8 ms·

Disclosure: I only read up until it was revealed what the policy was. This was always my opinion on this. "As easy to cancel as it is to sign up". It's simple,

Disclosure: I only read up until it was revealed what the policy was. This was always my opinion on this. "As easy to cancel as it is to sign up". It's simple, and completely shuts down this malicious behaviour without making it harder to operate for the honest companies (or worse for customers in any way I can think of). Usually these policies have downsides but I can't really think of any. This kind of behaviour is common among banks as well, they use their dinosaur status when it comes to things that are bad for their business, but can be very progressive on the other end of things. For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents (here in Sweden at least) to be handed to the other bank. I had to first wait in the support, then ask politely to get these documents. They told me that they would snail mail them to me immediately, but after two weeks I called them again, then they said sorry and sent me a PDF instead proving that they could have done this immediately...

inglor_cz 2y ago
"As easy to cancel as it is to sign up" Hm, I would prefer two-step sign up to one-step unsubscribe.
- litenboll 2y ago
  Sure, but it's a minimum. Also, the incentive here is aligned with what's best for the customer, i.e. they probably want to make their two step subscription process to become one step which automatically gives the user an easier process to unsubscribe.
- pbasista 2y ago
  Why the asymmetry? And what do you have in mind when you refer to "two-step sign up"?
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    For my convenience; and by two-step sign up I mean "enter my e-mail into a form, then receive a confirmation e-mail and click on a confirmation link to be actually subscribed".
    - fckgw 2y ago
      Are you confusing this with email newsletter subscriptions? This is talking about paid membership services, the kind of thing where you need an account and often payment methods.
      - inglor_cz 2y ago
        Yes :) Sorry.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    It would stop my email doppelgänger from signing up for services under my address.
misstuned 2y ago
The same goes for all services. I was able to sign up for an ISP service (in the UK) online very easily, with a few clicks and entries onto a form to enter my details, choose my installation date, choose my speed, etc. Fast forward a few years, I'm leaving that house and need to cancel the internet - snail mail letter needed.
- litenboll 2y ago
  It's similar here in Sweden. Usually they require a call to support, officially. However, I think there is a law/policy that require them to accept unsubscriptions by mail/message, regardless of what they say on their website. I recently did this and it worked! Maybe there's something similar in the UK?
  - eckesicle 2y ago
    Yes that’s right. You can unsubscribe by any which way you want. Mail, phone call, pigeon. Any message sent to any employee or office in anyway is deemed acceptable for giving notice for any service or contract.
- nanoservices 2y ago
  There is zero incentive for a company to invest in tooling and tech to make processes that lose them customers more efficient. This is something that has to be regulated and enforced. I just don't see a c-suit clamoring to spend money on making it easier to leave.
  - unsupp0rted 2y ago
    The harder they make leaving, the less % chance that I'm ever coming back. But I suppose they know and don't care.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    There is a reason to invest in this, the rationale goes as follows: Some of my customers will legitimately need to cancel, unsubscribe, stop using, or whatever, but they like the product. If I piss these customers off, they may recommend against using it, and refuse to ever use it again so I should accept that they're leaving with grace and maybe they'll return later. You can offer to "pause" a subscription for example, "Posted to Amundsen-Scott† for six months? Alas Swim Fun Inc don't have a pool there, but when you get back just hit resume and you can keep the same pricing, meanwhile we won't charge you". But far too many "business leaders" are focused on short term gains at any cost and so this doesn't compute for them. They don't care that you currently like the product and would resubscribe when you get back from the pole, because that's a year or more away, they care about next quarter, and if you aren't income next quarter you're irrelevant to them, fuck you. † Amundsen-Scott is the name of the base at the South Pole of the planet. It's a cool place. But lots of services aren't available there or would make no sense. You can't live there permanently, so those people are coming back.
echelon 2y ago
> For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents How would this work? The lender may have paid for your loan (and may not have even gotten the right to service the loan). How do they make their money back? What about the mortgage-backed securities market?
- litenboll 2y ago
