While this is a shitty practice (and to be honest, I don't really expect better from most publishing companies), it does tell you on the second page that the price of 99 cents per week is for 4 weeks only.
I do think it's pretty normal for the consumer to say "okay well, if that's the price for 4 weeks only, what happens after that?". The fact that that is not made clear immediately is shady, but I'm not sure it's a true deception.
That's just sad. I guess I can understand the motivation, though that doesn't justify anything. It's becoming very difficult to monetize online newspapers, and they are forced to resort to such unethical practices to make ends meet.
Newspapers really have missed a trick or two in the transition to the internet.
In the main, I agree: They got caught napping and didn't keep up so that's their own fault.
That being said up until a few months ago, I didnt't read papers or watch the news on TV since it's all stage-managed nonsense but I decided to take out a FT weekend subscription after buying one on a whim one day.
I must say it was very enjoyable reading a newspaper with quality stories and no fluff or click-bait titles and so on.
I don't consider tabloids to be anything other than literary fast-food for the masses but I am thoroughly enjoying reading my FT on a Saturday and Sunday morning with a cup of tea.
Tl;dr: The Boston Globe website tries to get people to subscribe.
Also, the locution "dark patterns" in the headline is a weird term that is, frankly, more deceptive than anything the writer purports to reveal the Globe does.
Well, like it or not, "dark pattern" is the standard term for this sort of thing. Some of the examples being called out are defensible; some aren't:
> Before you can read the article, there is a pop-up ad asking you to subscribe. By itself, this is annoying, but not deceptive. The real dark pattern is hidden at the top – the ‘Close’ button (circled in red) uses a very low contrast font, making it hard to see. It’s also in the left corner, not the standard right corner. This makes it likely that users won’t see it, causing them to subscribe when they didn’t have to.
> A Boston Globe reader can subscribe online. If they have a question, they can ask over email, or through a convenient live chat service. But if they want to stop paying, they have to call and ask on the phone
honestly I think 'dark pattern' is too mild a way to put it and 'deception' is more accurate. If the whole point of this 'pattern' is to get someone to do something they don't actually want to do, how is that not deception?
The New York Times also does this and it feels dirty.
https://myaccount.nytimes.com/mem/cancel.html?id=10434447
We're sorry to see you go.
To cancel your subscription quickly and easily, please call Customer Care at 877-698-5635
Hours of Operation:
Monday — Friday: 7:30 a.m. ET through 9:00 p.m. ET
Saturday and Sunday: 7:30 a.m. ET through 5:00 p.m. ET
I had a terrible experience with a NYT digital-only subscription, and I'll likely never subscribe again.
I had a subscription for a while that I hadn't been using. I only used their site when linked to it from another (like HN). I tried to cancel online, but there's no way to—you need to cancel over the phone. So, I did, sitting on hold for close to a half hour. Bad experience, but I wish it had ended there.
Fast-forward two months, and I started getting emails that my subscription was past-due. Then I come to realize that they had continued to bill me every 2 weeks, but the payments had just started failing because my card expired.
I emailed CS, mentioning that I had cancelled my subscription and I was being billed by mistake, and to make sure my account got cancelled this time. They "couldn't do anything about it" because my account was in their "grace period", and that I would continue to get the past due emails until the grace period ended.
I ended up filing chargebacks for each charge after I had originally cancelled. To my knowledge, they never replied to or contested the chargebacks (does the customer usually get this info, if they do? it's the first and only chargeback I'd ever filed).
Audible, although I'm unsure about cancellation, only allows setting your account to "suspended" by phone.
I do this because I'm unable to keep up with one audiobook per month, but still really enjoy their service.
Also, Rackspace email (paid hosting by email address) requires you to contact customer service to delete email accounts you are not using. Not quite making a phone, but still requires going through a "wait and communicate with a human being" ten-minute process rather than a simple click to delete an account.
I cancelled Audible online. I was still annoyed because I signed up for the free month through a couple of clicks on a kindle and then because it isn't integrated with the Amazon account I forgot about it.
I can only speak for the NYT but they have a toll free number in my country, though the line was pretty bad (cut off twice).
Next time, I'll try to execute my right to cancel by the same means I subscribed, though. I don't think they will argue with you and if they did, I'd just fill a chargeback with my CCC.
I think the descriptor is fairly accurate these are Dark, but not really outright dishonest. They do a lot to funnel you in, which I think is understandable but it was tougher to get past the huge red price that did say billed today, but not what the increased price would be. That and the cancellation.
When I was in my first year Econ 101 class I remember the professor telling a story which IIRC was about SF Bus Companies. We were talking about price elasticity and general market pricing mechanisms and doing price curves. The story was essentially that the bus company brought in consultants who evaluated why the company was losing money after it had raised rates. It was a no-brainer of course, that if you sell 5,000 rides a day (made up number) that if you raised prices from 1.00 to 1.10 you would make 10% more.
It turned out, that the company was doing rather poorly after raising rates but critically, they were even priced too high at 1.00. 20,000 people would ride the bus for $0.75 and have less impact on the marginal price as the busses were heavily underused.
The point is that it is possible, I would say likely but I have no data, that a subscription for the Boston Globe might attract 5,000 people at current price(made up number), but like above if they charged $0.99 a month, they could feasibly have 20000-200,000 customers in a biz with virtually 0 marginal cost, and profit tied directly to subscriber size(ads which I assume they show to even paying subscribers after reading the article).
Newspapers are super elastic, and that price curve probably falls steeply after $1.00 a month.
Not entirely sure, but don't credit card companies charge a considerable minimum fee per transaction? I'm guessing the fee kicks in for each month. That'd be a significant marginal cost.
Although a large organization like the Globe will be able to negotiate better rates.
Definitely true. I would suspect slightly less people would see it this way, but feasibly $12.00 a year would be solid, you could have access for a full-year and not think about it and at Stripes prices it would net 11.35
> Although a large organization like the Globe will be able to negotiate better rates.
Or aggregate each customer's monthly payments into one larger charge, like Google used to do for Play Store purchases. From memory they waited until you'd reached something like $8 and then charged that in one transaction.
I wonder how much the friction of signing up factors in. It may be that there are lots who would pay $1/month, but the friction of going through an onerous signup processes fraught with these dark patterns, giving out your CC number etc, means they just google up another source. For the subset of people people who are motivated enough to over that signup hump, the price elasticity curve may be different.
We really need some zero-friction mini-(if not micro) payments solution. I'm imagining a Paypal subscription button that's as frictionless as a Like button (on both subscribe and unsubscribe). Click once to pay $1 for access, without even leaving the page (no logins or signups). Unsubscribe is just a single click away, with no hidden cancellation periods. I love the idea of flattr, but only someone like PayPal has the existing userbase to get any adoption. They also have a balance feature to reduce CC processing fees.
It's actually incredibly dishonest, at each and every step of the way. It's anti-consumer, and makes distrust the organization and it's integrity as a place of good journalism. You never bothered to explain how you thought it wasn't. How is a huge surprise bill at the end of a year not dishonest? Hiding truth is dishonesty. Low level used car lot sales type strategy.
I agree on that. Every subscription seems to think everyone is willing to pay $9.99/£10 a month for them.
They are completely bonkers. They have absolutely no idea how people consume news; they still believe I'm going to go there first thing in the morning as my first page and 'read the whole newspaper' or something. And that I'll be subscribed just to them, or something equally idiotic.
I'm willing to pay that £10 for netflix for example, or perhaps 2 or 3 /maximum/ service I use /a lot/ -and that will be reviewed very often- but I'm not going to pay that to everyone whose website I go once a week or so.
What are they thinking? Gimme a subscription for £1/month, and I'll take quite a few of them (possibly more than 20 or 30!!) but I'm not willing to shell out that sort of money for occasional visits.
I'd call it outright dishonest. Tell me quite plainly the price I'll pay or I'll treat you as a scammer. Vaguely telling me the special offer price and completely avoiding the true price is a scam like pattern.
You're right on pricing though. Newspapers need to stop trying to charge nearly the same as a print subscription. Almost no one is going to pay that these days - we don't expect to get all our news from one or two sources now.
I'd love to see a respected news site try a penny under $1/£1 a month sub just to see how the numbers land. I'd wouldn't be at all surprised to see enough subscriber growth that they make more notwithstanding traffic growth. It has to be better than advert supported rates.
