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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: * s

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
  Avis sends me a monthly statement for $0 dollars, even though I have not rented a car in years. :)
jolux 5y ago
Reading the replies it seems like this law may have incentivized some companies to make themselves extremely difficult to contact in the first place. How does the law deal with this?
- eckesicle 5y ago
  It doesn't. The legal framework leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the judge. They look at the law itself, and interpret the intent of the lawmaker. Suppose I wanted to cancel a service from a firm that was hard to reach. I'd block the payments through my bank and if it ever went to court I'd just need to show I took reasonable steps to attempt to contact them before blocking any payments and then most likely win the case.
- ImPostingOnHN 5y ago
  It is money, not any law, which has incentivized this. For many companies, there's just no financial incentive to let customers easily cancel or contact you once recurring payments are set up. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #1: Once you have their money, you never give it back
registeredcorn 5y ago
I'm interested to know: * Does this apply to all of Scandinavia, or only specifically Finland and Sweden? * How do they avoid abuse of the system? I.e. I unsubscribe you on your behalf by pretending to be you. Surely at least one person must be doing this maliciously on a constant basis. * How many subscription companies are there in countries where this applies compared to countries where there are no such laws? Given the burden, it seems logical to completely ignore and actively avoid the countries where this applies.
jpttsn 5y ago
[1] decrees that (but not how) consumers can cancel auto-renewing contracts immediately iff the business hasn’t informed the consumer about auto-renewal in writing.
aeternum 5y ago
This seems really annoying. You can unsubscribe to most things in writing as well in the US. The issue is that it takes only a misclick to subscribe, whereas writing and mailing a letter or getting a napkin and travelling to the company's HQ takes considerably more effort (few companies have humans answer the phone). Seems that Scandinavia needs to change their laws if the goal is to make it easy for the consumer.
- ess3 5y ago
  I feel like this is missing the point. The point is that it’s illegal to reject a cancellation no matter the medium it was delivered on. So in order to not deal with the overhead and legal trouble of managing napkins that people slip your employees, you’re incentivized to make it as easy as possible
  - aeternum 5y ago
    Because it does not solve the problem. Shady online subscription companies can simply put the office somewhere inaccessible and not accept e-mail/calls from customers. The law should outline mediums that companies must accept. IE have a published webpage or e-mail address that allows unsubscribe.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      I believe the point is that this isn’t acceptable in the Nordic countries
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > This seems really annoying. The most annoying part is that in any thread like this the top comment invariably ends up being some smug observation that <insert European country here> is clearly better than the US.
  - chrsig 5y ago
    The solution to this is to help the US rise to the occasion, not complain about it on the internet.
throwaway894345 5y ago
Man, I remember the ordeal that was trying to cancel a cell phone plan when I was a broke student studying abroad. Had to plead with them in arcane, formal French (a real pain considering I wasn't even fluent in everyday, conversational French--ended up needing help from a native French friend) on stationary and they still rejected my cancellation and continued to charge my French bank account. I tried closing my French bank account, but they wouldn't let me (IIRC because the cell phone provider was making ongoing withdrawals) so I just moved all of my money back to my US account and let the French account go into the red. The French bank continued sending me demands for money. After several years, they eventually notified me that they would be closing my account because I was delinquent.
- napo 5y ago
  Funny, I had the opposite experience. I'm French and I spent 2 years in the US. I had a T-mobile subscription, and it was too painful to cancel my subscription. With my accent I could barely pass the robot that was trying to understand why I was calling. Then when I had someone on the phone, the call just dropped, in the middle of conversations. I did that a few times and then gave up. I assume I'll also receive a notification one day that I'm breaking the law and owe some crazy amount of money.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    T-Mobile has stores all over and they can help you cancel in person (I did this in the US, and it's very common to change carriers). I suspect you can also cancel online. You can also pay with credit card, and in extreme cases you can have your credit card company decline/block charges (I had to do this when Hertz tried to defraud me out of hundreds of dollars). I also suspect banks will happily decline/block charges as well, but I'm less sure since I route most of my transactions through my credit card--at the very least it's quite a lot easier to close a bank account in the US. On the other hand, when I was in France just to open a cell phone account, I had to bring visa paperwork, proof of residence, and a bank account (no cell phone option) and it took 24 hours to open the account (compared with ~15 minutes + a credit card in the US). I'm sure there are lots of things that are more difficult in the US, but France excels at bureaucracy in my experience. I should also note that I love France in general and its investment in nuclear power in particular. (:
elwell 5y ago
How does this law translate to decentralized contracts/subscriptions? It may not be possible to support these analog mediums on an Ethereum smart contract for example.
- ferdowsi 5y ago
  Seems like smart contracts aren't so smart if they don't support easy cancelation mechanisms.
  - elwell 5y ago
