125 ms·

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

• Axien 5y ago
  I use Privacy.com and generate virtual credit card numbers. I cancel the credit card at the time of canceling the service (or at least trying to cancel the service).
  • TomGullen 5y ago
    Won’t help if you breach contract and they go to collections
    • ausername42027 5y ago
      exactly. it is really interesting that service even exists. Canceling a privacy.com card does not magically cancel a contract. Privacy.com seems like a great way to trick people into tanking their credit ranking when they think they are getting back at a company for being hard to cancel.
• confidantlake 5y ago
  Most people I talk to say they are against regulation. But without regulation you get stuff like this. I too am against having to get a permit for a kid to open a lemonade stand, but I am pro regulation to allow me to easily cancel subscriptions or my gym membership. Also I wonder if the NYT will ever report on how hard they make it for their customers to unsubscribe?
• puyoxyz 5y ago
  > The new guidelines around “negative option marketing” — which includes everything from automatic renewals to free trials that convert to paid subscriptions if consumers take no action — go beyond mandating that companies offer straightforward cancellation. No, fuck this! If I get a free trial I want it to auto renew; if I have to take another step to make it renew that’s a waste of time, and inconvenient. If I don’t want it to renew I’ll cancel.
• tickerticker 5y ago
  And a roar goes up from the crowd..... can't remember when I have felt such delight about a government announcement. Trying to close accounts for my just-deceased brother took HOURS over several days. The retention person at Verizon even said there could be many reasons not to cancel a dead person's account.
• jihadjihad 5y ago
  I went through the effort of canceling my NYT subscription this morning, and thankfully they have an option to cancel "using your account," which avoids a pointless phone call or virtual chat. It's the third option listed, of course, and there are a couple of guilt-trippy pages you have to slide past, but in all it took me 2 minutes to do.
  • dqpb 5y ago
    Do you live in California?
    • jihadjihad 5y ago
      I do not.
• dboreham 5y ago
  Ah, I fondly recall when the CTO of AOL tried to cancel his AOL account...
• alexfromapex 5y ago
  What about snail mail to cancel?
• eyear 5y ago
  Be decent, not rogue.
• kieloo 5y ago
  Same thing with The Guardian. Subscribed online and was then told I can’t cancel via email and have to endure a pushy sales call if I want to cancel. Similar experience with The Economist except it was via live chat instead. These experiences honestly make me want to never subscribe to a newspaper again.
  • 3guk 5y ago
    I was kinda shocked by The Guardian to be honest with you - I had a similar experience when I came to cancel my subscription to The Guardian Weekly, which is an excellent magazine. In the end I just told my bank to stop the direct debit - I had a few what seemed like automated payment emails from The Guardian telling me that my payments had failed and to update my payment choices - but other than that I considered my subscription over.
    • Spoom 5y ago
      Careful; if you don't go through their unsubscribe process, they can consider the contract still valid, and collect on the legally-still-valid subscription through liens and paycheck garnishments.
      • heartbreak 5y ago
        I had to stop payment via Amex to cancel WSJ. I have copies (and a receipt) of me informing WSJ that I was cancelling my subscription. Now I’m intrigued though. I’d love to see them try to claim there’s documented debt and collect on it.
  • csee 5y ago
    Don't subscribe again. You can read all these articles for free via archive. If they're going to be doing abusive things to you like that, you have a duty to pirate their content.
    • cto_of_antifa 5y ago
      I agree. And we should also apply this ethic to even more important things society withholds from people as an act of violence: housing, food, etc.
• yessirwhatever 5y ago
  Someone tell NYT.
  • lode 5y ago
    These days you can cancel yourself via myaccount.nytimes.com. Go to Subscription overview, and at the very bottom click "Cancel your subscription". You can also use this to get a better deal. Just start the cancellation, choose "My subscription is too expensive" as reason, click Continue a couple of times and they'll give you a reduced rate to keep you. I now pay 2 euros a month for a digital subscription.
    • Macha 5y ago
      My understanding is this is only available in certain jurisdictions which mandate symmetry between subscribe and unsubscribe options. Others direct you to phone or Web chat.
      • lode 5y ago
        Aha okay I didn't know that. That's just plain evil then.
• nickforall 5y ago
  I wouldn't get your hopes up too much. It has been illegal in Europe/the Netherlands for years, however it is not enforced at all. Most newspapers don't let you cancel without calling them, having to deal with sales people trying to convince you to keep your subscription.
  • omnicognate 5y ago
    Sounds like a juicy class action.
• lookalike74 5y ago
  Hedge fund dweebs: "We kill newspapers intentionally." Everyone here: "Fuggin NYT"
• swyx 5y ago
  Same with American Express. I couldn't believe that such a well known brand whose entire value proposition is great customer service has a "call to cancel" process. I hope it dies.
• simion314 5y ago
  I want to see the anti-regulation individuals explaining how this is bad and is affecting the poor small guy, and they need to do more work to implement this (the usual bullshit when a regulation they don't like like GDPR is discussed).
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Around here (Long Island, NY), Cablevision was notorious for the "crazy, desperate ex" approach. In order to cancel the service, you had to call them, and they would connect you to a "retention specialist." They would beg, wheedle, lie, manipulate, even threaten. I remember when I changed from them to Verizon, I had to hang up on the guy.
• Havoc 5y ago
  Just had to sit on a phone call forever to get rid of uk beer52 sub. It’s evil AF. Real life dark pattern
• smokey_the_bear 5y ago
  I just went to cancel my daughter's literati subscription because the books aren't a good fit right now. I was going to keep my son's, but they made me do an online chat to cancel, so I canceled both.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  Ironically, this may make people more likely to subscribe
• wallzz 5y ago
  in France, it's click to subscribe, send a physical hand written letter with signature using a tracking number, and you have to do this the right time( usually 2 months before the anniversary), if you miss it, you have to wait another year.
• golemotron 5y ago
  > To comply with the law, businesses must ensure sign-ups are clear, consensual, and easy to cancel. Specifically, businesses should provide cancellation mechanisms that are at least as easy to use as the method the customer used to buy the product or service in the first place. That's a tall order with one-click.
• slt2021 5y ago
  I keep a separate capitalone cc for all "subscriptions" and always keep it disabled, so that no charges will ever go through. just enable it back for 10 seconds when signing up for service and disable it back. so far it kept me safe from annoying services asking for cc and their unexpected charges
  • 93po 5y ago
    I use https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ for disposable numbers for just this reason. It's nice.
• zorked 5y ago
  Also a common practice in Europe (Germany, France, Switzerland...), but frequently even worse: click to subscribe, send a fucking letter to cancel it. Le Monde and Der Spiegel both do it. I'm a news junkie, I think paying for news is important, but I don't have even 1/4 of the subscriptions I would have if it wasn't for scummy tactics and/or the fear that I will be subject to them in the future.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • chmod775 5y ago
    >[...] and Der Spiegel both do it. They might have changed. When I checked just now, they offer a phone number and an E-Mail address to cancel a physical paper subscription (there's no account, so that makes sense). An online "Spiegel+" subscription can be cancelled via their website. https://abo.spiegel.de/de/c/abo-service/spiegel-abo-kuendigen https://abo.spiegel.de/de/c/abo-service/spiegel-abo-kuendige... It may be different for their non-German publication, but I had trouble finding any English information - which may be saying something...
    • hnbad 5y ago
      I live in Germany and have cancelled several physical magazine and newspaper subscriptions and even political party memberships via e-mail after signing up online. I can't say anything about Der Spiegel but I would be surprised if they did it any different given that German consumer protection agencies have some teeth.
  • koilke 5y ago
    Fortunately I have been able to cancel my Le Monde Diplomatique for many years through email. I did not get a confirmation email but they stopped billing me at least.
  • jaclaz 5y ago
    To be picky, at least here in Italy, not "send a letter", but rather "send a registered letter with delivery receipt", which plainly means that you have a non-trivial cost (several Euro, I believe in Italy it is now 10 or 12 Euro) and you have to physically go to the post office to send it. Recently many companies are (finally) allowing to use the PEC (which is a form of Certified Electronic Mail) which has the same legal value as the registered mail, but that the average citizens do not have (unless they have it for other reasons), which however has a (small) yearly cost, but that may be "dangerous" in the sense that it becomes your "legal address" so it needs to be monitored as anything that arrives there has legal value and is considered delivered to you the moment it arrives in the inbox.
• tristanperry 5y ago
  Good. The more exposure this tactic gets, the better. I remember trying to cancel my The Times (of London) subscription a few years ago. It was a terrible experience - having to ensure a pushy sales call for 20 minutes, where the call handler kept ignoring my requests to cancel as they kept reading a hard sell script. The sooner this practice ends, the better.
• _Donny 5y ago
  Living in Europe, I couldn't believe that if I wanted to unsubscribe to New York Times, I would need to call one of their hotlines which operated in US time-zones. IIRC the open hours were after midnight in my timezone, and their local hotline was out of order. I seriously thought that I had signed up for a phishing site ...
  • xdfgh1112 5y ago
    I used online chat to do it. It took several attempts to get connected. They offered me a really good deal to stay but I declined on principle because I don't want to support such practices.