I'd pay that, without second thought. I'd be happy paying that across the twenty or so news sites that make up regular reading for me.
I think business practices which are illegal in many countries because of consumer protection concerns can justifiably be called "dishonest" without any additional qualifier.
The Boston Globe is being intentionally deceptive about the amount they're charging their customers. They're trying to trick people into paying more money than they thought they were consenting to.
You could argue that they'll only "trick" those who don't dig deep enough to figure out the real price, but that's like saying confidence tricks are moral because they only work on naive people.
CCC is using a self-signed cert, and I haven't vetted it. But then, I'm not using it for anything that requires security. It just allows me to get a confirmation link.
Well it at least sends them one message, so that is working enough.
Obviously I take different tacks depending how much I want to access the site. In this case I'm talking about the subscribe-or-close popups, obviously not a real account or anything.
I did a quick Google and there's a few free whois API services that would fit the bill. They (presumably) all return the same data. So.. whichever works.
Alternatively a far more interesting (but much more difficult to set up) solution would be to use chrome.runtime.connectNative to execute the native whois command on the user's OS.
Essentially you need to add a native messaging app manifest to Chrome to tell it about the app on the host, and then Chrome reads that JSON file to find where to execute it, what to use to talk to it (eg stdio), what it's called, etc. On Windows the location of the JSON file has to be added to the registry (which is prohibitively annoying), but on OSX and Linux it's just saved in a specific folder. Once you've done that it's a simple case of calling a method on the chrome.runtime object, or setting up a couple of listeners to actually make the call.
whois already doesn't work for a lot of the new gTLDs and ICANN is in the process of reinventing it. So be prepared for loads of edge cases and keeping up with ICANNs flimsy mind.
Didn't mean to be negative, just informative. Try any of the new gTLDs, e.g. "stuffin.space", "rms.sexy" or "abc.xyz", they won't work.
Or for a moderately amusing confirmation of ICANNs assertion that the current model is broken, try to whois microsoft.com, apple.com or google.com (NSFW language).
I think the current plan is to make whois data mandatory for commercial entities, and abolish the current decentralized model, but AFAIK no work has started yet.
Any negativity conveyed is purely by virtue of the grim state of affairs.
Edit: I just checked your profile and you probably know a lot more about the situation than I do. Feel free to correct me where I'm wrong! Your domain "gtld.club" does not work either, by the way :)
I remember back in the early 2000s getting pestered by a particularly annoying junk fax spammer calling my home line every morning at 4-5AM. Fortunately, thanks to being an early adopter of VOIP, and someone with more free time than I have now, I could have a little fun. Turned out the origin numbers for the junk fax calls were not spoofed, and always came from a block of phone numbers that matched a pattern. So I did a few simple web searches and identified the company behind it (some marketing company in Florida). It didn't take too long to get the personal phone number of that company's CEO. Then just programmed the VOIP box to forward all calls from that pattern of numbers back to the company's CEO. It took about a week for the calls to stop.
Typically, merely putting their letter in the outbox and getting it returned to them is enough to get them to stop, at least after a few times. As a side benefit, it gives money to the USPS, wastes theirs, and saves you have to walk to the trash!
I was under the impression that attaching business return mail to another package didn't work any more - it'd obviously be an easy loophole to close.
Completely agree with the rest of the approach though. The real question is what to do with the "broadcast" flyers the post office has gotten involved in spamming. Stamp "return to sender" and stuff in blue mailbox? I don't see that employee frustration adding up to any change.
roughly 60,000 people who want to know what's going on around them in terms of local government, arts, sports, ordinary people, etc. The Globe is about 50 times better at these things than any other source.
The people that were paying that money to buy the paper version of the newspaper, for example.
There are people that might find enough value in the journalism of the Boston Globe to want to spend that kind of money on it, compared to the "entire internet" that can be, broadly, not the most reliable source of information (wether the Boston Globe is a good newspaper I have no idea, but it might be for some people).
That is a completely different discussion than looking at the deceptive tactics they use to make people that don't want to pay that amount to actually subscribe.
I do, happily. I subscribe to the Economist too. In the scheme of things $350/year isn't much when you can spend that much in a weekend on gardening supplies.
But the globe has also never charged my that much. They've been charging me roughly $200/year for the last 3 years for a digital subscription.
I absolutely hate the dark pattern of fully controlling your subscription online, including changing it to a different service, but canceling requires a phone call during very specific business hours where you are very likely to forget.
It's disgusting and way too many companies are utilizing these tactics rather than building a solid business model.
More companies that are doing this should be called out. Ive seen naturebox, justfab and others just to name a few.
It should be, I think, a reasonable demand of reputable business that any subscription must be able to be cancelled via the same medium as it is signed up for.
How does Truebill make money? It seems a little too good to be true to be free. I mean, I can think of a bunch of perfectly acceptable ways to make money off this (selling anonymous information about what makes subscribers unsubscribe to companies, for example), I would just like to know before I sign up what exactly I am signing up for.
eFax does it everywhere. I paid $0.99 to send a fax and ended up with two monthly statements for $16.99 that were not refundable. It's disgusting and it should be illegal.
For anyone else who runs into problems with eFax. E-mail them, say you're deaf and therefore unable to call. It worked for me. Often dark patterns have great dark patterns that work in response.
I suspect T-Mobile is just deeply and embarrassingly incompetent, rather than actively user hostile. Everything, including spending more money with them, often takes a phone call. Changing plans online is impossible about half the time (depending on what you're trying to do, and it doesn't fail more often for downgrading service than upgrading). They are a phone company that barely knows how to do business as a phone company; they definitely aren't a technology or internet company, as they fail remarkably on those fronts.
Kept getting bills every month even though I had cancelled and I was supposed to be on the free for life plan of 200MB. The representative acknowledges it was their fault every time. They removed the item from the bill every time within fifteen minutes of me dialing.
Then I changed address. They might still be billing me for all I know.
If you are in the US (reasonable guess for a(n ex-)T-Mobile customer), you might want to exercise your right to pull a free credit report check and make sure it's not screwing it up.
Correct. Former vendor, worked with their cell network crew on many occasions.
To be more fair, all the large carriers are mostly laden with corporate procedures and bureaucracy so it's hard for worker bees to make progress even if they know what's needed. T-Mo's procedures are just more broken.
What would happen if you send them an email stating your wish to cancel and then asked your CC company to deny any charges from them? I'd think that would be a legal and valid way to cancel any service.
I removed subscriptions from a few services that way and none gave me any problems. Even reactivated some of the accounts later on when I decided to go back. Most of those used paypal, so I think they got cancel notifications straight away.
I can't remember the names of most of the companies though. One was definitely Match, because they expect you to call them to cancel (or did at the time)
They send to collections. Personally I find a certified letter to their registered agent is the best method when I think a company might be shady and I don't wanna wait on the phone.
It's the person on record who should be contacted for legal matters, correspondence, etc.
Essentially, if these things ever get to court if you contacted someone other than the agent they can claim they weren't notified, didn't know, etc, if they are shady, but a registered letter to the registered agent is like the gold standard of having contacted them.
It depends where you are, but many places have something broadly similar. Here in England, for example, any limited company must have a registered address and mail to that address must be read. The registered address must be shown in various places by the company, and can also be checked by anyone through Companies House, which is the government authority that deals with such things. These are all legal requirements here, and the authorities will not look kindly on a company that doesn't follow the rules, with potentially serious implications for its directors.
For the states I've been curious about in the United States, each state's Secretary of State usually has a search form for corporations, LLCs, and limited partnerships. examples: California (http://kepler.sos.ca.gov/) and Washington (http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/).
I'd think that would be a legal and valid way to cancel any service.
Please be careful. That is not necessarily the case, and depending on your local laws you may be left owing money, going to collections, and/or having your credit damaged for non-payment.
I have been in that situation before. I send them an email stating I wanted to cancel and I got the run of the mill "call this number". The reply proved that they're reading it so I send a reply back that I was unable to call, that they must forward the mail, and they're welcome to call me if they think it isn't me that is canceling. Then I refused any future CC payments and that was the end of it.