  Maybe I described it in a bad way. I'm talking about renegotiating the interest rate with another bank. So the original bank loan is not moved in practice, it's just paid back in full. It's law here in Sweden that the mortgage plan can't be changed (I.e. number of years etc) if you change bank, so the documents are related to this.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    Ahh, this is called "refinancing" in the US.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
So... EU laws?
- jkaplowitz 2y ago
  What EU-wide law requires it to be as easy to cancel as to sign up? I’m sitting in Germany right now and I’m unaware of any such law - though it might very well be recent and not fully transposed into German law, or might be situational or not widely complied with. It’s a good idea though, absolutely.
  - mtmail 2y ago
    We have the regulation in Germany, but afaik it's not EU-wide. The "Gesetz über faire Verbraucherverträge" basically says that if something can be subscribed to easily online, then the company also has to provide an easy unsubscribe. It goes into detail how such a button should look like, how labelled, what data the confirmation page has to list and how fast the confirmation has to be (immediate).
    - tomschwiha 2y ago
      I believe the EU law sets the minimum required conditions for contracts (fair, not abusing the customer), but the individual EU-countries can implement more consumer friendly rules.
  - patrickk 2y ago
    It's horrendus in Germany trying to cancel a mobile phone subscription, internet service, gym membership or the likes. You have to jump through hoops like sending a registered physical letter, 3 months before the end of the service period for it to be considered a valid cancellation ("Kündigung"). Without this, you're forced into paying for another year. EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer nonsense.
    - tomschwiha 2y ago
      This is no longer true, it is limited to a one month period (after a possible 2 year minimum contract to offer "special discounts") in advance and every contract can be cancelled online.
efitz 2y ago
I have been trying to get my state legislators to implement such a consumer law for over a decade. The federal proposal will likely be ineffective unless it has an individual cause of action. What that means is that the only way (IMO) such a law works is not if the government enforces it, but rather if any consumer can sue the company in small claims court for a reasonable judgment (eg $1000 or something). Now the company has to fix their ways or feel death from a million cuts, and the cost to defend likely exceeds the cost to pay. The other things the law needs (it may have but the article wasn’t clear) are clarity and penalties for dark patterns. For example, “as simple as it was to subscribe” needs to be WAY more detailed, eg “takes no more time for a reasonable person to unsubscribe than it did to subscribe” and “the user must be able to use the same communication channel or mechanism (eg web, mobile app, etc) used to subscribe, in order to unsubscribe”, and “at the time of subscription, unsubscribe instructions must be provided to the user via a persistent medium such as email”, and “the unsubscribe interface must be prominently discoverable on the web site or mobile application”, etc. And any dark patterns or intentional violations need to make the recoverable amount subject to a multiplier. I am happy that the government is tackling this but doing it through regulatory action is not likely to help much IMO; especially in light is the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Chevron deference, it’s likely not to last through legal challenges. (IANAL)
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I agree with the bit about individual cause of action, as long as it includes attorney fees too, as that is the way to go from having to file yourself, to getting juicy lawyers lined up to make bank (from my experience litigating FOIA). In fact, with FOIA in Illinois the only way to hurt a non-compliant public body is with the attorney fees[]. There is a civil penalty per violation, but it isn't paid to the litigant, but it is paid by the public body to the county. As one government lawyer said to me, "I don't care if I lose! I just write a check out to myself!" [] some of the lawyers I know who do this work agree to split their fees with the litigant as an incentive for them to see it through, which I don't think is technically legal, but it let's people keep the government honest and make some change for their effort
eckesicle 2y ago
Swedish legislation has it right here. You can unsubscribe by any means you prefer. Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. The choice is completely with the party who wishes to terminate the agreement. It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.
- dataflow 2y ago
  > Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. How would that even... work? Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area? And a customer who feels like a company a hard time could just put a notice in the paper and then collect money because the company obviously won't read every newspaper? Also, what about companies wanting to give customers a hard time by canceling their subscriptions - now customers have to read every newspaper too? I must be missing something...