  • docdeek 5y ago
    I had that exprience with the NYT - I had to time my call right to hit the office hours on the US east coast. That said, when I last had an interaction with them about a subscription, I did the whole thing via a 24/7 online chat. A far better and more convenient experience, if one that still lacks the simplicity of a simple ‘unsubscribe’ button.
  • hajhatten 5y ago
    Now I just wish this was implemented in my country/EU. NYT set the precedence for our national newspapers.
  • wheels 5y ago
    At least in Germany, having to cancel by sending a letter (or, amusingly, sometimes a fax works) is still common.
    • sorokod 5y ago
      Was cancelling my cell provider and was required to send a fax - hello Vodafone.de
      • littlecranky67 5y ago
        Cancellation by mail is always fine, no company can opt out of it in a legal way. You don't even need to get the address right, you can mail it to any subsidiary of the company - it is the companys responsibility to correctly route it internally. You can even directly address it to the CEO and at "persönlich" to it. My favorite.
• adrianmsmith 5y ago
  If they do something like this, it shows such complete lack of confidence in their product. "The only reason why people would continue to use this product is... if we make it sufficiently difficult to cancel". When signing up for a product, if it uses tactics like this, I assume the product is no good, and even the producers of the product know it...
  • lostgame 5y ago
    This has nothing to do with confidence. It is a psychological manipulation tactic to make it more difficult to cancel, in the hopes that the subscriber will give up partway through the process because they don't want to pick up the phone. It's all about profit. The shareholders don't really give a damn about the company's confidence in its product. They care about subscriber numbers and the dollars that come from them. The quality of the product is way secondary to that.
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    I also dislike this business practice, but I don’t think the only way it comes about is from lack of confidence in product/service. Let’s say you were building a startup and had to prioritize limited resources on everything that sucked about it. You’re talking to users, tracking various metrics, trying to get people to use it, and your backlog of things you wished you could do is 3+ years long. You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first.
    • pxndx 5y ago
      the NYT is not a small startup.
    • capableweb 5y ago
      > You’d build easy sign up before you built easy canceling. Even if you were the least nefarious business owner in the history of the world, the ctime on your signup page would be older than that of the cancel page. Whether it would be 15 minutes, days, or months later is a question, but I doubt anyone has coded their cancel page first. I think many startups undervalue the value proposition of "It's easy to change away from us" or "It's easy to cancel if you're not happy". I can't even count the number of times I've heard from users signing up to services I've built that one of the top reasons they signed up in the first place, was because it was easy to migrate away if they ever needed to. Preventing vendor lock-in has always been high up on my list of features for every service I build/am involved in.
• Zanfa 5y ago
  A reasonable legal requirement should be that customers are able to unsubscribe using the same method used to subscribe and the process should not require more time and effort than the initial subscription.
  • microtonal 5y ago
    This is the case in the Netherlands and a contract cannot revoke this right (Burgerlijk Wetboek 6:236). If you subscribe online, you should be able to unsubscribe online. Another thing that helps if you don't want to fight someone who violates this and they require you to send a letter, that an e-mail also qualifies as legally binding. So, if they ask a letter to end a subscription, they must also accept an e-mail. (IANAL)
    • grenoire 5y ago
      T-Mobile Thuis literally delayed the end of my subscription by two months, and only cancelled it when I called back. There wasn't ever a way to cancel online. In practice they've really been truly garbage, lawful or not.
      • t0mas88 5y ago
        Ziggo is similar, very shitty customer service, and you have to talk to an aggressive sales person to be allowed to cancel. The moment fiber was delivered to my area I cancelled them and just hung up on the sales guy lying to me about how their speed was higher (it definitely isn't) than fiber.
        • microtonal 5y ago
          Ziggo is terrible. I recently overheard one of their salespersons (at MediaMarkt) claiming that Ziggo is also fiber internet (it's cable). Only when the customer pushed him, he admitted that it is not really fiber, but then argued that it doesn't really matter, because 90whatever percent of the route from the data center to home is fiber.
• mikevm 5y ago
  I’m also annoyed by having to return or mail back routers when disconnecting from ISPs. When you sign up they are glad to deliver and install at no cost, but now you have to waste time or money sending them the equipment back.
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    It is really not the same thing: they lent you equipment. That «no cost» is not really such, but if it were, you cannot demand further "favours" on the basis of former or other favours. (Or, they could go along the lines of that "fake" «no cost» and charge you for both equipment deployment and full equipment costs incorporating them in the general fees, increasing them.)
• romwell 5y ago
  Well, making something illegal doesn't make it non-existent. Let's see how this is enforced before putting those "Mission Accomplished" banners up.
• forgingahead 5y ago
  Great - please inform the NYT immediately so they can stop this incredibly sleazy practice for their own business.
• jurassic 5y ago
  I vowed never to pay the NYT another dime after the hassle they gave me about unsubscribing from their crossword subscription a few years ago. It was such a pain, I told to actually cancel my news subscription too. Never looked back. These days I mostly read the WSJ and it meets my needs.
  • kabdib 5y ago
    Took me nearly an hour on hold with the WSJ to cancel my account. The longer I had to wait, the stronger my resolve got.
• rogual 5y ago
  I just expect these tactics from periodicals these days. Last time I signed up to one (The Economist) I used a pre-paid debit card for this very reason. Sure enough, they eventually gave me a reason to cancel (popup modals over their online articles for paying customers) and I just emptied the card and sent an email to their customer service saying "I hereby cancel my subscription; you are no longer authorized to charge my card". Can't refuse to cancel me if I have no money taps temple
  • cutemonster 5y ago
    Could they have sued you if they had wanted to? If, theoretically, there was an unsubscribe button in one's user settings that you hadn't seen, and you sent an email instead and blocked the payment card?
    • Nextgrid 5y ago
      The email is evidence he's let them know of his intention to cancel. Unless there is some major clause in the contract that entitles them to more money such as a minimum commitment, I don't see a problem. Granted anyone can sue for anything anyway, but I can't see them having a strong case. They'd be paying a lot of money to try and litigate this and demonstrate their bad faith in the process.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      No one would sue unless the balance was into thousands, or they're just an individual pursuing a vendetta. What would likely happen is they'd charge it off to a debt collection agency that would hassle you by whatever means of contact they have for a couple years until you paid or they gave up on it. And when they give up on it they usually just sell it downstream to an even more crappy company more willing to use aggressive tactics.
      • cutemonster 5y ago
        Oops sounds both scary and realistic Maybe the collector would do a credit check to find out how much money they could get from you
• bojan 5y ago
  A lot of charities in the Netherlands do the same thing, where you can't just give a one-time donation, but have to subscribe to a monthly contribution. That is horrible enough as it is. But then to unsubscribe, you have to call them (during their and your office hours) and endure another couple of pitches to keep you subscribed until you are finally allowed to cancel. And then some of them even have a cancellation term of one month.
  • Epskampie 5y ago
    This is the reason i have a label next to my doorbell that says: "Donations only without subscription and to volunteers". Since then we've not have a lot of charities ring the bell, and the ones that do I actually want to give to.
  • alpaca128 5y ago
    In my case it was trivial to unsubscribe, but they then started sending me all kinds of letters in regular intervals. And never stopped, I still get them years later. I'm certain by now they paid more for those stupid letters and pens than I donated in the first place. Which is yet another reason for me to never waste money there again, as I now know where it's used.
• totorovirus 5y ago
  Reminds me of my wsj cancellation. I procrastinated twice calling via hotline and they ripped off three months of subscription from me.
• aigo 5y ago
  The Times of London does this, and so does The Telegraph. Most of my subscriptions go via PayPal or Google so I can just cancel the payment and eventually my service will be cancelled for lack of payment.
  • Gymkana 5y ago
    I've used the Times a handful of times as a student. It's always painful when student discount ends and you ring up and say I can't afford £26 a month. They'll drop it to £10 then £5 but they never match my student price. I've had to leave during bachelors and professional qualifications.
  • dazc 5y ago
    The Telegraph have stopped doing it. I think they have now realised it's counter-productive. Hopefully, others will follow. Incidentally, I also think it's now common knowledge that unsubscribing will, in most case, initiate a lower price offer.
• lagadu 5y ago
  In Portugal the law makes it so you can cancel any service using the same means that you used to subscribe it, so if they support subscribing online, unsubscribing also has to be doable the same way; same goes for via phone, personal or whatnot. It makes sense, prevents service providers from making it too difficult to terminate a contract.
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    This is extremely reasonable and civilized. Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability? I have noticed of other EU countries that a response against abuse may exist, but severely delayed and only partial (e.g. about sale of misrepresented services and other contractual scams, especially when carried out over the phone).
    • DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      > Would you say that the rest of the legislation in Portugal is consistent, and the direction of the Country is towards good sense and reliability? not GP, ... it is a role-model when it comes to the points listed above. I think it's hard to answer your question because how would one define "good sense and reliability". At the risk of being called out for whataboutism, here is something that would be sobering for most people (like myself) applauding the current "good parts": https://www.biometricupdate.com/202111/portuguese-lawmakers-try-to-unshackle-biometric-mass-surveillance-alarms-ring https://www.biometricupdate.com/202111/portuguese-lawmakers-...