When I encounter these types of windows that I can't seem to "close" I use Google's developer console to inspect the element and then...delete it. The box goes away and I can read the rest of the news article. It's a pain but it's better than clicking anything that might lead to further annoyances.
You could use something like Greasemonkey and set up rules for that domain, though it'd be nice if this was automated from the action of deleting an element.
Write a small TamperMonkey script to fix their BS JS. That's what I did when Comcast wouldn't let me pay my bill without creating a Comcastic!!! Account. My login worked just fine, but they really wanted to block me from paying my bill until I created a separate account with their useless email features and other things for some reason. Killing some DOM elements let me pay their ransom.
Unfortunately, you're risking your credit score. If you signed (or agreed to) a contract with a specific termination procedure, then just cancel your payments without going through that procedure, they are within their rights to recover the money.
There's no law to say that you can terminate by email. Most companies won't bother chasing, but there's nothing to stop them really hurting you.
Yes, they are providing a service: access to their content. Whether you read it or not is not their fault.
It's a silly situation that arises because of the (almost) zero marginal cost of providing digital media. It makes sense in the physical world: you can't claim your money back because you didn't read the magazine they sent. But these laws are much the same in the virtual world.
If they provided and you agreed to a way to cancel, and you don't use that way, they are totally within their rights to continue (passively) providing access, and charging for it. In perpetuity, yes.
An analogy to a magazine subscription would be a for-pay email newsletter. In that case, if the newsletter was sent, obviously the company is owed.
But in the case of a passive web site subscription, if the customer stops accessing the site and stops the method of payment, no services have been rendered, and no cost has been incurred by the company. Web server logs could even prove this (although the company could also falsify them).
So a better analogy would probably be a gym membership. Imagine a gym refuses to allow a customer to cancel in-person or on the phone, instead requiring the customer to mail a letter. So a customer, justifiably angry at this, calls his bank or credit card and stops future payments, and never sets foot in the gym again. Now, no services have been rendered after that date, and no costs have been incurred by the gym. They are owed nothing--if not legally in all jurisdictions, then ethically and morally, and therefore legally it should be the same.
I would like to see this tested in court, even a small claims court. In the case of a company intentionally making it difficult and time-consuming to unsubscribe, and a customer cancelling the payment method due to that difficulty, I have a feeling that most judges would side with the former customer. And as has been pointed out, in many places this is not legal, and I would not be surprised if that included several U.S. states.
Yep, you'd be screwed there too. If your agreement with the gym said you would unsubscribe by mail, and you just stop paying without doing so, they could recover the money.
Gyms make their money by having people pay without using the gym, so they wouldn't care that they aren't 'rendering services'. That's a big reason many companies, and most gyms, use subscriptions.
You could fight it in court if you want to. You might even win. You might even win the following battle to recover your credit score. But all that's going to be a lot more of a hassle than picking up the phone and cancelling in the first place. It takes a special kind of person to willfully seek such a pyrrhic victory.
There is no such thing as a credit score in Denmark. I can be put in a register called RKI, but only if I acknowledge that I owe them money, or the court has ruled that I do.
That's a scare myth. Cancelling a $50 contract won't meaningfully hurt your credit score. Missing your rent and credit card payments for 3 months will hurt your credit score.
I certainly don't condone making it artificially difficult for people to cancel, but there are several reasonable points against accepting some random e-mail as cancellation. It's not authenticated or tamper-proof, for a start. There's no proof of whether or when it was actually delivered. It probably requires a real person to read and act on it, which may delay things like cancelling any recurring payment process, possibly beyond the point where more money has been spent.
For any subscription services I run, if someone mails us asking to cancel, we normally direct them to the on-site cancellation process. This does use all our normal security and log-in procedures, and is fully automated and can be used in moments at any time.
However, if someone did not cancel that way (or in one of the other ways we allow for in our terms) and just blocked their payment, we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us. In practice we're only charging a small amount in these cases so we'd probably just cancel their service when payment didn't go through, but there is no guarantee any other business would make the same decision, so your strategy is risky.
> There's no proof of whether or when it was actually delivered
If a real person replies to my mail, it's reasonable to expect that it has been delivered.
They're more than welcome to ask any question via mail or initiate the call in the time I specify (outside of my working hours) - which I wrote. Or they can have an online form to do it as well, just like they did when they accepted my money in the first place.
> we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us
I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to. That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.
I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to.
Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.
That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.
I don't know where you're from, but in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with, it seems unlikely that would be the case.
From a purely practical point of view, I'm not sure it should be the case either, even though I'm generally in favour of reasonable consumer protection laws. For e-mail specifically, there are too many problems with relying on it, particularly if significant amounts of money or other commitments are affected by whether or not a subscription continues.
Depends on the laws I suppose. I Denmark you cannot bind a consumer to pay for a service for any period except for a few special cases (for instance, phone service up to 6 months).
I'm from Denmark, and we have some fairly strong consumer protection laws exactly to prevent things like this. If I cancel any kind of prepaid service, not only do they have to stop charging me money after the periode is finished, they also have to give me back the money equivalent to the remaining period from the end of month + 1 month and forward.
Denmark seems to have relatively strong laws in this respect compared to most places, and from what little I've seen of them, they generally seem quite reasonable.
There is still a question of what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation, though. If you're subscribing to a service based in a country other than your own, there may be other laws that are relevant as well.
Personally, I'm a fan of the symmetry argument: you should be able to cancel a service through equivalent methods to what you could use to sign up for it, and without requiring an unreasonable amount of effort.
> what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation
While that's one aspect of the situation - and yes, a matching notification requirement is sensible - this discussion of "cancellation" is missing the important question: were goods delivered or services used?
Using a newspaper publisher as an example, if we're talking about a simple contract (for either a predefined period or specific termination criteria) where some amount of money is regularly exchanged for the regular delivery on dead trees or electronic means (email) of their publication, then there is a debt that needs to be repaid. The publisher fulfilled their obligations created by the contract.
However, this is a very different situation if no debt has been created. If the contract was a regular payment to gain access to their back archives, if you haven't used their services, then there isn't a debt[1]. Also, I suspect most businesses using contracts of this type will include some sort of clause that terminates all of their obligations if the payments stop.
The point being that there is going to depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, so it's dangerous to generalize.
[1] Some jurisdictions might treat use of the service separately than a "retainer" for access. This doesn't really change anything, though it might make the situation much more complicated.
The point being that there is going to depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, so it's dangerous to generalize.
That is certainly true. I do think a few people here seem to be taking a rather narrow interpretation of when services have been provided, though.
Say you sign up for access to an on-line newspaper, but then as it happens you're busy and don't actually read it. The newspaper still had reporters writing stories, and servers and Internet bandwidth to pay for, and admin staff dealing with the tax records triggered by your subscription, and so on. I don't see why someone should necessarily expect to get back their money under those circumstances.
Perhaps a more obvious example would be an insurance policy. For obvious reasons, you can't get a refund at the end of the period of insurance just because in practice you didn't need to make a claim.
Whenever I've been putting terms and conditions together for a new service, the lawyers always seem very careful about exactly what constitutes offer and acceptance to form the contract, when provision of services starts, how the agreement can be ended and any terms that survive termination, and other details like that.
To consumer protection laws in Denmark state that, you cannot cancel for a periode in the past. If you've prepaid they can keep payment for "30 days end of month", but anything beyond that must be returned. For monthly payment, you must be able to cancel up until the next payment is due. It doesn't matter if the service is used or not.
Out of curiosity, are there any limitations on those Danish rules? For example, suppose someone is running subscription access to a magazine at $5/month, but wants to offer a discount if customers sign up for a whole year to say $45. This sort of promotion isn't unusual, and it's potentially beneficial to both the magazine and the reader, but from your description it wouldn't be viable under Danish law.
If you tried that with someone who cared, you could get taken to small claims court. And it would end up costing you a lot even if your defense prevailed. In TX at least, companies are not allowed to use lawyers in small claims court.
You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.
What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with? In any business I run, it takes maybe 10 seconds, and the service is completely transparent about how to do it. It's secure, it's fully automated, and it's in the customer's own interests as well because it will also cancel any recurring payment arrangements with other services immediately and automatically.