    Our future digital overlords might choose to integrate humans into the hivemind to support these analog cancellation requests, but gas costs would certainly spike.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Why? Can't a company make it so that there's a "cancel contract" method? I am not an Ethereum expert, I just don't understand, to be clear. I'm sure this is far more basic than what you know how to do, but this seems pretty simple to add a "cancel contract" method that seems like it'd meet the requirement to be as easy to cancel as it was to set up. The account status seems like they can at any time just read it off the smart contract, they already do for balance monitoring each month in this example. https://www.sitepen.com/blog/smart-contracts-a-tutorial https://www.sitepen.com/blog/smart-contracts-a-tutorial Is the issue that there will be a bunch of extraneous data on the chain or something when, say, Verizon puts their entire customer database onto Ethereum?
  - elwell 5y ago
    I was more so referring to having to support the handing of a napkin to an employee.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      You'll probably have to make it so that either party can cancel contracts.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I tried to delete my Spotify account (in Sweden). Not just cancel, but delete because they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full display and I was not even a little bit okay with that. I think 7 different "yes I'm really sure, yes despite the sad violin music and yes despite the images of sad puppies", a support ticket, several emails going back and forth confirming I'm really sure, and then a few more forms assuring I'm absolutely sure I want to do this. I don't... know what they think they are accomplishing with this obstacle course. If anything this nonsense makes me want to remove the account even more. If it was just a button I might have come back later, but they can rest assured they will never see me again after that nonsense. If that means listening to gramophones for the rest of my life, so be it.
- dgellow 5y ago
  Send an email mentioning you want to delete your accounts and all your personal information from their system, according to GDPR. They have 30 days to comply.
  - gizmo686 5y ago
    A non EU resident doing bussiness with a non EU company has no protections under GDPR. Even if you are an EU resident, the scope of GDPR's extra judicial reach is not entirely clear. Merely accessing a foreign site as an EU resident does not subject it to GDPR. The site needs be actively targeting the EU in some way.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Spotify is a Swedish company.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full display Do you mean this page? https://open.spotify.com/user/daniel https://open.spotify.com/user/daniel That data is also visible to anyone in the app, and you can mark playlists as private.
wpietri 5y ago
One other thing I'd like: For digital subscriptions, I'd like not using the service for, say, 30 days to automatically pause billing. So if I don't use Netflix or read the NYT for a whole billable month, they don't bill me for the month. If there's no cost to the producer and no value to the (non-)user, there shouldn't be a charge.
secondaryacct 5y ago
It's nice. I m French living in Hong Kong, and in both I sometimes have to cancel my credit card to get rid of newspaper subscription. And often, the more the newspaper whines about freedom of the press the harder it is to get rid of their legal warning that I must pay !!! And there was no contract limit during the 1-click 5 minutes sub !!! Mediapart in France was so borderline writing me every week after I had to cancel my second credit card, being unable to send french snail mail from France, the only way they accept ! The first card was for LeMonde. Totally made me hate the militant press, and in BOTH places, it's really insane. Like they treat their readers way worse than the government treat them, and yes, even in Hong Kong :( At least NYT didnt threaten me legally and took a simple email. I was so stressed when I cancelled, there was again no frigging button. I will never again sub to newspaper it's just too much worry you ll have a forever parasitic CC bill until you force cancel the CC :(
- napo 5y ago
  I also had a terrible experience trying to cancel my subscription to Le Monde. In the end I paid a service something like 6euros so that they would send the proper letter. There's 0 chance I will ever subscribe to a newspaper ever again.
_2d30 5y ago
> You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in > any way that is most comfortable to you. [0] > For example, you can: > * send them a letter > * send them an email > * call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone > * write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee This is bad, actually. Unnecessarily raises costs. The FTC's perspective is much improved over this.
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”. Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.
  - _2d30 5y ago
    > Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”. No it shouldn't and that should be obvious. > Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that. Yes, this is good, but the FTC's ruling does this as well so it's better. Only way a company could get around offering click to cancel would be to not offer online signup. Best of luck to those companies succeeding!
    - another-dave 5y ago
      I imagine though that you'll still have companies trying to stretch the definition of "at least as easy as sign-up" to breaking point. You didn't just "click to sign up", you probably filled in a sign-up form to create an account, clicked on a link in your email to validate your account, then filled in another form to add payment info. I wouldn't be surprised to see companies saying we can have multiple, multi-page 'exit' forms and an "Are you sure?" email and still be FTC compliant.
    - mynameisvlad 5y ago
euroderf 5y ago
Wellll, Finland IS Scandinavian, in social system if not in language.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tzs 5y ago
If I write your name on a napkin along with a request to cancel service and hand it to random employee of some company you have a subscription with, how do they verify that it really came from you?
Breza 5y ago
Sounds like the CANSPAM Act in the United States. You can unsubscribe to an email any number of ways.