      • FpUser 5y ago
        >"...At the risk of being called out for whataboutism..." One who calls the other "whataboutist" is usually a hypocrite.
    • kranke155 5y ago
      No. Portugal is a (atm) an radically aging country, it is rife with corruption and politics are poorly led. Brain drain is massive. Employment is extremely difficult for both the jobseeker and the employer due to poor competitiveness, low productivity and terrible regulation. Healthcare systems have been dropping off a cliff. IMO going the direction of a dying country. And I am Portuguese. Virtually anyone I know with a good skill set that’s profitable abroad has moved.
• alex_h 5y ago
  How would one go about trying to get this law enforced on a company? I live in California where this tactic has supposedly been illegal for 3 years already, but when I go to cancel my AT&T internet subscription, I still can not do it online and am forced to call.
  • danuker 5y ago
    Perhaps "small claims court" would fit the bill. Maybe there are lawyers specialized in that.
• mdp2021 5y ago
  Should not you only use anonymous / pre-paid / virtual / revocable credit cards for those operations?
• yosito 5y ago
  What would the consequences be of subscribing to something with a disposable card, then deactivating that card instead of formally unsubscribing? Can companies send your information to a debt collector or somehow force you to pay since you didn't cancel? Can it affect your credit score?
  • dejj 5y ago
    German law knows “Dauerschuldverhältnis” (permanent indebtedness). If you don’t cancel the contract and just cease payment, the other party can obtain title against you, and eventually impound you.
    • danuker 5y ago
      I would suppose you'd have to actually have a choice in the matter. If you have to spend 30+ minutes to unsubscribe, surely it's not the only law that applies.
    • littlecranky67 5y ago
      True, but easy way to get around this is to just revoke the SEPA mandate - which you are always allowed to. You still owe the money, but after revocation they will have to send you an invoice and wait for your payment. Larger companies will not do this as they have no process for this, and rather allow termination.
  • Nextgrid 5y ago
    If there's a minimum term/commitment it can be considered morally wrong (as you're depriving them of revenue you've agreed to pay in advance) and there might be more incentive to collect that amount. If there's no minimum commitment (or it's expired already) there's basically no problem. Yes, they can in theory send that debt to collections and litigate. Both of these are expensive and are unlikely. If you've made reasonable efforts to cancel you can indeed block future payments and let them sort it out. If they want to litigate they'd have to explain why those reasonable efforts were ignored (and have the court rule in their favour).
• neya 5y ago
  Fuck New York Times, I had to go through this chaos once and promised to never ever use any of their services ever again. I even went to the pain of making sure all my ad blockers were in full force when visiting the NYT. I developed a strong sense of hatred after realize what kind of slimy tactics they used to stop you from cancelling a subscription. One day, I found a loophole. I would email them requesting a cancellation for my record and initiated a chargeback against them via my credit card company. I had no hopes of getting the money back, but then I also had evidence that I tried to reach out to them via calls and emails to make them cancel my subscription and the chargeback went through and I got a full refund. I really enjoyed that feeling knowing that the NYT lost more than they made from me as for every chargeback, the credit card company would penalize the merchant with a fixed fee - usually anywhere from $20 to $50 per chargeback if I'm not wrong. I wish all those who had been scammed by NYT raises a chargeback and burn them to the ground. God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company like this.
  • bedobi 5y ago
    > God, I never realized how passionately I could hate a company like this. May it burn in hell huh xD sorry but this is so relatable and cracks me up badddd
  • treyfitty 5y ago
    Just to play devils advocate, can’t they just send it to collections if they really wanted to? I did the same thing for a gym membership (NYSC) and they threatened collections 3 months later. Fortunately, they went bankrupt.
    • csomar 5y ago
      He tried to reach them to cancel his subscription. In that case, he could challenge collection and then go to court to prove his case? For the gym, it depends on your contract. Maybe you had a 1 year commitment but you paid monthly?
  • jgb1984 5y ago
    Why would I want to read their woke hysteria anyway...
• Yizahi 5y ago
  This exactly is why every year I think about subscribing to some expensive (for me) journal, then google horror stories about unsubscribing and abandon this idea. Some people above mentioned inconvenient work hours when calling to unsub, but it's not only that. International subscribers must also pay to simply call another country. If will be put on hold for tens of minutes or more, then the price of that call will easily be more than annual sub price. I suspect that even if FTC will change something in US, international subscribers will still be left out, because this is what usually happens in such cases.
  • algesten 5y ago
    I had this exact experience with New York Times. I subscribed, realized I didn't like their editorial style at all, and then had to call long international phone calls to get it to stop.
• DarthNebo 5y ago
  Stripe can be a good enforcer of this. A lot of banking accounts opened online refuse to close the same way too.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• marcvizcaino 5y ago
  1
  • marcvizcaino 5y ago
    1.1
• enonevets 5y ago
  I’ve had gym memberships where calling to cancel wasn’t good enough, you had to come in person to cancel.
• LadyCailin 5y ago
  I found a loophole for NYT and The Economist. Convert your payment to PayPal (they allow you to edit payments, but not remove them), and then go into PayPal to cancel the active payment agreement. Easier than cancelling the card, or calling them.
• yodsanklai 5y ago
  I had the issue with the WSJ. I couldn't believe it was so hard to cancel. My solution was to update my card with an incorrect number, they canceled the subscription after the payment was declined.
  • bodono 5y ago
    I wonder if this strategy could impact your credit rating though?
    • acnops 5y ago
      Does it? I'm having the same issue
      • ds 5y ago
        No. You cant do anything to someones credit unless you have their SSN. Damn good thing thats the case also, if you happen to be named Jane Doe or Bob Smith.
        • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
          This is incorrect, see my other reply to you in the sibling thread.
          • hnburnsy 5y ago
            Yup, the local city library dinged my credit report for late library fines ($18) and I had to clear it up to get a new mortgage. The library did not have my SSN.
      • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
        Years ago I did credit investigations related to mortgages as a job. My info is perhaps a bit out of date but I'm not aware of any significant changes related to this. If you simply ignore an account that has a balance due accumulating on it, they'll likely charge it off to a debt collector as part of a routine batch process. The threshold where this happens varies but 90 to 120 days overdue is the common range. You could argue with the collection agency that the service provider voided the contract by their behavior, but honestly, arguing with a collection agency isn't gonna be easier than jumping through the hoops to cancel with these scummy service providers.
• usrusr 5y ago
  This is why consumers are so eager to use obscenely expensive (in terms of what the recipient actually gets) payment methods like Google/Apple in-app subscriptions.
• b20000 5y ago
  finally
• goodluckchuck 5y ago
  You don’t have to wait for them to agree that your subscription is cancelled. When I call I tell them I’m cancelling and they’re no longer authorized to charge my card. If they don’t stop the charges, then it’s much easier to talk to my own credit card company and do a charge-back.
• xg15 5y ago
  > Publishers tend to think of this as “retention.” My understanding was that "retention" used to be simply a measure of how many unique users/customers kept using your product. With some implicit (maybe too optimistic) understanding that they stayed because they wanted to. In classic "if your measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure" tradition, "retention" today seems to be about keeping as many recurring visitors as possible, no matter how and no matter the reason why they are staying.
  • alpaca128 5y ago
    Maybe they confused it with detention.
  • darkwizard42 5y ago
    I don't think this concept is new. I mean look at the gym/fitness market. It is largely defined by gyms looking to onboard members with special discounted entry rates and then largely leaving them be and milking the monthly payments.
• chriskanan 5y ago
  It would be great to have this universally, especially with gyms, where one can click to join but must write a letter and mail it via the postal service to cancel.
  • illuminati1911 5y ago
    Or even better. Send a fax. :D
• xg15 5y ago
  > including an option that’s “at least as easy” as the one to subscribe Weirdly enough this sounds like a loophole. I can already see some companies trying to bullshit their way through an investigation: "Oh sure, we don't provide online cancellation, because our way to cancel is even easier than online:" *presents a way to cancel that is in practice more difficult than online*. I think either mandating that cancelling must be possible using the same workflow as subscription or more clearly defining what "easy" means would be important.
  • rolandog 5y ago
    It should have been stipulated that unsubscribing should be offered immediately after the option to subscribe.
    • logfromblammo 5y ago
      I think "unsubscribe" should only be offered after a customer has been charged. Before that, it should be "cancel" or "annul". For instance, if there is a "free trial" period, wait until after that expires, and the customer has been charged, before offering an "unsubscribe". But aside from the hair-splitting, yes, you are absolutely correct. If I have instant buyer's remorse, I should be able to click it away just as instantly.
      • cgriswald 5y ago
        I don't agree. "Canceling" a free trial means the trial ends immediately. "Unsubscribing" during a free trial means the trial continues, but you are no longer subscribed so when the free part of your subscription runs out it won't automatically renew.
        • SkittyDog 5y ago
          None of that language is has a standard legal or regulatory definition, across the US. They are not precise terms, at least not yet. They are frequently used colloquially in ways that contradict your suggestion. I'm not saying your definitions are bad, or wrong... Quite the contrary, I think your ideas are great! But the specific terms & definitions aren't what really matter, are they? We just need standard language, with specified legal meaning, that consumers can invoke to make service providers jump to task.