What is entitled is things like the person who mailed us the other day, after hours on a Friday and just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due, saying very rudely and aggressively that they weren't using the service and they'd forgotten to cancel before but now they wanted to and they didn't authorise any further payments and they'd do all sorts of nasty things to us if we charged their card again. I mean seriously, they were told three times when they signed up what the charging basis was, and they could have cancelled using the normal facility in far less time than it took to write their little rant. It was only through luck that one of us saw their message in time to act on it, and if we hadn't, it would have been entirely their fault.
You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.
There is nothing remotely extortionate about the business practices we are talking about. The services in question are completely transparent and up-front about both what the charging basis is and how to cancel, and our terms are legally unremarkable.
As for "services not rendered", anyone is free to cancel their subscriptions with any service I help to run at any time, and none of those services use any sort of sneaky long term commitments or ever have. But if you stay signed up, and you have access to the services, you don't get to decide later that you want your money back because you didn't actually use them that month. If you think that's unreasonable, I wish you luck in getting all your insurance premiums refunded if you haven't claimed on them at the end of the year.
> What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with?
The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.
> just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due
What's wrong with that? Are customers required to provide notice? It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday. It's your system.
> they were told three times when they signed up
Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights... All that sounds rather entitled to me.
The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.
We've spent several years building that particular service. We pay the bills for running it whether or not any particular customer uses it, because we have to have enough computers and bandwidth and so on available so that our subscribers can get what they're paying for. Our expenses don't magically disappear just because someone didn't use a service that they had previously used and were still signed up for during a certain period, nor can we telepathically tell whether intermittent users will not actually use the service during the next billing period.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with sending an e-mail to an address no-one is likely to be monitoring in real time, denying permission for a fully automated scheduled payment to be taken a few hours later? Well, no-one might read the message before the payment gets taken, for one thing.
It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday.
You don't seem to understand how this works. The money would already have been taken by the automated systems at that point. That means we would have to actively refund it, which may in itself incur a charge depending on the payment processing services involved. In any case, it requires significant manual intervention to do that and update all the records accordingly, which is at best wasting time we could otherwise spend on more useful activities.
Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights...
We are perfectly within our rights. That's the point.
As it happens, we often do go out of our way to deal with messages from our subscribers as helpfully as we can. We take considerable pride in offering very good customer service, and we receive far more positive messages than complaints. In some cases, we will even voluntarily refund someone's subscription fee for a month, perhaps if we believe their situation wasn't entirely their fault or they had some honest misunderstanding about something.
But make no mistake, doing these things costs us time and, in some cases, money. We will do it anyway for most people, because that's the kind of business we want to run. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do so, either legally or morally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also had little inclination to do so in the case of someone who by their own admission had known what to do and failed to do it, yet who felt the appropriate reaction to that was to write to us rudely, making an unreasonable demand and immediately threatening us if we failed to comply, instead of simply asking for help if they needed it.
Your business expenses are not my problem. The grocery store doesn't get to charge people when they order too much perishable fruit.
Your of a different opinion, that's your prerogative. Just don't expect everyone to feel the same way. I certainly don't.
I don't care how much you've poured into automating your business processes. That's what you do to increase your profit margins. I only care about two things: My input (time, effort, money), and your output (services provided).
That's just business. If someone is rude, be happy to see the back of them as a customer. Or fire them as a customer. Both those are acceptable. Taking a consumer to court if you think you'd have a case (you wouldn't) is also your right.
It's also their right to take you to small claims, which depending on the state may require you to send an employee to their state, without a lawyer, to justify your actions to a judge. I think you'll probably discover they're not going to be very sympathetic to your perceived right to take people's money just because you have business expenses in predicting future costs.
The grocery store doesn't get to charge people when they order too much perishable fruit.
They probably do if it was a special order placed for a specific customer who then cancelled once the food was already delivered to the store. And why shouldn't they, if it was entirely the customer's fault?
The rest of your post is just wishful thinking, like most of your other comments in this thread, so I see little reason to continue this discussion. Businesses can and do take non-paying customers to court or through a collections process, and routinely win under the kind of circumstances we're talking about.
In particular, cancelling a payment you owe does not in itself relieve you of any contractual obligations you have, it just means you're in default. You might not like it, but it is the law almost everywhere. As I said in another post, try getting a refund on an insurance policy at the end of the year just because you haven't made a claim, or getting part of your phone bill refunded because you didn't need to make a call in a certain period. If you try cancelling your payment without cancelling your service in those cases, and then refuse to pay what you owe, you'll be taken to court or collections, and you'll lose.
And you didn't special order anything. Your argument here is all kinds of moving goal posts.
Bottom line: Unless you have an actual contract, don't expect to win. And even then, be prepared to demonstrate that your product worked as advertised and explain why, despite communicating by email with the customer as routine, that was not sufficient for cancellation. Pretty sure you haven't addressed this at all except to say "because I thought I could sell the things I bought!". Sorry, but no, you don't get to change the rules just because yours is an Internet service. Especially not for a month to month pre-pay authorization. That's just ridiculous. I haven't even seen pre-paid cellular networks try to pull that scam.
Bottom line: Unless you have an actual contract, don't expect to win.
We do have an actual contract, the moment someone signs up and pays us money under our advertised terms. It is as clear and legally binding as if we sat down at a table and signed a piece of paper. I suspect that not understanding this is the cause of many of the incorrect things you've been saying in this thread.
Edit: Just to be reiterate in case it wasn't clear from my other comments, one of the points in those terms specifically says what the process for cancelling is and that an e-mail is not sufficient, for precisely the kinds of reasons we've been talking about on HN today.
You're trying to claim fees for services not rendered for a pre-paid monthly service are rightfully yours (again without addressing the email) because you've made a claim in a ToS.
And you think that'd stand up in small claims. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when that gets tested. ;-) And the collection agency willing to sign on as a co-defendant? That better be some monthly subscription fee.
You're going to have a rough time explaining why you thought you were within your rights to ignore her cancellation notice. Do you also think your ToS would allow you to ignore certified mail? You might want to talk to an actual lawyer.
Boredom? I dunno. Didn't feel like watching TV I guess.
Since he/she cited a specific case however, doesn't seem like "strawman" qualifies.
A company representative is notified of cancellation. A company offering a month to month pre-pay service isn't entitled to anything else. End of story. IMO. Anything else is unethical.
That seems perfectly reasonable. No you're not within your rights to dick with people in bad faith, no matter what a ToS says. You can put whatever you'd like in there. Doesn't mean it'll pass muster when you're in front of a judge.
Beyond that she (the customer) is perfectly within her rights to cancel at any time. So the "but but but, I spent money!" is the real straw-man here. Silhoutte would have considered it his/her obligation to spend that money either way, the customer could have cancelled at the literal last second, through her/his preferred online method even, and that doesn't change a thing. There's a strawman.
Mostly it's probably because I had AT&T try something similar on me in the past year, trying to hold me liable for $1,300 for UVerse service at an address I've never lived at, going as far as to pursue collections against me.
They and the collections dropped their claim pretty quickly when I made it clear I'd be taking them to small claims over this.
Those are different circumstances. I suppose it just irks me that some people think they have a "right" to your property because you were rude?
It's nobody's "right" to dip into your wallet for a prepaid service. It's not moral. It's not ethical. Can you think of another service where that'd fly? I can't. The utility companies only seek to recover services rendered. Prepaid phone services will simply suspend service until you pay up. It's your right to suspend payments on your credit card to your MVNO whenever you like. It's their right to suspend service if you do. It's not their right to do much else.
You're talking hypotheticals. We actually do this, and we actually do talk to real lawyers. On the rare occasions when someone has tried their luck, we have never lost so much as a chargeback.
Of course, most of the time it never gets that far, because as I said before, we try to provide very good customer service. Among other things, that means we are up-front about our pricing and we give our subscribers quick and effective ways to manage their subscriptions. I wouldn't want to run a business that did the sort of shady things mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. We get very few complaints in the first place, and in reality it's far more common for us to help out someone who made an honest mistake and then get a nice mail back.
