPs are probably doing fairly well (Telia et al).

So, it's a question: why it's so hard or takes so long time to implement things in US, which have no obvious drawbacks and improve quality of people lifes? In the end it's also a representative democracy.

This is HN, saying "we're having this process in country X, and it's clearly worse than in country Y, and the reason is 'culture and history'" might be a technical explanation here, but when it's used as a statement of support, it "does not follow".

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