• cheggisguilty 5y ago
  Chegg Study for university students does not link to a cancel subscription on their website, you have to search google "how to remove sub from chegg" and then you can find a "Cancel Sub" help article on the Chegg website. You can not get directly to the cancel article from their base website. They should be fined for the dark pattern.
  • cute_boi 5y ago
    Many website I have encountered has similar dark patterns. Its not just chegg but other too like facebook. Most people don't know meaning of deactivate vs delete (and delete even takes like 30 days ridiculous). And many website like Adobe will make you follow series of steps like 7-8 pages. And they try to convince you shouldn't cancel via examples like "Your following services are active you no longer can access them". At last page it was like this "Right now we are offering 30% discount you can grab this easily etc.". Till its coded to law I don't think we can expect anything from corporation.
• mercy_dude 5y ago
  Good. The worst experience I ever had was with NY Times when I wanted to unsubscribe I had to go through multiple call/chats with a person and it was almost impossible since it was hard to get in touch with one. I am glad FTC is doing something others are afraid to do.
  • 88913527 5y ago
    Anyone with access to a public library (photo ID will get you a free library card) can access eLibrary services that get updated daily. No need to pay for NYT, for WSJ, or any major national newspaper. By paying taxes, you're already paying for digital access to this media. I applaud the FTC's decision but I wish people realized there's more practical means for accessing media that is more frequently locked behind paywalls these days. You fight it with a library card.
    • badwolf 5y ago
      I always recommend folks get a library card, as they will generally provide free access to these as well as many other newspapers... However there's often 30-90 day embargo to access current issues/articles online.
    • jcgoette 5y ago
      >photo ID will get you a free library card Results may vary.
      • rootsudo 5y ago
        No, Librarians are pretty liberal with this. Many in big cities, e.g. Chicago, Seattle, etc don't even need to see an ID, just a bill but if you show up and pester back and forth a few times they'll still give you one. No government identity needed. A bill helps.
        • OldHand2018 5y ago
          In large cities especially, libraries will have an "independent" charitable foundation attached to them. It is very prestigious in the local community to be on the board or to donate large sums to these foundations. Thus, large city libraries are typically excellent with plenty of funding and can afford to offer services to the poor and indigent which smaller libraries cannot. In the US, a lot of libraries are funded by property taxes, and the various laws that allow these taxes to be collected (for library purposes) will state that the library cannot offer services to people outside the geographic boundary for a lower cost than is charged to the people inside the boundary and are paying the taxes. That's why they need "proof" of where you live before giving you a card. But then you also have laws requiring services to be provided to the homeless regardless of proof of residence (how do you prove your residence when you are homeless?). How does the library resolve that legal conflict? It pretty much always comes down to money and local attitudes (see first paragraph).
• IAmGraydon 5y ago
  Someone needs to inform TMobile’s Home Internet division of this.
• john37386 5y ago
  I subscribed to a weekly meal kit. It was very easy to onboard and I liked the service for many months. My situation changed and I no longer needed their service. I wanted to cancel my subscription and it's impossible to do online. It's written in super small to call their happy representative. I didn't like this situation so what I'm doing is skipping the meal kit for the next 4 weeks. Every month I log on their website and skip the next 4 weeks... I'll do this until my credit card expired. Just for this, I won't recommend them to anyone. It's sad because I kind of liked it when it was useful to me.
  • xg15 5y ago
    Question from a non-American. Is it actually legal to "cancel" a service by having your credit card expire? At least here, if there is a subscription with recurring fees active, you're liable for those fees, whether or not the provider is able to collect them at this moment. This sounds like you risk building up a lot of debt and eventually having a collections agency come after you.
    • wonderwonder 5y ago
      Probably not legal, but in the sense that you could get sent to collections for what you owe vs getting charged with a crime. If the company wanted to be difficult I think they could keep billing you and then send you to collections and likely most people would pay to avoid court costs and continued credit degradation.
    • john37386 5y ago
      I might change my strategy and finally call them at some point. It's just frustrating to be stuck in this situation. Thanks for the tip.
      • weswpg 5y ago
        Many banks will automatically transfer recurring subscriptions to your new card as a "helpful" measure. > Updater services allow merchants to know when your credit card information changes, and to alter their records accordingly. If you don’t want to continue the subscription, you’ll need to cancel it directly. https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/recurring-charges-updater-1275/ https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/recurring-charg...
• rexreed 5y ago
  Vonage is notorious for not only preventing people from canceling online but making it hell to cancel over the phone. They frustrate people trying to port numbers and charge ludicrous cancellation and other fees. Totally extortionate and predatory behavior. I hope all customers become aware of these practices.
• dudul 5y ago
  I see a lot of comments about hellish phone calls to cancel subscriptions. Every time I have to make such unpleasant call (usually an ISP or phone carrier) I always start the conversation by telling the representative that I'm recording the call on my end. After that it's usually pretty smooth.
• virologist 5y ago
  “Click to subscribe, mail to cancel”. would be more efficient.
  • virologist 5y ago
    even better “Click to subscribe, come in person to cancel (office hours Teuesday, ...)”
• adamkochanowicz 5y ago
  Privacy.com card. Set one-time use with limit equal to subscription price. I do this with shady subscriptions now and I decide when it’s time to cancel.
• xtiansimon 5y ago
  Maybe OT, but Square (the online merchant processor) has a button for immediate deposit of funds. Click it by mistake and find no verification step and immediate and irreversible fee for 1.5% of your queued transactions.
• 4monthsaway 5y ago
  Finally. Now let's see how often it goes unenforced, just like affiliate link disclosure.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  Yes!
• dwighttk 5y ago
  Is nytimes going to go out of business?
• why-el 5y ago
  I give them a card I grab from privacy.com that has a set amount, when I want to cancel, I set the card's amount to zero. They fail to charge it after a few attempts. The end.
• glitcher 5y ago
  The article's framing is a little odd by putting the emphasis on news organizations. In my experience the worst offenders have been ISP's and phone providers. And it is such a widespread practice, it happens with everything from credit cards to gym memberships. Another funny thing I'm wondering now, is if companies might find they are more profitable by eliminating these manipulative customer retention departments. Maybe try shifting the focus to making better products that customers want to stay with in the first place.
• dqpb 5y ago
  Finally! FU NYT
• mrfusion 5y ago
  This would be amazing for gyms! I’ve paid for six months now for my old gym because I’ve been too lazy to go there in person fill out a form or whatever is required.
  • TheHypnotist 5y ago
    Some ask you to mail them a letter.
• watchdogtimer 5y ago
  This is one of the biggest benefits of using a virtual credit card from services like privacy.com or Capital One's Eno. Just create a card online specific to the service to pay for it, then cancel the card when you want to unsubscribe. Capital One lets you create an unlimited number of cards at no charge.
  • petilon 5y ago
    Not quite. Now the business can send you to collections.
    • 0des 5y ago
      Which company sent you to collections?
    • throwawaycuriou 5y ago
      If you provided a pseudonym, how would they associate it with you?
  • 1shooner 5y ago
    Have you done this before successfully? I wouldn't just stop paying for a service to without following the agreed-upon termination process, it sounds like a great way to get referred to a collection agency.
    • danlugo92 5y ago
      Use a prepaid gift card, give a pseudonym.
• GuB-42 5y ago
  Several times, I've seen that the easiest way to cancel was to block the payment. Your subscription won't last long if you don't pay. I guess that in theory, they could sue, but not only it is a small sum, they also probaby don't want to expose their dark patterns to a court of law.
• danielvaughn 5y ago
  This kind of practice isn't only in the comms industry. I had a gym membership back when I lived in NYC. Called them up one day, got a membership within just a few minutes over the phone. A few years later when I moved, I called to tell them I'd have to cancel. I had forgotten to cancel before I moved, so I was already in another state (Florida). They told me I had to come into the gym physically to cancel, even when I told them I had already moved. I called several times, asking everyone including the manager to just let me cancel over the phone. I remember saying "ok so you're telling me I have to literally fly to NYC just to cancel my membership with you?" And they said "I'm sorry sir, that's our policy." After a week or so, I threatened them with a lawsuit, and then they complied.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• pR1vaCy_1000 5y ago
  I have a $1 iCloud subscription on an old iCloud account I no longer use. I could not cancel the subscription from a browser, so I called apple, and was told I have to do it from an apple device. The problem is I no longer have an apple device. Ultimately they escalated the problem, but I never received a call back.
• aristophenes 5y ago
  I had to cancel my gym membership because I was moving, and it required me to send a physical letter. I did this, but found out later that somehow I owed like 2 dollars, so they didn’t count my cancellation request because my account wasn’t up to date (should be illegal). They continued to bill me the entire membership fee, but my credit card had changed, so they sent my account to a collections agency. Right when I was trying to get a mortgage to buy a house. Cost me hundreds of dollars and much more in annoyance. Thanks The Edge for doing that to your previously loyal customer! It ought to be a law that once a customer informs you via email, text, phone or mail (and all must be easily found) subscription services can no longer accrue new charges.