All I'm saying here is that we don't have any obligation to go beyond what our terms and the relevant laws require, and in particular, we don't have to accept some random e-mail as cancellation when we explicitly say we won't, for good reasons, and when we provide a quick and effective alternative that is readily available to all subscribers. I honestly can't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
In Denmark, companies are required to clearly and visibly state things such as total price - if they fail to do so, the "contract" is invalid. If they don't provide a reasonable way to cancel services (relative to the signup procedure), the company have no case. So stating in a ToS that I must call to cancel, when I signed up with nothing but a webform and an email, would not be accepted.
In Denmark, companies are required to clearly and visibly state things such as total price - if they fail to do so, the "contract" is invalid.
Something approximately the same as that is true across the EU under the recent changes to the consumer protection rules.
On your other points, I'll just mention that this subthread was originally about whether accepting e-mail as a cancellation method was appropriate, not so much the original topic of trying to force people to call as an aggressive way to deter cancellation. It seems we all agree that making it excessively difficult for someone to cancel when they're entitled to is scummy behaviour, and I imagine the law in many places would take a similar view.
Ok, fair enough. Email is an unreliable form of cancellation for a number of reasons. I don't necessarily buy it, but let's accept this for the sake of argument.
But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?
Except to make the customer (especially international customers, which may have to call in the middle of the night and who may incur significant charges) jump through a whole lot of hoops and to make it as difficult as possible to cancel.
To me this reeks like a shit ton of bad faith by the service provider, which has nothing whatsoever to do with security.
But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?
I suppose if they had some sort of credentials set up for phone access then that would be a point in its favour. My bank do have well established security procedures for me to contact them by phone, for example.
To be clear, I am not in any way condoning requiring phone cancellation as a technique for making it artificially difficult or frustrating for someone to cancel when they are within their rights to do so. As you say, it stinks of bad faith.
Call centers are in general quite atrocious as far as authentication goes. Here is one particular egregious example http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authent... I cannot remember where I read it, but there are services in Eastern Europe where you can hire someone to field questions at a call center. A calm detached criminal is going to be more convincing than a flustered person who cannot believe that their identity is being questioned.
In general, there is nothing that you can ask me over a phone that cannot be asked to someone pretending to be me who can get the details in a variety of ways. To static questions there are static answers. If you perform two factor authentication properly, this is actually easier over a website than the phone.
They often have you state particulars of the account details. MS will send you an email with a code that you must tell them.
In any case, one isn't more or less secure than the other. The physological effect of speaking to a phone just makes someone feel one is more safe. I'd say that if you send an email to the address you have on the account details, you can reasonably expect to get the right person to the same degree as you would when calling the phone number on the account.
Would it be fair that if one cannot cancel by email then one cannot subscribe by mail since the same risks exist (of authentication and tamper-proof) exist?
Of course, you normally can't sign up for services that require payment via e-mail anyway, since no-one credible is going to ask for enough details that they can charge you through an insecure medium like e-mail.
Btw, I'd like to add that if you provide a simple way to cancel on the web, I'd be more than satisfied with it. If I send an email, I probably couldn't figure out where to cancel after 5-10 min.
For what it's worth, if an average user of any service I'm talking about couldn't figure out how to cancel within even 1 minute, I'd consider that a significant usability failure. Typically we have an obvious button for it on whatever the main control panel or dashboard for their account is, and we rarely have more than a confirmation button and perhaps an optional question or two to complete the process after that.
Some people would probably argue that we make it too easy for customers to leave, but as I've said, we prefer to run these services a certain way, and if it doesn't completely maximise profit then that's just too bad. It's not uncommon for some of these services to have a pattern of seasonal memberships, so from an entirely self-interested point of view, the trust we earn by making it easy to sign up and easy to cancel is probably of some value anyway.
I skipped to the end of that process. Called ETrade to cancel. They said it cost money to cancel! That's why they had a minimum balance - so they could steal it when you tried to quit.
That smelled. So instead I signed up for the ETrade checkbook, wrote myself a check for my remaining balance, cashed it, and never dealt with them again.
I tried something similar with a big bank once. I got calls from collections agencies about 9 months later. I ended up paying them about $50 in account fees to save a black mark on my credit report. They were charging me to keep my account open even though I made it very clear that I didn't want that, but I didn't go through all their proper paperwork.
So yeah, it's not like any of these types of establishments care at all about their reputation. They'll gladly ignore your not-to-their-letter cancellation, stop contacting you, and send your $50 usage fees for no actual usage to collections.
WatchESPN (at least their college app). Requires a personal email to cancel, can do everything else on their site. So tired of those guys. They got an extra 20 euro from me by using this too, so I guess it works? (If they want no money from me ever again).
I have a few credit cards dedicated to this purpose, that I cancel when I run into this problem. This article made me realize how messed up it is that we have come to this.
In general, managing subscriptions for each media source sucks. I'd rather trust one company to manage it and have it all in one place rather than a few different ones with varying level of quality.
Why do I have to become dishonest to cancel a service? I don't want to do that. I don't want to lie. This is terrible. This doesn't make it any better or easier to cancel. I don't want to lie and I shouldn't have to.
Whether it's okay to lie to them has no obvious bearing on whether it's necessary. Where did you learn morality? A shallow reading of the New Testament?
From my parents, thanks. I fail to see how it's "necessary" in any sense here. Nobody's going to die because I called the company to cancel my account instead of emailing them.
The fallacy is in considering a corporate account-management procedure as 'them'. There's no person there. There's a process set up. Do what you have to, to defeat the obstacles presented by that process.
Like all such processes, this one is defined by people, and implemented mostly in terms of a set of actions available to those employees of the corporation who handle cancellation requests. Telling such a person that you're deaf, and thus unable to communicate by voice telephone, is no less a lie because that person happens to be acting on behalf of his employer. If your morality forbids lying, then this lie violates it no less than any other.
There seems to me a somewhat troubling trend of reaction to the widely derided "corporate personhood" principle in law, by deliberately depersonalizing such "persons" to an extent which appears to me to increasingly include not only the "corporate person" per se, but the actual people persons who constitute that corporation, and who implement and act upon its policies - to regard the modern corporation as a faceless alien behemoth, after all, is of necessity to overlook the fact that it is an organization of people, in theory (if to a somewhat greater extent than in practice) around a common goal.
Your comment here is squarely in this line. "There's no person there", after all, is blatantly erroneous: of course there is a person there, otherwise there'd be no one to whom to worry about lying. It's been a while since I last reread The Authoritarians, but I seem to remember this kind of depersonalization being a significant theme in its analysis of how your category of authoritarian followers become willing to countenance human rights abuses. In that light, it surprises me to see you express a perspective which includes precisely that kind of elision, and I'm curious whether you see a substantive difference where I do not.
Yet there is also a process. Its impersonal by design. You are not even likely to talk to the same person twice. So the rules are different. If you pretend its a one-on-one relationship, you will be manipulated, lied to and frustrated.
Miss Manners reports trying to get her newspaper address changed. She called several times, but no result. Finally an agent told her that they are instructed to not do anything unless the customer was angry. She politely asked "Would you put me down as having been livid?" He politely agreed.
Did she lie? We all know we're just trying to get the system to work for us. Today, when you can't even begin to talk to a real person on the other end, you have less (no?) requirement to pretend you're interacting with one.
You are accusing the victims of authoritarianism of being authoritarian when they fight for their rights against organizations trying to oppress them. Wow.
Let me pose to you another scenario, and you tell me if you think my actions where abhorrent:
Whenever I work from home, there's often a knock at the door from someone trying to sell me solar panels. It's always a hard sell, they don't take "no" for an answer, and I don't have the time to deal with it. So when they ask if I'm the homeowner, I respond, "No, I rent.". They thank me and continue on their way.
It's clearly important to treat people with respect, even when they find themselves in a job position whose description goes against your interests.
But you wouldn't be lying to them, as I can assure you the customer service worker couldn't care less whether you're really deaf or not. As an analogy, telling a lie via telegram only counts as lying to the recipient, not to the post office clerks typing and handling the telegram.
In fact you would be lying to a faceless entity that is not a human being, whose charter clearly states that its purpose is to extract as much money as possible from you and funnel it somewhere else. Where to? Into the (ultimate) pockets of people who have built this entire construction in order to be as removed as possible from the moral and legal implications of the faceless entity's actions. Not to mention remaining very well hidden. Cowards and thieves, at the very least.
Whether you believe I'm lying to the faceless entity or to the cowards and thieves who built it that way (which is a valid philosophical point) I have no qualms whatsoever doing either thing.