  - BartjeD 2y ago
    Just what you receive, i'd assume. Where reception is a legal definition. Essentially when a reasonable third party can be said to have received. In English legal systems attached terms and conditions work the same way, with regard to receiving them.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    "legal notice in a newspaper" is still very much a thing in common law jurisdictions, with a long history, see banns going way back https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns if you change your name you need to put it in the newspaper, and https://futureofnewspapers.net/how-to-place-a-legal-notice-in-a-newspaper/ https://futureofnewspapers.net/how-to-place-a-legal-notice-i... There are many different types of legal ads, with different costs to advertise. The most common type of legal notice in New York is an LLC formation notice. The State of New York requires limited liability corporations to run an ad informing the public on the formation of the new corporation. There are also FCC, SLA liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe notices, name change notices, divorce notices (also known as dissolution of marriage notices), and probate notices.
kwanbix 2y ago
This is how it works in Argentina. For at least 15 years IIRC.
nerdjon 2y ago
My only concern about this is the signup processes that already take multiple pages anyways. Take cell phones or internet, I don't have an exact number but I feel like with those given all of the information I have to put in, various agreements, etc etc once my service is in my cart I generally have 3, 4, maybe more pages of stuff to go through. Is the "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up" showing me the same number of pages trying to convince me to stay? Sure at least in that case it is still online, but it leaves plenty of room for dark patterns. Could something that states something as simple as that, just lead to a slightly worse signup process in the hopes that they can then convince customers to stay longer with those dark patterns. It would be a gamble on the companys part, but could pay off. I realize no law will be perfect, but I worry that something that simple could be abused when it would likely just be better to make a law about unsubscribing in the first place that applies across the board. Edit: I was thinking about this more. But what exactly is "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up"? When I sign up for a service I am paying for at a minimum I had to create a username, a password, and put in my credit card. Maybe I had to validate my email and/or phone. Maybe I had to put in my address, validate I was a student, etc etc. Signing up is not a one click thing, so just stating that neither would canceling. I get the spirit of saying something like that, but with simplicity I feel like also opens up room for interpretation and it doing nothing to really help except for some extreme cases (like needing to call). But I also look at my gym membership, I could not sign up until I physically went in or at the very least talked to someone on the phone. That gives them the power to do the exact same thing when I want to cancel.
- litenboll 2y ago
  Yeah I agree with this, it's a very good point. Of course a real law needs more narrow wording. The spirit of it should be more about not allowing companies to have different means for subscribing and unsubscribing. Then there can be additional rules that prevent them from convoluting the process more than necessary.
- intended 2y ago
  I think this counts as over thinking. Unsubscribing is MILES harder in many countries. The unsubscribe link is buried in some unknown sub menu, customer support dumps you, or the like. Trying to fatigue someone out of subscribing is a bad business model. If people want to leave, it should be dead simple to do so.
lttlrck 2y ago
Why more than one-click? We already have plenty of examples of this working, everyone else needs to get on board.
atoav 2y ago
I still recall a big reputable newspaper that was approaching students with free sample subscriptions to their newspaper. The sign up was super simple, to end the subscription you had to do the telephone equivalent of getting through a maze blindfolded while sacrificing your first born when the stars aligned right. After that experience that news source is on my and many of my colleagues black lists. And we are the core demographic they would probably like to target. Yeah.
sureIy 2y ago
> As easy to cancel as it is to sign up I think that’s not enough in some cases. Signing up requires inputting a bunch of data; unsubscribing should be 2 clicks at most, no logins.
- fckgw 2y ago
  How would you unsubscribe from a subscription service without logging in and confirming your account?
tracker1 2y ago
Until they require you to dig out your CC and input the number and the cvv code to cancel, which shouldn't be needed, but hey, it's "as easy" as signing up. ;-) Oh, sorry, that's not the card you signed up with... what do you mean you don't have the card that expired last year that rolled over when you signed up?