  • spaetzleesser 5y ago
    That's one insanity I don't understand why companies can get away with. They can set up bureaucratic processes and even when you follow them, they "lose" your material, raise some weird objection or ignore it. Same happens with health insurances and hospitals. They ignore you whenever they feel like it but the payment and collections clock keeps ticking. I have heard it was the same in 2008 and later when people requested mortgage relief and the banks just ignored them for months and years.
    • Frost1x 5y ago
      It amazes me how successful consumer hostile strategies are in recent times. It sort of flies in the face of most economic models that claim markets self-regulate. This includes businesses in industries which aren't massive and monopolistic and even have competitors. When all your competitors decide to indirectly collude with one business's successful consumer hostile strategies, it becomes the norm and another barrier to entry for a competitor to come in with a better offering. In theory, consumer hostile practices should exist at a discount so a reputable business that isn't consumer hostile should be able to offer better products/services at a higher price point and let consumers decide if they want a hostile or non-hostile market. Some may claim that consumers just want cheap above all else and the market regulates to that, hostile or not. I dismiss this and claim the issue is that a price point signal doesn't give me enough information to tell me if a business is consumer hostile or not. Paying more absolutely does not guratentee a better consumer experience, it could just be a business operating at higher margins and that seems to be the norm--a business disguised as offering higher quality products/services or better experience to justify the price point. This model seems to work just as well and captures a subset of people willing to risk paying more for a hopefully more consumer friendly experience. The issue with all of this is, as a consumer, you can't know without trying, and are limited by anecdata of trial and error while businesses often have significantly larger pools of information and therefor leverage to work with and strategize against consumers on price points and margin padding. Reviews and that sort of shared information are already gamed with so much misinformation and disinformation that these consumer hostile strategies continue to hold well (and are legal). I can try limiting reviews to a trusted network by word of mouth so I know people aren't hustling me (mostly, for now) but that only helps when someone in my trust network has a recommendation. Often, they don't, and they too have limited selection so their anecdata is a small sample size as well, meaning a better consumer experience can exist at a better price point. As such, I'm not sure how you resolve this asymmetry in information in free markets. Consumers almost never have leverage unless they collude together because they lack scale and information that come with the resources of owning a business. Here you have hundreds, thousands, millions of customers you can sample from and test different strategies against, optimizing for your margins. As a consumer, I don't have the resources to do this and since consumer information is largely disjoint, I'm always left at a disadvantage hoping some business won't screw me over as many frequently do. What's worse is that if a consumer hostile business is successful enough to accumulate enough resources to play the continous rebrand/rename game, I can't possibly even build a reputation against something I consume. I'm instead encouraged to push to established businesses and further entrench the massive market share holders where we tend towards a different set of monopolistic anti-consumer strategies.
• petilon 5y ago
  This isn't limited to newspapers! Have you tried canceling internet service? My internet service did not use internet for cancelation. I had to call. Free ad for t-mobile: their 5G service for home internet is awesome.
• josefresco 5y ago
  I wonder if this will apply to Network Solutions, which requires you call to cancel services.
• nixpulvis 5y ago
  AT&T is offensively in trouble here. Not only can't you cancel easily on the web, you can't even go into their stores to cancel either. Finally, after 45+ minutes on the phone, they have a habit of hanging up on you. It's now happened to me twice within a month of each other. The FTC better have some real teeth here.
• strenholme 5y ago
  Since I live in California, which has a “click to subscribe means you must have click to cancel” regulation, this isn’t an issue for me. After the New York Times published their inaccurate hit piece attacking Scott Alexander and Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, I was able to cancel online just clicking my way through. I now subscribe to The Wall Street Journal, which looks to be the most neutral newspaper right now. Being a California resident, I have a special “California only” cancel button on my user control panel.
  • MAGZine 5y ago
    Canceling aside, I don't think the WSJ is particularly neutral, but perhaps it does appeal to your sensibilities (note, however, those are not the same). I find WSJ to take particularly corporatist/capitialist views on things. Which is fine for things business, I suppose, but I've read many articles from WSJ that are basically "hey government sucks, am i rite?" which is not neutral.
    • jonahhorowitz 5y ago
      Not that HN is really the place for this discussion, but the _news_ section of the WSJ is pretty neutral and well written. The _opinion_ page is very slanted towards "corporatist/capitalist views".
      • MAGZine 5y ago
        That's an easy thing to say because it's more difficult to disprove. You could say that about the NYT, Al Jazeera, NPR, CNN, etc etc. Of course the topics that an institution choose to talk about also biases it. If you spend all of your front page space complaining about unions and talking about business, that is a different bias than one who dedicates column inches to stories about the environment. Or different from once that dedicates column inches to ones about social issues. But even if you go on wsj.com, I see "Biden EV Tax Credit Puts UAW Over Environment, Nonunion Auto Makers Say," -- which is such an interesting way to frame the topic, but certainly not what I would call neutral. The topic pits UAW versus Nonunion automakers. If you want neutral news, in terms of content and in terms of story coverage, there are better options than the WSJ.
• EmilioMartinez 5y ago
  A hard-to-cancel suscription is basically automatic theft, and should be treated as such
• viro 5y ago
  Honestly avoiding stuff like this is why I loved how the App Store did subscriptions.
• boringg 5y ago
  Thank Effing God ... I don't care if your churn metrics go to isht please enforce this decision.
• twothamendment 5y ago
  I've only had one good experience with call to cancel. Ok, one company and many good calls. Drumroll please, for AOL. Every time I'd try to cancel they'd give me another two or three months for free. Then I'd pay them for a month and call again. I was a teen and paying for this new fangled internet myself because my parents didn't get it yet. Paying 4 months out of the year was affordable!
• evancoop 5y ago
  There's something odd about legislation of this ilk. Virtually every comment here bemoans these nefarious activities, and the commenters themselves try to avoid companies that utilize these dark patterns. The market, therefore, seems to be working - the companies that pull this type of nefarious BS find their way into the dumpster of failed ventures (as they should!). Would a law, in effect, force companies to mask their unsavory dispositions? Customer LTV is actually higher when they are given the opportunity to control their subscriptions...
  • dahart 5y ago
    > the companies that pull this type of nefarious BS find their way into the dumpster of failed ventures What are some examples of companies that failed over this? All I’m seeing here are very large very healthy companies being named like NYT, WSJ, Sirius, etc. Seeing anecdotes of a few people trying to avoid being scammed doesn’t demonstrate a functioning market. If anything, the evidence here is the opposite of what you suggest: that dark patterns are working on the public at large and companies can easily get away with bad behavior indefinitely if allowed to. > Would a law, in effect, force companies to mask their unsavory dispositions? How would that work here, exactly? If there’s a cancel button, then there’s a cancel button. Regulation has worked well for many, many things. Companies sometimes do need to be told what’s not acceptable, and they have in the past complied once told.
    • evancoop 5y ago
      Can we truly scour the internet for small-time violators? Sure, if a massive entity like NYT or WSJ fail to comply, that could be called-out and addressed. But are we prepared to enforce such a paradigm at scale?
      • dahart 5y ago
        Yes, we are prepared to enforce this. That’s precisely what laws, courts, and an enforcement agency are for. This process has worked many times in the past and it will work now and in the future. I don’t understand your implied objection. Yes, small time violators, and big time violators alike, will be reported by their customers. Currently, customers don’t have any place at all to take their complaints, because it’s not illegal for a company to attempt to prevent a subscription cancellation. How do you propose to call out and address the issue without a law? How are you proposing to enforce individual violations, and what is the violation exactly? You claimed that market forces were taking care of this already, but that’s not true, and runs in direct contradiction to the mountain of evidence in this thread alone.
• whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  I think the hypocrisy of allowing call to cancel and not doing anything about to stop it WHILE suing apple (which DOES make click to cancel a reality for subscriptions) was probably a bit too glaring. The reason people go for the walled gardens is because the govt, which would be the natural control point, has dropped the ball totally in terms of online scams and crap. And no, I'm not talking about going after google for the umpteenth time for some random thing - but the straight crap / lies / scams (impossible to cancel online subscriptions, bogus tech support installing back doors etc).
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Beautiful. Take that, NYT website, lol
• xmorse 5y ago
  The best thing the FTC did in the last 2 years
• flanbiscuit 5y ago
  There was a skit on SNL recently that satirized this issue, wonder if the FTC was watching, ha! It's about trying to cancel your cable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM
• taxyz23 5y ago
  I totally agree that call to cancel is a PITA and companies should be called on the carpet for it. The prime example of this is when I tried to cancel my Consumer Reports subscription a few years ago and it required me to Snail Mail a cancellation. What hypocrisy. But government intervention and more red tape is not the answer. Public shaming and taking your business elsewhere works better and maintains freedom. Otherwise we are only inviting in the long, inflexible, and political arm of the bureaucracy (and even worse in this case federal bureaucracy) to get involved in every facet of how a business structures its interactions with its customers. It encourages wasteful litigation, clutters our life with mountains made from molehills, incentivizes running to the government for the answer to every annoyance, and makes starting and running a small business the equivalent of running a minefield not knowing which local, state, or federal law or regulation it may violate with any particular action.
  • unethical_ban 5y ago
    Ah yes, that free market where any rapscallion can create a multi-hundred-reporter corps filled with publisher and Nobel prize winning staff spread across the globe to report on current events and politics. You can't fork the NYT.