You are right. What makes it okay to lie is that no harm is done to anyone I care about not harming. That they made themselves someone I no longer care about harming is their own issue.
Sorry, I'm not a consequentialist. And if harm is your criterion, what harm is done to anyone by calling customer service to cancel your account instead of lying so you can do it via email?
Any company that treats is customers so badly is likely to have a long hold period if you phone them up, probably by design. Calling them could easily take half an hour and my life only contains a finite number of half hours.
I'd like to think that I could do something productive with that time that would make my life or the world slightly better. Plus the frustration of sitting on hold would negatively impact my health and state of mind.
That seems like quite a lot of harm; certainly not worth an empty idealistic gesture that would not help anyone.
You can do something productive regardless. It's really baffling how many people seem to treat being put on hold as something that requires you to actively devote time to. Is this an age thing?
Being put on hold does put limits on what one can do. Can I be at the movies? Can I be having a discussion with friends and family? Can I driving? No to all of these (without having a performance impact).
Being put on hold does far more damage than lying in this particular case.
Moreover, the person you'd be lying to couldn't care less if you're lying or not. The person is most likely paid by the hour and is counting down hours to clock out and go home.
The company might not believe you, but many deaf people do listen to music. Deaf doesn't have to mean total silence, it can also mean that sound is so muffled or distorted that you can't understand the spoken word. Music still has some value, if you crank it up.
Got one of those for wine yesterday - get the initial cheap (but not free offer) purchase, and then only through well-learned suspicion do I check through enough to realise they've auto-enrolled me on a £25/month subscription.
On the upside they answered the phone immediately outside office hours and it was all cancelled in less than 30 seconds, so it's not always a hard sell on the phone
LinkedIn's "free trial" does this too (although they are /somewhat/ transparent with it). They send invites to trial their premium product pretty regularly, but in order to activate the trial you have to essentially sign up for the service, and then remember to cancel again before the trial runs out and you start getting billed.
Here's my trick: use a virtual credit card number (which is safer, anyway, since you don't expose the # of your original CC), and revoke it when you want to cancel. Or, make a VCC# with a $ limit. I don' t know if anyone other than Citibank has them anymore. They are fantastic.
Bank of America has them; their Apple Pay support is built on them. You can create one directly via their online banking interface, although it's pretty deeply buried and (IIRC) requires Flash, which is weird.
Newspapers are so desperate, they'll do anything. The answer is only use a customer focused card, or insist on invoicing, preferably where you pay in arrears.
My local paper even plays games with invoicing. They bill on a weird cycle (10 week) and will send you out of cycle/overlapping invoices that you don't actually owe. Sometimes those out of cycle invoices casually jack the rate up 20-30% -- if you pay it, you're accepting new terms.
My local paper does the same thing. Didn't realize this was their new strategy and that the billing department was not incompetent. They will send fake bills ahead of time with higher rates and say that my previous weeks have run out but my wife keeps everything logged and sets them straight everytime. Also long as you are willing to "play chicken" to cancel the service, they are willing to renegotiate to your terms (just like Comcast.)
One time I was trying to cancel my plan with Bally's fitness in New York and they wanted me to send a physical letter to Nebraska or something. I filed a better business bureau complaint and it was taken care of very quickly.
24 Hour Fitness has a similar policy you can put your account on indefinite hold at a location but to cancel you have to mail some letter to their headquarters. Stupid bullshit to keep their numbers up artificially.
My local fitness place had a deal where for $5 a month they'd put your membership 'on hold'. What a deal! I discovered by erasing my credit card on their payment site I could do it for $0 a month.
Just be careful that they don't take you to collections for "missed payments". Regardless though, fuck these kinds of practices where signing up is easy and leaving is hard. That should be something massively illegal with fines in the millions to billions for the number of affected customers.
There's even worse ones - Gyms that make you sign up for a membership that auto-renews every year and bills your credit card monthly.
They require you mail a physical letter requesting cancellation via certified mail! And you must prove you are the account holder and then wait 6-8 weeks for them to process your cancellation, so you might just end up auto-renewed for another year unless you cancelled two months in advance.
It's actually a wonder some of these business models based on theft by deception/fraud don't get prosecuted/sued out of existence...
A agency of some sort that protected consumers from these sorts of business practices would make a lot of sense. I wonder if Elizabeth Warren is doing anything...
Every year there's a genuine effort to reign in payday lenders in my state. Alas, those businesses know how to lobby. Bills die in committee, key votes won't budge, etc.
"Petty" issues like this don't light the activists' fire sufficiently to bring the heat required to push thru change. Another similar issue is predator towing operations. Every one agrees they have to go, but they're far down on the list of priorities.
I just cancelled a membership at a gym which utilises these cancellation practices. When I found out that I'd have to mail a physical letter, I called my bank instead.
If you use your credit card, you can wiggle your way out of it if you explain that these cancellation processes are absurd. Call the gym and ask if they'll cancel your membership over the phone first. After they refuse, tell your credit card company about it and ask them to try calling the gym with you on the line to get your membership cancelled. If the gym persists in its refusal you should be able to dispute and block the charge.
For me though this happened to be linked to my debit card (and I never ever put monthly billables on my debit card so I'm not sure what I was thinking when I signed up). However, because I had no other services linked to my debit card, I was able to have my bank just send me a new card and that was that.
If you have a signed contract with the gym, then just cancelling the card account may be a good way to find yourself sent to collections. Eliminating the payment method just means you are not paying them any more, it doesn't mean that you aren't accruing charges.
As annoying as these cancellation procedures are, they are almost always laid out in the up-front contract (especially for a gym, where you signed up in person). The time to object is when you sign the contract, not when you're trying to cancel.
(Not that I don't <strikethrough>hate</strikethrough> like this practice and find it shady and annoying, but wouldn't want people to wind up in deep trouble as a result).
Collections is a boogeyman. No company actively recruiting new non-distressed customers wants to have a reputation for harassing customers who fight back against pickpocketing. They'd rather let the occasional savvy customer go and continue signing up more rubes.
Comcast does this as well. It's actually worse than just cancelling. You can't even downgrade to a lower internet speed without calling, but you can upgrade to something more expensive online.
Yup, and when you call to downgrade, it's not a quick conversation. They have to try to negotiate with you and try to actually sell you more when you're asking for less. The person I spoke to finally capitulated after about 10 minutes of trying to sell me packages, ask me what my internet was used for, trying to explain why I might want not-their-cheapest thing, trying to tell me it's a bad deal, etc. It was super annoying and a stressful experience honestly to drop from 100mbit peak download to 35mbit service; $65 a month vs $105 for the 100mbit, 100mbit came as a package deal with basic cable which I didn't use since I don't have a TV. It was $10 cheaper than without TV, priced at $60/month for 6 months as a promo, the TV bundled so they can inflate their subscriber numbers to attempt to publicly minimize the effects of cord cutting.
I'd do anything to have a different ISP, but my apartment building has the choice of Comcast or 768k ATT DSL for the same price since I'd have to also get a phone line.
So I've discovered that the trick to a faster downgrade phone call is to call and say you want to cancel your service. Then you get someone who's trying to keep you as a customer, and they are willing to do more to please you.
I wish expiring credit card numbers existed to kill this sort of online quasi-scam (let's call it what it is).
I'd like to say, "$0.99 a week for 4 weeks? Cool, here's a temporary number that expires in exactly one month. Please cut my subscription off after then."
Of course, I suspect that the benefit of the entrenched system in the US for everyone but consumers will guarantee that this will be really difficult to accomplish in reality.
Many banks actually offer exactly this feature. You set a dollar limit and an expiry date. E.g. Bank of America ShopSafe: https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf... My Swedish bank offers the same thing and even has an app to generate card #s
Which Swedish bank is that? My bank used to offer expiring VISA cards but removem them claiming 3D Secure offers the same protection. (Obviously it does not...)
Discover used to offer this. Linked to a separate subdomain and used a Flash applet to generate the card numbers. Then after a couple of years they cancelled it without explanation.
True, though by leaving a bad last impression I'm less likely to restart my subscription later and less likely to recommend your service to others. I guess if you work out the relative values, you can still decide this way is the most profitable for your business and that's fine.