inglor_cz 2y ago

"As easy to cancel as it is to sign up" Hm, I would prefer two-step sign up to one-step unsubscribe.

litenboll 2y ago
Sure, but it's a minimum. Also, the incentive here is aligned with what's best for the customer, i.e. they probably want to make their two step subscription process to become one step which automatically gives the user an easier process to unsubscribe.
pbasista 2y ago
Why the asymmetry? And what do you have in mind when you refer to "two-step sign up"?
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  For my convenience; and by two-step sign up I mean "enter my e-mail into a form, then receive a confirmation e-mail and click on a confirmation link to be actually subscribed".
  - fckgw 2y ago
    Are you confusing this with email newsletter subscriptions? This is talking about paid membership services, the kind of thing where you need an account and often payment methods.
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      Yes :) Sorry.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  It would stop my email doppelgänger from signing up for services under my address.

misstuned 2y ago

The same goes for all services. I was able to sign up for an ISP service (in the UK) online very easily, with a few clicks and entries onto a form to enter my details, choose my installation date, choose my speed, etc. Fast forward a few years, I'm leaving that house and need to cancel the internet - snail mail letter needed.

litenboll 2y ago
It's similar here in Sweden. Usually they require a call to support, officially. However, I think there is a law/policy that require them to accept unsubscriptions by mail/message, regardless of what they say on their website. I recently did this and it worked! Maybe there's something similar in the UK?
- eckesicle 2y ago
  Yes that’s right. You can unsubscribe by any which way you want. Mail, phone call, pigeon. Any message sent to any employee or office in anyway is deemed acceptable for giving notice for any service or contract.
nanoservices 2y ago
There is zero incentive for a company to invest in tooling and tech to make processes that lose them customers more efficient. This is something that has to be regulated and enforced. I just don't see a c-suit clamoring to spend money on making it easier to leave.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  The harder they make leaving, the less % chance that I'm ever coming back. But I suppose they know and don't care.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  There is a reason to invest in this, the rationale goes as follows: Some of my customers will legitimately need to cancel, unsubscribe, stop using, or whatever, but they like the product. If I piss these customers off, they may recommend against using it, and refuse to ever use it again so I should accept that they're leaving with grace and maybe they'll return later. You can offer to "pause" a subscription for example, "Posted to Amundsen-Scott† for six months? Alas Swim Fun Inc don't have a pool there, but when you get back just hit resume and you can keep the same pricing, meanwhile we won't charge you". But far too many "business leaders" are focused on short term gains at any cost and so this doesn't compute for them. They don't care that you currently like the product and would resubscribe when you get back from the pole, because that's a year or more away, they care about next quarter, and if you aren't income next quarter you're irrelevant to them, fuck you. † Amundsen-Scott is the name of the base at the South Pole of the planet. It's a cool place. But lots of services aren't available there or would make no sense. You can't live there permanently, so those people are coming back.

echelon 2y ago

> For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents How would this work? The lender may have paid for your loan (and may not have even gotten the right to service the loan). How do they make their money back? What about the mortgage-backed securities market?

litenboll 2y ago
Maybe I described it in a bad way. I'm talking about renegotiating the interest rate with another bank. So the original bank loan is not moved in practice, it's just paid back in full. It's law here in Sweden that the mortgage plan can't be changed (I.e. number of years etc) if you change bank, so the documents are related to this.
- Spivak 2y ago
  Ahh, this is called "refinancing" in the US.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

So... EU laws?

jkaplowitz 2y ago
What EU-wide law requires it to be as easy to cancel as to sign up? I’m sitting in Germany right now and I’m unaware of any such law - though it might very well be recent and not fully transposed into German law, or might be situational or not widely complied with. It’s a good idea though, absolutely.
- mtmail 2y ago
  We have the regulation in Germany, but afaik it's not EU-wide. The "Gesetz über faire Verbraucherverträge" basically says that if something can be subscribed to easily online, then the company also has to provide an easy unsubscribe. It goes into detail how such a button should look like, how labelled, what data the confirmation page has to list and how fast the confirmation has to be (immediate).
  - tomschwiha 2y ago
    I believe the EU law sets the minimum required conditions for contracts (fair, not abusing the customer), but the individual EU-countries can implement more consumer friendly rules.
- patrickk 2y ago
  It's horrendus in Germany trying to cancel a mobile phone subscription, internet service, gym membership or the likes. You have to jump through hoops like sending a registered physical letter, 3 months before the end of the service period for it to be considered a valid cancellation ("Kündigung"). Without this, you're forced into paying for another year. EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer nonsense.
  - tomschwiha 2y ago
    This is no longer true, it is limited to a one month period (after a possible 2 year minimum contract to offer "special discounts") in advance and every contract can be cancelled online.

efitz 2y ago

I have been trying to get my state legislators to implement such a consumer law for over a decade. The federal proposal will likely be ineffective unless it has an individual cause of action. What that means is that the only way (IMO) such a law works is not if the government enforces it, but rather if any consumer can sue the company in small claims court for a reasonable judgment (eg $1000 or something). Now the company has to fix their ways or feel death from a million cuts, and the cost to defend likely exceeds the cost to pay. The other things the law needs (it may have but the article wasn’t clear) are clarity and penalties for dark patterns. For example, “as simple as it was to subscribe” needs to be WAY more detailed, eg “takes no more time for a reasonable person to unsubscribe than it did to subscribe” and “the user must be able to use the same communication channel or mechanism (eg web, mobile app, etc) used to subscribe, in order to unsubscribe”, and “at the time of subscription, unsubscribe instructions must be provided to the user via a persistent medium such as email”, and “the unsubscribe interface must be prominently discoverable on the web site or mobile application”, etc. And any dark patterns or intentional violations need to make the recoverable amount subject to a multiplier. I am happy that the government is tackling this but doing it through regulatory action is not likely to help much IMO; especially in light is the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Chevron deference, it’s likely not to last through legal challenges. (IANAL)

qingcharles 2y ago
I agree with the bit about individual cause of action, as long as it includes attorney fees too, as that is the way to go from having to file yourself, to getting juicy lawyers lined up to make bank (from my experience litigating FOIA). In fact, with FOIA in Illinois the only way to hurt a non-compliant public body is with the attorney fees[]. There is a civil penalty per violation, but it isn't paid to the litigant, but it is paid by the public body to the county. As one government lawyer said to me, "I don't care if I lose! I just write a check out to myself!" [] some of the lawyers I know who do this work agree to split their fees with the litigant as an incentive for them to see it through, which I don't think is technically legal, but it let's people keep the government honest and make some change for their effort

eckesicle 2y ago

Swedish legislation has it right here. You can unsubscribe by any means you prefer. Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. The choice is completely with the party who wishes to terminate the agreement. It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.