  • sneak 5y ago
    > Public shaming and taking your business elsewhere works better and maintains freedom. This was not borne out in practice. I, too, wish more consumers were discerning and picky, and I, too, dislike regulation, but this part of the argument against it isn't valid.
• skyde 5y ago
  I faced this problem with the airport Gogo wifi they charge monthly fee but you need to call and spend hours on the phone to cancel.
• timwis 5y ago
  Thank goodness! When trying to cancel NY Times, I had to cancel it in PayPal because I couldn't get through to NYT!
• myfavoritedog 5y ago
  I signed up for an introductory rate subscription to an online publication, then when the introductory rate was running out, I thoroughly intended to just let it continue at the higher rate. By chance, I noticed that if I DID want to cancel, I needed to call. The wrongness of the tactic made my decision for me. I called them right away to cancel and let them know that I would have continued with my subscription, but I wouldn't pay for a publication that used unethical retention practices.
• nunez 5y ago
  This is amazing. I wanted to delete a bunch of services I had passwords for in 1Password. A significant number of them couldn't be cancelled online. You couldn't even call. You had to email to ask for a cancellation. This, in effect, meant that they held your data hostage. Of course, this means nothing if fees aren't associated with non-compliance.
  • jdc0589 5y ago
    this is only useful for some paid services (and does nothing to deal with your data they still have), but virtual credit cards are a life saver. I feel powerful every time I can't cancel something from a service's website but I can just go kill the virtual credit card I signed up with.
    • lostcolony 5y ago
      Though you still need a documentation trail showing the attempted cancelation, lest you find your credit history affected and a some scummy collection agency trying to collect years later.
    • metalliqaz 5y ago
      some of them will continue billing your account, even if they can't charge your card, and eventually turn it over to collections
    • nunez 5y ago
      I learned about Abine and Privacy while going through that exercise and they have, indeed, changed my life. Between that, Firefox containers, and iPostal (virtual mailing address that accepts almost any sort of mail), I have much stronger identity protection when I shop online. Every recurring subscription gets made on isolated Privacy cards. Every website that isn't Amazon gets an independent Blur card. I now never have to worry about overcharges, data breaches, or my data being sold. The adtechs can have it; go nuts!
  • Westontony905 5y ago
    I have been working for a year plus to get my credit to 700plus, I felt pretty bad when I checked there wasn’t any improvement. One delighted evening after I closed from work, I sketch through the internet trying to figure out how to bring up my score, I came across lot of articles/testimonies of different kind and one caught my attention speaking and recommending a particular hacking company named TROVIAN CREDIT REPAIR. I quickly write out the details TROVIANCREDITREPAIR@GMAIL.COM or text; +1 (424) 307 4562 and contacted them; thereafter they replied and told me they are fully back in service. To cut the long story short they started with the repair and got my score to exactly 799 and remove all the negative items replacing them with awesome trade lines. Get in touch with them via the above contacts and get your credit perfectly fixed.
• newshorts 5y ago
  Nothing is easier than mailing a letter. You don’t even need a router for it! Simply click to subscribe and mail us a letter of intent to cancel when you want. Of course it will take us 60 days to process mail and if your handwriting isn’t great we might not be able to read your account number. To access your account number, simply log in and click the lower right hand side of the page 5 times while holding the shift key down. If your account number doesn’t show up, call tech support.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Looking at you Consumer Reports and LA Times! Any company that forces me to call to cancel, and then works really really hard to retain me, and then starts offering me better and better deals loses my business for life. If you can't offer me your best rate before I leave then you are just trying to get over on me and I'm offended. Have fun losing customers and going out of business.
• travisporter 5y ago
  I once had to reset my password for Comcast via web chat. "while I'm resetting this, can I interest you in a TV service? Only 60/mo no additional fees." Wasted 10 mins of his time getting TV service priced out (of course - set to box wasn't included!) and said no thanks. Of course as a student my time was essentially worthless
• izzydata 5y ago
  I should have waited to cancel my Spectrum so I could sue them for the ridiculous phone call I had to have.
• nobody9999 5y ago
  Dark patterns aren't just for cancellations. A couple years back, a friend bought me a one year gift subscription for Britbox[0]. When I tried to activate the gift subscription, the site refused to allow me to do so unless I provided them with a credit card number. Which, from a practical standpoint, makes no sense as it was a gift. I wasn't going to provide these wankers with my credit card number[0], so I then had to have an awkward conversation with my friend as I didn't want her to pay for something I couldn't use. To their (very minor) credit, Britbox did refund the cost to my friend. [0] AFAICT, much of the subscription industry relies on having your credit card details so they can continue to bill you. Especially with annual subscriptions, as most folks will forget about it until they see the charge on their credit card statement. Then the subscription service has another year for you to forget about it again. Rinse and repeat.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    One or two of my credit cards offers an unmaintained way to get virtual card numbers with dollar and month limits. I'd just use that. Save the awkwardness with the friend.
  • edge17 5y ago
    This seems to be a common design pattern on iOS App Store as well. Download a 'free' app and don't let the user use the app in trial mode unless they click a button that gets them to sign up, subscribe, or buy some in app purchase.
    • baby 5y ago
      I really really hate this pattern on iOS. This and the app that is completely filled with ads.
      • handrous 5y ago
        Apple-mediated subscriptions are at least easy to list & cancel. I do wish they'd 1) allow explicit demo versions of apps—using IAP to have a de-facto demo that requires IAP to upgrade just isn't as good, IMO, because I want to be able to distinguish demo-to-paid from nickel-and-diming IAP garbage, and 2) have an actually-free filter for apps that don't have ads, IAP, a paid upgrade, or heavy reliance on a paid account of some kind.
• GuardianCaveman 5y ago
  I would just add that services like privacy.com that allow you to create burner cards or cards with specific limits has really helped me with things like gym membership or other places that may make it hard to cancel.
  • timwis 5y ago
    This service is great. I wish they offered it in the UK.
• timwis 5y ago
  I hope they do something like this for gym memberships!
• dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I might cancel my gym membership, and re-join online just to make sure I can use this if I need to.
• dqpb 5y ago
  Next, I'd like a law that requires every service that serves ad's to also have a paid no-ad option.
• ajuc 5y ago
  Another dark pattern - "share my data with these" list, on by default, 4000 entries, and you have to uncheck them manually one-by-one or accept.
• flerovium 5y ago
  Does this apply to ISPs? If so, this headline is much bigger than it appears. In the US, it can often take a full day to cancel Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum... There are horror stories that require follow up over multiple days. If only laws could fight the administrative burden of insurance companies, healthcare providers, credit bureaus...
  • nonameiguess 5y ago
    Ha, Spectrum very helpfully canceled my home Internet service without me even needing to ask when an incoming neighbor fat-fingered their new account signup and accidentally claimed to be moving into my house. On the other hand, it did take a full day to get my service restored.
  • omarhaneef 5y ago
    And phone service like AT&T. Also my question. Maybe if they can not force you to take a modem, and then they only cancel it with a physical return. Another dark pattern.
• eckesicle 5y ago
  Meanwhile in Scandinavia: You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in any way that is most comfortable to you. [0] For example, you can: * send them a letter * send them an email * call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone * write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee All are equally legit and legally binding. Companies obviously do not want to deal with the manual overhead, so services typically have an easily accessible button for you to click. Furthermore, companies are required to notify you at least 1 month before any contract is extended and offer you an easy way to cancel - and if they don't you can cancel at any point and get refunded. [1] [0] for example in Finland: https://www.kkv.fi/sv/information-och-anvisningar/kop-forsaljning-och-avtal/avtal/att-saga-upp-ett-avtal/ https://www.kkv.fi/sv/information-och-anvisningar/kop-forsal... [1] for example in Sweden: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-20141449-om-konsumentskydd-vid-automatisk_sfs-2014-1449 https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-f... EDIT: Just realised Finland isn't Scandinavian, but oh well :)
  • bjoli 5y ago
    Sixt (car rental) did not follow these rules. The procedure was something like "write a letter to out german head quarters". I ended up making a GDPR request for them to first send me all data they had and then remove any data (including email addresses) they had on me. I will hopefully never have to use their services again.
    • nonameiguess 5y ago
      Are you renting a fleet? How do you even subscribe to car rentals? Is this a thing where if you rent frequently enough, you get a discount to just pay constantly instead of per car?
      • bjoli 5y ago
        The swedish laws apply to news letters as well. I rented a car from them in 2015. In 2018 I had enough.
    • kazinator 5y ago
• daariomj 5y ago
  The Economist Magazine makes it extremely hard to unsubscribe. I had to change my credit card.
• MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Seems like a lot of box subscription companies are gonna need to do some work this holiday season. There are a lot of companies out there who are also posing as US entities when they're really based overseas and have small LLCs as US affiliates who sell whitelisted products who will be affected too. Recently I purchased a yearly subscription for an app from a foreign "health" company and after the checkout process, I was presented with some supplement options. These options were showing a discount on a per-month basis, but were also deceptively packaged in such a way that (a) the price was actually per month, and (b) if you chose ANY of the items on the screen, you were immediately billed for them without checkout. Realizing that they just hit me for $270 for half a year's supply of supplements, I immediately sent an email to their customer service that I wanted my money refunded because I did not intend to pay a quarter grand on what were essentially fiber pills. These are shipped from a California warehouse. It was past midnight CST. Twenty minutes later, I receive an email telling me that they are sorry but my order has been processed and there's nothing they can do, but if I wanted, they could send RMA instructions on the package. Their terms of service dictates that they have a "no-refund" policy and will only accept returns if there is physical damage to the shipped product. I asked again, and was rebutted again with the same sort of nonsense. Nobody was processing an order for a small goods company in California after midnight. Welp... my next email to them informed the customer service rep that it was past midnight in California so no shipping had occurred. That I worked for a company with local and national news reach and I would be glad to share the information of my story, the app, the company name, and the parent company name with reporters who would be interested in covering deceptive business practices. 10 minutes later, I received an email apologizing for their transgression and another confirming that the charges were reversed.
• sempron64 5y ago
  I subscribed to Verizon Fios service entirely online but when moving I found out there was no way to cancel except to call their support and bounce through several numbers. Quite annoying. However, because when signing up you do need to have a technician come to your residence, so there is some non-online interaction, it might not be against the rules.
• aczerepinski 5y ago
  I suspect for many sites you could change your address to California and then cancel online. Sites have had to support CA cancelations for years.
• 999900000999 5y ago
  I think Match got sued for this, they go out of their way to stop you from canceling since as a business practice they'll show you bot messages before you sign up. Once you give them 40$ or whatever then you'll immediately see all your matches are fake. This alone is already a problem, but then canceling is deliberately made difficult. The problem is they've ( via their child brands like Tinder as well) made billions doing this. If you can run a business, make 10 billion dollars and then pay a 10 million dollar fine, you'll just pay the fines. I don't have a good solution to this. I personally refuse to give my money to or work for companies in this space.
  • arrosenberg 5y ago
    > I don't have a good solution to this. Break up IAC, which is an illegal combination, throw Barry Diller in jail for fraud and seize his assets.
  • thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
    >The problem is they've ( via their child brands like Tinder as well) made billions doing this. If you can run a business, make 10 billion dollars and then pay a 10 million dollar fine, you'll just pay the fines. Even worse, you'll choose to do it instead of doing something productive with your time. Why do something risky and expensive for less money?
• tombert 5y ago
  I remember about 15 years ago, I signed up for Real Rhapsody's unlimited music service. I tried it for about two months, didn't like it, and found that canceling required me call them on a weekday during business hours (ending at 4pm eastern). I was still in high school at the time, and this is pre-smartphone so it would have been hard for me to do this during lunch, so it was pretty hard for me to cancel. Eventually I had to ask my mom to impersonate me, call them, and cancel it, but it was an idiotic thing. How uncomfortable are you that users will like your service if you have to trick them into staying subscribed? Granted, it was the Real corporation, I really should have seen crap like that coming.
  • bredren 5y ago
    > How uncomfortable are you that users will like your service if you have to trick them into staying subscribed? It reeks of insecurity. The issue is that it may be an honest reflection that it fails to deliver actual value. I can think of many examples of organizations I’ve seen that have used / are a form of dark pattern opt-out/unsub now: - Wave Apps the accounting software with their payroll service. - burning man org in their 2020 ticketing presale - Ancestry.com What the FTC needs to get into labelinf purposefully confusing unsubscribe interfaces that trick the user into not performing the action of intent as fraud. If internal docs show intent to mislead, (which in many cases they will) companies should face criminal charges.
    • inetknght 5y ago
      > If internal docs show intent to mislead, by the time a complaint is made then the internal docs have fallen out of the company's retention and backup policies...
• elwell 5y ago
  Consequently, our children's children will never appreciate this humor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5DeDLI8_IM
• bilalq 5y ago
  Which regulatory body can make "sign up for gym membership in person, send registered mail to cancel" illegal? Unethical subscription processes happen even outside of tech.
  • 0xffff2 5y ago
    The link won't load for me, but based on a quote from the full FTC ruling someone else posted, I'm pretty sure it's the FTC and this rule would do just that. The ruling seem to be much broader than the headline implies.
• nobodyandproud 5y ago
  You ever tried canceling Amazon Prime? Amazon words the cancellation prompt in a way that it SEEMS like you’re out the $139.00 when it renewed. And injects many options to keep you, while you think you’re canceling. But no, it’s prorated (because it’d be illegal otherwise) and it’s all the way at the bottom many pages down. There are many, many dark patterns
• makecheck 5y ago
  …and collectively billions of hours of wasted time are returned to consumers everywhere. Generally though, we really need some efficient mechanism for saying “hell no” to new things that are clearly anti-consumer, instead of letting them be conceived, implemented, and insufferable for years before anything can be done.
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  AOL's revenue would have been much lower if this had been the policy back at their peak.
• m3kw9 5y ago
  Good middle finger -> WSJ
• m3kw9 5y ago
  One click cancel link should be required to be given for every subscription.
• vaidhy 5y ago
  Great job FTC/Lima. We need it and you delivered. On a separate note. Why is it really hard for HN community to make a compliment? Yes, some companies will try to skirt around. But most of us seem to agree this is a step in the right direction and being hopeful is nice.
  • throw10920 5y ago
    > On a separate note. Why is it really hard for HN community to make a compliment? You can find a bunch of compliments in this thread, and others. Don't portray the "HN community" as a monolithic entity with a single will. It's not. And trying to guilt-trip the community into making compliments is bad form, really annoying, boring to read, and goes against the spirit of intellectual curiosity.
    • dang 5y ago
      I agree with you otherwise, but please edit out swipes like that last sentence. It's not necessary and not in the spirit of "Be kind" [etc.] à la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
      • throw10920 5y ago
        My apologies, I'll rewrite it. [edit: edit window has passed, I missed it] Sorry for making more work for you, dang! Can you help me understand what the best way to express the intent in that last sentence is ("this kind of statement is anti-intellectual and shouldn't be on HN", roughly) without being unkind? (feel free to email me, address is in my profile)
• SubiculumCode 5y ago
  How about "click to subscribe, click 6 diminutive, threateningly labeled buttons to cancel".
• msravi 5y ago
  Meanwhile in India, The Reserve Bank rolled out a new policy (from Oct-1 this year) for recurring transactions on credit cards that requires the cardholder to provide an "e-mandate" for subscriptions with an additional factor of authentication (AFA). The e-mandate can be withdrawn at any time by the cardholder, giving them control of their subscriptions. https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=11668&Mode=0#AN1 https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=1166...
• stretchwithme 5y ago
  My guess is making it easy to unsubscribe to everything will make it more likely that people will experimentally subscribe to things in general. This is actually better for users and legitimate, useful services.
• daertommy 5y ago
  Is this the most upvoted post on HN?
• indus 5y ago
  Last week I analyzed thousands of SaaS vendors that are using dark patterns in their billing loop [O]. Found out that many of the practices are borderline illegal..more so now. Notables: 1. No notification when free trial converts to paid 2. Silent recurring renewals 3. Shady card authorization to bypass rule engines 4. Upsize during billing updates! 5. Charges during training and onboarding [O] https://quolum.com/blog/saas/i-analyzed-saas-billing-dark-patterns/ https://quolum.com/blog/saas/i-analyzed-saas-billing-dark-pa...
• edgyquant 5y ago
  Planet Fitness does this. You can sign up in a couple of minutes online but they require you to go into the store and request cancellation.
• literallyaduck 5y ago
  Now, do must click to renew. How many elderly are still paying for magic jack, AOL, or other vampiric services.
• swayvil 5y ago
  Ran into this with Verizon.
• jgsuw 5y ago
  This is fantastic, I am still bitter from having to wait on the phone for 45 minutes to cancel my NYT subscription, only to have an argument with the poor call-center employee about how I was really resolved to cancel the subscription.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• synergy20 5y ago
  What about IRS's pay me when you profit over stock, deduct 3000 per year if you lose money until you're dead? not symmetric to me, not at all.
• torsday 5y ago
  Looking at you Economist .
• subsubzero 5y ago
  Great job on cracking down on illegal behavior from bad actors. The next step I'd like to see is to focus on having deletion of accounts made very easy for all apps. Alot of web/social media companies make creating a account dead simple, but when you want to delete an account the tab is hidden by dark pattern design, or its made extremely complex and time consuming by sending multiple emails to different 'departments'. Account deletion should be legally as simple as account creation.