A good example from my own experience was freelancer.com. Their account closing procedure was so bad that now I won't open another one.
But if I do pay you, I expect to be honestly told up front how much you will be charging me.
That's the one thing that makes the Boston Globe's behaviour unforgivable: they're not just tricking you into thinking the subscription cost is less than 1/4th of what they actually charge you -- they're ramping the price up twice and not telling you about the second jump anywhere throughout the subscription process.
Maybe there is an addon or addition to adblocker that simply can stop us from reaching these sites? Would be nice with a global list of dark pattern sites and simply be warned about them.
We can fix the cancellation problem by forcing that a signup and cancellation must be symmetric by nature (ie. signing up online means that cancellation should also be possible online).
ZipCar requires a phone call too. Despite being a subscription service, if your credit card expires, they will send it to debt collections until you call to officially cancel. Shady.
Intentional or not, I'm really annoyed by a similar thing in the NYT iPad app: the ads are exactly where you naturally put your fingers to scroll. Coincidence?
The web consultants and senior (non-journalist) execs will make money. The Boston Globe itself will lose respectability.
They're getting shafted too but don't realise it.
When I last had to book a rental car and they did not show me the final price on the order now page I cancelled and choose a different company. Completely unacceptable.
This kind of misleading pattern is illegal in Australia and from reading other comments, probably the Europe.
In Australia the full price for a product has to be displayed equally or more prominently than any other price. So that $6.93 has to be just as visible other pricing claims (like $0.99 for 4 weeks).
The same law also requires companies to include tax prominently in their pricing. More generally, a business cannot engage in misleading or deceptive conduct.
The rationale behind this is it makes things fair for consumers, and helps businesses compete fairly.
These laws probably don't exist in places like the US as businesses complain about compliance costs, and the governments have other priorities.
In the UK at least, the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations of 2008 imply that it is an illegal sales technique. There has been some success in courts prosecuting this to a degree that most subscription services will also display the full price, less they become the example case.
There are. In fact, they were strengthened significantly quite recently, particularly in the area of online sales, and now with potentially quite serious penalties for any business that doesn't comply.
If you're interested, the main underlying EU rules are in Directive 2011/83/EU.
"Prices displayed by a business must be clear, accurate and not misleading to consumers. You should always display the total price of a product or service. When you present prices to your customers, you must state the total price of the good or service as a single figure, which is the minimum total cost that is able to be calculated."
> "When you present prices to your customers, you must state the total price of the good or service as a single figure, which is the minimum total cost that is able to be calculated."
Interesting. Suppose you go into a fast food place and say "I'll have a burger, medium onion rings, and a small soft drink". Assume onion rings come in medium and large, soft drinks come in small, medium, and large, and fries come in small, medium, and large. Assume onion rings and fries of the same size cost the same, and one can be substituted for the other in a combo with no price change.
The clerk could ring this up as those three separate items as ordered, giving price P1.
A second option is to ring it up as a medium combo (Burger, medium fries, medium drink), substitute onion rings for fries, and downgrade the drink to small, giving price P2 which is less than P1.
A third option is to ring it up as a small combo (Burger, small fries, small drink), upgrade to medium fries, and then substitute onion rings for fries, giving price P3 which is less than p2.
Is the seller in violation of the law if the clerk does not figure out and use option three?
How about an order for multiple people but all on the same ticket? For example here in the US Arby's has gyros for a limited time. They are something like a little over $4 each, but they have a 2 for $6 deal. Suppose a family of 5 comes in. The husband orders, then each kid orders, then the wife orders and pays. Suppose 3 of the 5 people ordered a single gyro each. If this were in Australia, would the clerk be required to notice that he can put two of those gyros together and ring them up as 2 for $6?
I'm pretty sure that usually, in the last situation with Arby's, the computer would automatically combine things that are part of a combo and apply the discount.
I think most point of sale systems have this built in when your order automatically gets a discount. Specially in supermarkets where the price changes with quantity.
Hey there, the quoted sentence is not a precise interpretation of the law (albeit is is written by a regulator). You could read the law at s47 - 48 at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/caca201026... and probably argue either way with your examples. If you think of a "combo" or "bundle" as a separate good to the individual items then those examples are unlikely to be covered.
In reality though, these laws are intended to prevent misleading price representations, not to force businesses to calculate the best deal for their customers.
I'm curious, how many Australian websites force you to enter your shipping address before you shop? In the US to properly account for sales tax you basically have to get the coordinates of the address you're shipping to.
The most degenerate example I'm aware of, is that my boss lives on a county border. On the other side of his street, sales taxes are 7.5%. His are 9%. The zip code, city (kind of - technically one side is part of another city, but the post office recognizes it as the same city), and street name is all the same, but the county is different, which you don't collect for shipping reasons.
Every online retailer I've seen collects it wrong, including Amazon, although maybe their backend for reporting purposes calculates it right. When searching for software solutions to sales tax, most of them seem to get it wrong too.
However, while I was watching the documentary 'Spotlight', which was The Globe's 2002 expose on the Roman Catholic church, it occurred to me - How are good newspapers to survive and turn a profit? Readers are unwilling to pay/subscribe and online ad revenue is falling.
It's a genuine problem and I sure hope some of these newspapers survive and are still around a decade from now. The WSJ, NYT, and WaPos will, but what about some of the the others?
The problem with newspapers is that if they paywall all of their articles, they won't get any viewers because nobody knows what kind of articles they write without subscribing. A lot of them have an 'X free articles per month' thing, but since I'm on three different machines, I've never hit that limit unless it was like one or two a month.
1. Make certain articles freely available. They're not stupid--they can figure out which ones will draw people in.
2. Do it LWN-style: the current week's edition requires a subscription, after that it's free. If it's well-written, people will pay to not be a week behind.
As much as I understand the need for a subscription this practice should be illegal.
And in some countries they actually are. There are laws in some European countries where you always have to disclose the full price and in case of reductions and offers you have to clearly show the original price.
>How are good newspapers to survive and turn a profit?
They might not. It doesn't surprise me, nobody wants to read objective news anymore. They'd rather seek out and read things that confirm their biases. It's one of the paradoxes of choice; more information and we actually learn less.
I noticed one of these on the UK National Lottery site recently. It asks you how many weeks you want to play for and defaults the choice to "continuously via direct debit"
Direct debits are remarkably easy to cancel though. No need to find the place you subscribe to, just call your bank, done. Bank required to refund in the event of an incorrect charge, with no time limit.
Much, much safer for recurring payments than continuous charge authorisation on a credit card where you have to contact the charger to cancel (or wait for your card to expire).
Reader Mode in browsers is increasingly useful for this kind of crap.
I'll add that the flipside is that publushers need revenues. I'm aware micropayments are making another go of it (David Brin is publishing an article shortly which I reviewed in draft). My thought is that that's actually the weong way to go and that what we need is superbundling, including possibly at the government level (an income-indexed content tax). Some asskicking in browser and web space to too shake out the cruft.
More and more websites block those though. I'm using some HN app on iphone a lot, and for articles from the New York Times and such, all you get is a summary and a 'read more' link, which gives you a page covered halfway with the (obligatory EU) cookie thing (every time) and with a 'subscribe now' banner.
This is a new concept for me, thank you, I've learned something. Most media companies are going the way of shady advertisers, using BuzzFeed/deceptive tactics. It's something that has really harmed the browsing experience, and continues to give rise to ad blockers.
Why is this called "dark patterns"? It seems that it can be more accurately described by calling it deliberately misleading or deceptive design. Clicking the link I had no idea what it meant. Terminology like this makes sense when the concept can't already be described using two words.
As for the content of the article, it has always seemed anti-user to me for a website to prompt for a subscription 30 seconds into browsing a page. I wonder if anyone has actually investigated the effect it has on traffic properly, because I always go back whenever I get prompted to subscribe.
If someone had told me in 2005 that in the future, intrusive popups would work its way back into the domains of acceptable design to the point where people will gladly have them on their personal blogs I would have laughed in disbelief. Together with "You have an outdated browser" ("Please view this in Netscape 4.0"), "Rotate your device" ("Best viewed in 800x600") this is all a terrible setback in acceptable practices.