dataflow 2y ago
> Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. How would that even... work? Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area? And a customer who feels like a company a hard time could just put a notice in the paper and then collect money because the company obviously won't read every newspaper? Also, what about companies wanting to give customers a hard time by canceling their subscriptions - now customers have to read every newspaper too? I must be missing something...
- BartjeD 2y ago
  Just what you receive, i'd assume. Where reception is a legal definition. Essentially when a reasonable third party can be said to have received. In English legal systems attached terms and conditions work the same way, with regard to receiving them.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  "legal notice in a newspaper" is still very much a thing in common law jurisdictions, with a long history, see banns going way back https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns if you change your name you need to put it in the newspaper, and https://futureofnewspapers.net/how-to-place-a-legal-notice-in-a-newspaper/ https://futureofnewspapers.net/how-to-place-a-legal-notice-i... There are many different types of legal ads, with different costs to advertise. The most common type of legal notice in New York is an LLC formation notice. The State of New York requires limited liability corporations to run an ad informing the public on the formation of the new corporation. There are also FCC, SLA liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe notices, name change notices, divorce notices (also known as dissolution of marriage notices), and probate notices.

kwanbix 2y ago

This is how it works in Argentina. For at least 15 years IIRC.

nerdjon 2y ago

My only concern about this is the signup processes that already take multiple pages anyways. Take cell phones or internet, I don't have an exact number but I feel like with those given all of the information I have to put in, various agreements, etc etc once my service is in my cart I generally have 3, 4, maybe more pages of stuff to go through. Is the "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up" showing me the same number of pages trying to convince me to stay? Sure at least in that case it is still online, but it leaves plenty of room for dark patterns. Could something that states something as simple as that, just lead to a slightly worse signup process in the hopes that they can then convince customers to stay longer with those dark patterns. It would be a gamble on the companys part, but could pay off. I realize no law will be perfect, but I worry that something that simple could be abused when it would likely just be better to make a law about unsubscribing in the first place that applies across the board. Edit: I was thinking about this more. But what exactly is "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up"? When I sign up for a service I am paying for at a minimum I had to create a username, a password, and put in my credit card. Maybe I had to validate my email and/or phone. Maybe I had to put in my address, validate I was a student, etc etc. Signing up is not a one click thing, so just stating that neither would canceling. I get the spirit of saying something like that, but with simplicity I feel like also opens up room for interpretation and it doing nothing to really help except for some extreme cases (like needing to call). But I also look at my gym membership, I could not sign up until I physically went in or at the very least talked to someone on the phone. That gives them the power to do the exact same thing when I want to cancel.

litenboll 2y ago
Yeah I agree with this, it's a very good point. Of course a real law needs more narrow wording. The spirit of it should be more about not allowing companies to have different means for subscribing and unsubscribing. Then there can be additional rules that prevent them from convoluting the process more than necessary.
intended 2y ago
I think this counts as over thinking. Unsubscribing is MILES harder in many countries. The unsubscribe link is buried in some unknown sub menu, customer support dumps you, or the like. Trying to fatigue someone out of subscribing is a bad business model. If people want to leave, it should be dead simple to do so.

lttlrck 2y ago

Why more than one-click? We already have plenty of examples of this working, everyone else needs to get on board.

atoav 2y ago

I still recall a big reputable newspaper that was approaching students with free sample subscriptions to their newspaper. The sign up was super simple, to end the subscription you had to do the telephone equivalent of getting through a maze blindfolded while sacrificing your first born when the stars aligned right. After that experience that news source is on my and many of my colleagues black lists. And we are the core demographic they would probably like to target. Yeah.

sureIy 2y ago

> As easy to cancel as it is to sign up I think that’s not enough in some cases. Signing up requires inputting a bunch of data; unsubscribing should be 2 clicks at most, no logins.

fckgw 2y ago
How would you unsubscribe from a subscription service without logging in and confirming your account?

tracker1 2y ago

Until they require you to dig out your CC and input the number and the cvv code to cancel, which shouldn't be needed, but hey, it's "as easy" as signing up. ;-) Oh, sorry, that's not the card you signed up with... what do you mean you don't have the card that expired last year that rolled over when you signed up?