• anandsuresh 5y ago
  About time this happened. I experienced this with the ACLU, of all the entities out there using this dark pattern. Enable subscriptions online to donate to the ACLU, but if you changed your mind, you have to get the phone to cancel. Needless to say, I just let my credit card expire.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kelp 5y ago
  California SB-313 (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB313 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...) was passed in 2018 and has this requirement: "... a consumer who accepts an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online shall be allowed to terminate the automatic renewal or continuous service exclusively online, which may include a termination email formatted and provided by the business that a consumer can send to the business without additional information." But I have one recent anecdote that suggests this language is not specific enough to lead to a very good outcome. I had a SiriusXM subscription for my car, and paid $52.21 for the past 12 months of service. And they wanted to renew me for something in the ballpark of $20/month ($240/year). I absolutely hate that business practice and having to go talk to them to negotiate a better rate, otherwise they auto-renew you for a much worse rate than you were already on. So I went to cancel. There is no click to cancel option. You have to call or do online chat. I think the online chat is how they can say they follow California law. It still took me about 30+ minutes to actually cancel the service, because the person responding to the chat has to run through a script to try to retain you. First they want to know if you are enjoying the service. Then they want to know what stations you like. Then it's "I'll switch you to this new plan that's only $12/month, can I go ahead and do that?" All the while I'm telling them that the reason I'm cancelling is that they tried to auto-renew me to a much higher rate, and now they are making it super hard to cancel, which makes me want to cancel more. So I had to go round and round insisting I wanted to cancel. Never did they offer me anything close to the previous rate I was paying. Though I see now that if I re-enabled my subscription I'd get close to that rate again for 6 months. But for a service that I only use when I don't have good cell phone coverage, and the annual time waste they put me through to avoid over paying... It's not worth it.
  • cwp 5y ago
    Damn, I had that exact same experience. Eventually, in exasperation I said something like "I don't want you to respect my wishes, I want you to act on them." And somehow that did the trick and the CSR cancelled immediately. Of course, I then got increasingly insistent spam from them for the next year.
  • kqr2 5y ago
• tvhahn 5y ago
  New York Times, I'm looking at you...
• uncomputation 5y ago
  This will be great for insurance and gym customers. Both make it as difficult as possible to cancel.
• kristopolous 5y ago
  I dealt with "fax to cancel" I think as recently as 2018. The wackiness is almost expected
• lutorm 5y ago
  I got this spiel from someone, don't remember who now. When they told me I needed to call to cancel, I responded "If you can process my subscription online, you can process my cancellation too. If you continue charging my credit card, I will charge back the transaction." Then it was suddenly possible to cancel online just fine.
• lostgame 5y ago
  Related to HN: this is part of the reason I always disliked the allowing of paywalled links on HN. I've had several journalism publications that have pulled this bullshit, and; frankly - at this point it seems to be part of their core profit plan. Probably always was. It's about goddamn time this was a law.
• alixanderwang 5y ago
  "Email to cancel" isn't as insidious, but should also be illegal. Superhuman does this. They responded promptly and cancelled my subscription, but nonetheless, that friction to not provide a synchronous button is always a deliberate choice, and often one that's telling of company values.
• dinvlad 5y ago
  Can we also make it illegal to send unsolicited marketing mail (not email, which can be easily filtered/unsubscribed from) please? It’s a pain to have to “opt out” from those annoying paper-wasting weekly Xfinity mails, when I clearly don’t want to use their service and never signed up for their ads using my new address anyways (I wonder how they learned about it, huh). But no, I have to find a special link to unsubscribe, and they say it takes them another couple months (!) to actually do it.
  • zachlatta 5y ago
    We get letters from Comcast almost every week asking us to switch to Comcast Business at our office, and we're on Comcast Business! (they are literally the only internet provider in our town and their max upload is 40mbps...) So frustrating.
  • Izkata 5y ago
    > and never signed up for their ads using my new address anyways (I wonder how they learned about it, huh). They target the address and then get the owner's name from public records.
  • mfrye0 5y ago
    I believe I read somewhere that mail is trickier. Being that the spam mail essentially subsidizes USPS.
• idworks1 5y ago
  Anecdata (only because I don't have access to the data anymore). Customer satisfaction is so much higher when they get a one click unsubscribe. In fact, when the friction is so low, the customer is likely to start the subscription back. I say this as someone who worked in customer service automation. The worst customer satisfaction score with lowest rate of re-subscription is from companies that make it hell to unsubscribe. I've seen customers send messages like "Cancel and refund immediately!" Since our response was ai driven, we cancel and refund no questions asked in less then a minute (we do fraud check in the background). Many times you get a response back from the customer apologizing for their tone and praising the product. Some of them restart the subscription a cycle or two later. When you make it hard to cancel, you lose customers on the long term. Make it easy, in fact make it friendly. Unless you are selling a shady product, there is no reason to believe customers won't come back. Edit: typo
  • Joeri 5y ago
    There is this common perception of companies as if they are entirely rational organizations, and every policy that we don’t like exists because it is profitable and benefits the company at the expense of the customer. But sometimes bad policies are just bad, they benefit no one, and they exist for dumb reasons. Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies.
    • rudian 5y ago
      I think “companies” have run out of the “benefit of the doubt” as far as I’m concerned. Using the web has become a pain not because companies don’t care about UX, but because they think popup X will increase profits — and it often does. Certainly there’s a good amount of ignorance in every company, but many choices are purposeful.
    • stedolph 5y ago
      Yes, this is the way. It doesn't makes sense.
    • somethingwitty1 5y ago
      An opposite statement can be said with the same amount of authority though: There is a common perception that companies only create policies we don't like through accidents and unforeseeable outcomes, not by specifically crafting policies to benefit the company. But sometimes bad policies are malicious and designed to maximize profits, even at the expense of long-term profits and customer retention. Maybe call to unsubscribe is one of those policies. As someone that has worked (briefly) for a company that operated in this fashion (and being a partial owner of one that the CEO tried to shift to this model...we got the board together and fired him), it is not an accidentally bad policy. It is actively discussed as a way to squeeze out an extra pay cycle (and often more) of payments. In recorded meetings or audited channels (such as email) or even PR releases, you are guided to discuss it as a "personal touch with the customer" and to help "lost customers" resolve the issues rather than cancel. You even try to convince your employees/engineers that is the reason. But when it is face-to-face conversations, the discussions are around the dollars and squeezing out as many pay cycles as you can. I know I was being a bit cheeky with my first paragraph, but this is definitely not one of those "whoops, we didn't think this through" kind of policies. If it were, the policy would have changed without the FTC or laws being needed.
• treebot 5y ago
  Gym memberships are notorious with this. I always wondered how it was even legal. I cancelled my debit card and they sent me to collections.
• timoth3y 5y ago
  This might upset those with more libertarian sensibilities, but it will make life better for almost everyone. It's a win for humanity.
• thayne 5y ago
  This article is talking primarily about publishers. Does it also apply to other subscription services, like say, an ISP?
• Trias11 5y ago
  Click to subscribe. Chargeback to cancel.
• max-ibel 5y ago
  I hate to be that contrarian guy, but I repeatedly put off calling spectrum to cancel our TV subscription (we never ever used it) because it involved talking to an actual salesperson who clearly used all sort of tricks to get me to upgrade to stuff I don't need. Note: I can upgrade plans on spectrum just fine, but cancellation or downgrades means talking on the phone. Based on my anecdata, this technique works just fine for companies - either they can charge longer for things that are not used, and/or they get a chance to personally talk to a customer to upsell them. I'd very much like to believe these technique does work against companies, but I don't see it.
  • update 5y ago
    Spectrum was the first company that came to my mind, too. Last week, my mom recently signed up for spectrum & she bought the traditional TV + Internet + Phone package, when she only needed Internet. I've been putting off calling them since I don't want to deal with talking to anyone. & yep, it is very easy to upgrade your subscription on spectrum's website but there is no way at all to cancel/downgrade online.
• theckel 5y ago
  NYT - do you see this?
• ssharp 5y ago
  As soon as the cancellation process is any more friction than a few online button clicks or a quick online chat, my move is to just contest their last charge on my AMEX and tell AMEX to permanently ban "merchant xyz" from ever charging me again.
• harha 5y ago
  Germany: you can cancel by mail (which we may not receive) or fax.
• nojs 5y ago
  Not a newspaper subscriber but can’t you just cut these payments off at the source by calling the bank and telling them it’s fraudulent and unauthorised? PayPal, Apple etc make this pretty easy for most subscriptions.
  • meitham 5y ago
    I did that with BSKYB for tv subscription 7 years ago. They were chasing for payment until last year.
• metatranca 5y ago
  I live in Florida and recently subscribed to LA Fitness and after a couple days I "discovered" that it is very difficult to cancel with them: you have to send a letter. https://www.wikihow.com/Cancel-an-LA-Fitness-Membership https://www.wikihow.com/Cancel-an-LA-Fitness-Membership
• postalrat 5y ago
  Why can't I cancel any subscription through an interface at my credit card's website?
• mcbutterbunz 5y ago
  I don't see why there isn't a rule that requires a method of unsubscription using the same method by which you subscribed (but not only by the same method). If you can subscribe by their website, you should be able to unsubscribe by their website. Same for phone, in-app, or in person.
• xtat 5y ago
  Every once and a while the FTC does some hero shit
• jwilber 5y ago
  Can finally cancel my nytimes subscription- literally the hardest thing to cancel.
• Johnythree 5y ago
  Am currently extremely pissed of with Expedia. They have been sending me a long list of unwanted emails "Because I had dealings with the company". Which I most definitely have not. And of course there is no way to "unsubscribe" unless I firstly log on. But the trick is that I don't actually have an account. So to unsubscribe from Expedia mailings, I firstly have to create an account. Needless to say, I will never, ever, be doing any business with Expedia.