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

jolux 5y ago

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

eckesicle 5y ago
It doesn't. The legal framework leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the judge. They look at the law itself, and interpret the intent of the lawmaker. Suppose I wanted to cancel a service from a firm that was hard to reach. I'd block the payments through my bank and if it ever went to court I'd just need to show I took reasonable steps to attempt to contact them before blocking any payments and then most likely win the case.
ImPostingOnHN 5y ago
It is money, not any law, which has incentivized this. For many companies, there's just no financial incentive to let customers easily cancel or contact you once recurring payments are set up. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #1: Once you have their money, you never give it back

registeredcorn 5y ago

I'm interested to know: * Does this apply to all of Scandinavia, or only specifically Finland and Sweden? * How do they avoid abuse of the system? I.e. I unsubscribe you on your behalf by pretending to be you. Surely at least one person must be doing this maliciously on a constant basis. * How many subscription companies are there in countries where this applies compared to countries where there are no such laws? Given the burden, it seems logical to completely ignore and actively avoid the countries where this applies.

jpttsn 5y ago

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

aeternum 5y ago

This seems really annoying. You can unsubscribe to most things in writing as well in the US. The issue is that it takes only a misclick to subscribe, whereas writing and mailing a letter or getting a napkin and travelling to the company's HQ takes considerably more effort (few companies have humans answer the phone). Seems that Scandinavia needs to change their laws if the goal is to make it easy for the consumer.

ess3 5y ago
I feel like this is missing the point. The point is that it’s illegal to reject a cancellation no matter the medium it was delivered on. So in order to not deal with the overhead and legal trouble of managing napkins that people slip your employees, you’re incentivized to make it as easy as possible
- aeternum 5y ago
  Because it does not solve the problem. Shady online subscription companies can simply put the office somewhere inaccessible and not accept e-mail/calls from customers. The law should outline mediums that companies must accept. IE have a published webpage or e-mail address that allows unsubscribe.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    I believe the point is that this isn’t acceptable in the Nordic countries
rootusrootus 5y ago
> This seems really annoying. The most annoying part is that in any thread like this the top comment invariably ends up being some smug observation that <insert European country here> is clearly better than the US.
- chrsig 5y ago
  The solution to this is to help the US rise to the occasion, not complain about it on the internet.

throwaway894345 5y ago

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

napo 5y ago
Funny, I had the opposite experience. I'm French and I spent 2 years in the US. I had a T-mobile subscription, and it was too painful to cancel my subscription. With my accent I could barely pass the robot that was trying to understand why I was calling. Then when I had someone on the phone, the call just dropped, in the middle of conversations. I did that a few times and then gave up. I assume I'll also receive a notification one day that I'm breaking the law and owe some crazy amount of money.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  T-Mobile has stores all over and they can help you cancel in person (I did this in the US, and it's very common to change carriers). I suspect you can also cancel online. You can also pay with credit card, and in extreme cases you can have your credit card company decline/block charges (I had to do this when Hertz tried to defraud me out of hundreds of dollars). I also suspect banks will happily decline/block charges as well, but I'm less sure since I route most of my transactions through my credit card--at the very least it's quite a lot easier to close a bank account in the US. On the other hand, when I was in France just to open a cell phone account, I had to bring visa paperwork, proof of residence, and a bank account (no cell phone option) and it took 24 hours to open the account (compared with ~15 minutes + a credit card in the US). I'm sure there are lots of things that are more difficult in the US, but France excels at bureaucracy in my experience. I should also note that I love France in general and its investment in nuclear power in particular. (:

elwell 5y ago

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

ferdowsi 5y ago
Seems like smart contracts aren't so smart if they don't support easy cancelation mechanisms.
- elwell 5y ago
  Our future digital overlords might choose to integrate humans into the hivemind to support these analog cancellation requests, but gas costs would certainly spike.
neltnerb 5y ago
Why? Can't a company make it so that there's a "cancel contract" method? I am not an Ethereum expert, I just don't understand, to be clear. I'm sure this is far more basic than what you know how to do, but this seems pretty simple to add a "cancel contract" method that seems like it'd meet the requirement to be as easy to cancel as it was to set up. The account status seems like they can at any time just read it off the smart contract, they already do for balance monitoring each month in this example. https://www.sitepen.com/blog/smart-contracts-a-tutorial https://www.sitepen.com/blog/smart-contracts-a-tutorial Is the issue that there will be a bunch of extraneous data on the chain or something when, say, Verizon puts their entire customer database onto Ethereum?
- elwell 5y ago
  I was more so referring to having to support the handing of a napkin to an employee.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    You'll probably have to make it so that either party can cancel contracts.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I tried to delete my Spotify account (in Sweden). Not just cancel, but delete because they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full display and I was not even a little bit okay with that. I think 7 different "yes I'm really sure, yes despite the sad violin music and yes despite the images of sad puppies", a support ticket, several emails going back and forth confirming I'm really sure, and then a few more forms assuring I'm absolutely sure I want to do this. I don't... know what they think they are accomplishing with this obstacle course. If anything this nonsense makes me want to remove the account even more. If it was just a button I might have come back later, but they can rest assured they will never see me again after that nonsense. If that means listening to gramophones for the rest of my life, so be it.

dgellow 5y ago
Send an email mentioning you want to delete your accounts and all your personal information from their system, according to GDPR. They have 30 days to comply.
- gizmo686 5y ago
  A non EU resident doing bussiness with a non EU company has no protections under GDPR. Even if you are an EU resident, the scope of GDPR's extra judicial reach is not entirely clear. Merely accessing a foreign site as an EU resident does not subject it to GDPR. The site needs be actively targeting the EU in some way.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Spotify is a Swedish company.
dehrmann 5y ago
> they inexplicably put my profile on the Internet in full display Do you mean this page? https://open.spotify.com/user/daniel https://open.spotify.com/user/daniel That data is also visible to anyone in the app, and you can mark playlists as private.

wpietri 5y ago

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

secondaryacct 5y ago

It's nice. I m French living in Hong Kong, and in both I sometimes have to cancel my credit card to get rid of newspaper subscription. And often, the more the newspaper whines about freedom of the press the harder it is to get rid of their legal warning that I must pay !!! And there was no contract limit during the 1-click 5 minutes sub !!! Mediapart in France was so borderline writing me every week after I had to cancel my second credit card, being unable to send french snail mail from France, the only way they accept ! The first card was for LeMonde. Totally made me hate the militant press, and in BOTH places, it's really insane. Like they treat their readers way worse than the government treat them, and yes, even in Hong Kong :( At least NYT didnt threaten me legally and took a simple email. I was so stressed when I cancelled, there was again no frigging button. I will never again sub to newspaper it's just too much worry you ll have a forever parasitic CC bill until you force cancel the CC :(

napo 5y ago
I also had a terrible experience trying to cancel my subscription to Le Monde. In the end I paid a service something like 6euros so that they would send the proper letter. There's 0 chance I will ever subscribe to a newspaper ever again.

_2d30 5y ago

> You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in > any way that is most comfortable to you. [0] > For example, you can: > * send them a letter > * send them an email > * call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone > * write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee This is bad, actually. Unnecessarily raises costs. The FTC's perspective is much improved over this.

mynameisvlad 5y ago
Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”. Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that.
- _2d30 5y ago
  > Customer choice and experience should almost always trump “increased costs”. No it shouldn't and that should be obvious. > Plus, this ignores practically the entirety of the rest of their comment, where they explain that the extreme openness just means that companies make it absurdly easy to do so they explicitly don’t have to deal with all that. Yes, this is good, but the FTC's ruling does this as well so it's better. Only way a company could get around offering click to cancel would be to not offer online signup. Best of luck to those companies succeeding!
  - another-dave 5y ago
    I imagine though that you'll still have companies trying to stretch the definition of "at least as easy as sign-up" to breaking point. You didn't just "click to sign up", you probably filled in a sign-up form to create an account, clicked on a link in your email to validate your account, then filled in another form to add payment info. I wouldn't be surprised to see companies saying we can have multiple, multi-page 'exit' forms and an "Are you sure?" email and still be FTC compliant.
  - mynameisvlad 5y ago

euroderf 5y ago

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

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tzs 5y ago

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

Breza 5y ago

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