Add to that some more recent design patterns like a "share on <social media>" button taking up 1/5 of the screen estate following you through the page only for the benefit of the publisher and the handful of users that also actively use twitter, weird overloading of scrolling behavior, "Continue reading" buttons... It's an awful mess and especially for websites that ideally would just present plain written text with some pictures it seems like designers are over-engineering their solutions for goals that in no way aligned with those of the users.
I agree. A dark pattern might be making the close button harder to see, but the pricing shenanigans are just downright deceptive and actually illegal in some parts of the world.
I disagree with cleanly splitting it into two categories, they're different points on the same scale.
Acting as if there is a difference in kind gives implicit approval to the behavior that is lower on the scale, and solidifies a dividing line that should be continuously getting pushed downward to move more and more types of deception onto the unacceptable side.
It is - for reasons that are a conversation unto themselves - uncouth to suggest a business is acting in bad faith without airtight evidence of malice. So the language gets softened.
It's doubly crazy when talking about the press. OP is picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. For all the rah rah "speaking truth to power" of the press, if you question the press you have to go hat-in-hand.
I don't think that is a valid concern in this case. From what I understand, "dark patterns" is hardly an euphemism, and implies that the perpetrator of "dark patterns" is acting in bad faith. The only reference to it that I can find providing a definition (http://darkpatterns.org) says that dark patterns "are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind".
It's a shortening of "dark design patterns", which in turn is short of saying "outright malicious design patterns". I'm not sure who coined the term or when it first appeared, but I find it an apt umbrella under which to describe a whole constellation of tricks and gotchas designed for unsuspecting and usually non-tech-savvy users.
So it means "outright malicious design patterns", but instead of saying that and conveying the meaning perfectly using relatively established and self-describing terminology, one can say two words less to make me look it up on a website. It doesn't seem like a win to me.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 3043 ms ] threadI do think it's pretty normal for the consumer to say "okay well, if that's the price for 4 weeks only, what happens after that?". The fact that that is not made clear immediately is shady, but I'm not sure it's a true deception.
Newspapers really have missed a trick or two in the transition to the internet.
That being said up until a few months ago, I didnt't read papers or watch the news on TV since it's all stage-managed nonsense but I decided to take out a FT weekend subscription after buying one on a whim one day.
I must say it was very enjoyable reading a newspaper with quality stories and no fluff or click-bait titles and so on.
I don't consider tabloids to be anything other than literary fast-food for the masses but I am thoroughly enjoying reading my FT on a Saturday and Sunday morning with a cup of tea.
Oh, it's only about £10 a month too.
Also, the locution "dark patterns" in the headline is a weird term that is, frankly, more deceptive than anything the writer purports to reveal the Globe does.
> Before you can read the article, there is a pop-up ad asking you to subscribe. By itself, this is annoying, but not deceptive. The real dark pattern is hidden at the top – the ‘Close’ button (circled in red) uses a very low contrast font, making it hard to see. It’s also in the left corner, not the standard right corner. This makes it likely that users won’t see it, causing them to subscribe when they didn’t have to.
> A Boston Globe reader can subscribe online. If they have a question, they can ask over email, or through a convenient live chat service. But if they want to stop paying, they have to call and ask on the phone
https://myaccount.nytimes.com/mem/cancel.html?id=10434447 We're sorry to see you go. To cancel your subscription quickly and easily, please call Customer Care at 877-698-5635 Hours of Operation: Monday — Friday: 7:30 a.m. ET through 9:00 p.m. ET Saturday and Sunday: 7:30 a.m. ET through 5:00 p.m. ET
I had a terrible experience with a NYT digital-only subscription, and I'll likely never subscribe again.
I had a subscription for a while that I hadn't been using. I only used their site when linked to it from another (like HN). I tried to cancel online, but there's no way to—you need to cancel over the phone. So, I did, sitting on hold for close to a half hour. Bad experience, but I wish it had ended there.
Fast-forward two months, and I started getting emails that my subscription was past-due. Then I come to realize that they had continued to bill me every 2 weeks, but the payments had just started failing because my card expired.
I emailed CS, mentioning that I had cancelled my subscription and I was being billed by mistake, and to make sure my account got cancelled this time. They "couldn't do anything about it" because my account was in their "grace period", and that I would continue to get the past due emails until the grace period ended.
I ended up filing chargebacks for each charge after I had originally cancelled. To my knowledge, they never replied to or contested the chargebacks (does the customer usually get this info, if they do? it's the first and only chargeback I'd ever filed).
I do this because I'm unable to keep up with one audiobook per month, but still really enjoy their service.
Also, Rackspace email (paid hosting by email address) requires you to contact customer service to delete email accounts you are not using. Not quite making a phone, but still requires going through a "wait and communicate with a human being" ten-minute process rather than a simple click to delete an account.
I've been able to both put my account on hold and cancel several times _online_ in the past 5 years.
Next time, I'll try to execute my right to cancel by the same means I subscribed, though. I don't think they will argue with you and if they did, I'd just fill a chargeback with my CCC.
When I was in my first year Econ 101 class I remember the professor telling a story which IIRC was about SF Bus Companies. We were talking about price elasticity and general market pricing mechanisms and doing price curves. The story was essentially that the bus company brought in consultants who evaluated why the company was losing money after it had raised rates. It was a no-brainer of course, that if you sell 5,000 rides a day (made up number) that if you raised prices from 1.00 to 1.10 you would make 10% more.
It turned out, that the company was doing rather poorly after raising rates but critically, they were even priced too high at 1.00. 20,000 people would ride the bus for $0.75 and have less impact on the marginal price as the busses were heavily underused.
The point is that it is possible, I would say likely but I have no data, that a subscription for the Boston Globe might attract 5,000 people at current price(made up number), but like above if they charged $0.99 a month, they could feasibly have 20000-200,000 customers in a biz with virtually 0 marginal cost, and profit tied directly to subscriber size(ads which I assume they show to even paying subscribers after reading the article).
Newspapers are super elastic, and that price curve probably falls steeply after $1.00 a month.
Although a large organization like the Globe will be able to negotiate better rates.
Or aggregate each customer's monthly payments into one larger charge, like Google used to do for Play Store purchases. From memory they waited until you'd reached something like $8 and then charged that in one transaction.
We really need some zero-friction mini-(if not micro) payments solution. I'm imagining a Paypal subscription button that's as frictionless as a Like button (on both subscribe and unsubscribe). Click once to pay $1 for access, without even leaving the page (no logins or signups). Unsubscribe is just a single click away, with no hidden cancellation periods. I love the idea of flattr, but only someone like PayPal has the existing userbase to get any adoption. They also have a balance feature to reduce CC processing fees.
It's actually incredibly dishonest, at each and every step of the way. It's anti-consumer, and makes distrust the organization and it's integrity as a place of good journalism. You never bothered to explain how you thought it wasn't. How is a huge surprise bill at the end of a year not dishonest? Hiding truth is dishonesty. Low level used car lot sales type strategy.
They are completely bonkers. They have absolutely no idea how people consume news; they still believe I'm going to go there first thing in the morning as my first page and 'read the whole newspaper' or something. And that I'll be subscribed just to them, or something equally idiotic.
I'm willing to pay that £10 for netflix for example, or perhaps 2 or 3 /maximum/ service I use /a lot/ -and that will be reviewed very often- but I'm not going to pay that to everyone whose website I go once a week or so.
What are they thinking? Gimme a subscription for £1/month, and I'll take quite a few of them (possibly more than 20 or 30!!) but I'm not willing to shell out that sort of money for occasional visits.
You're right on pricing though. Newspapers need to stop trying to charge nearly the same as a print subscription. Almost no one is going to pay that these days - we don't expect to get all our news from one or two sources now.
I'd love to see a respected news site try a penny under $1/£1 a month sub just to see how the numbers land. I'd wouldn't be at all surprised to see enough subscriber growth that they make more notwithstanding traffic growth. It has to be better than advert supported rates.
I'd pay that, without second thought. I'd be happy paying that across the twenty or so news sites that make up regular reading for me.
The Boston Globe is being intentionally deceptive about the amount they're charging their customers. They're trying to trick people into paying more money than they thought they were consenting to.
You could argue that they'll only "trick" those who don't dig deep enough to figure out the real price, but that's like saying confidence tricks are moral because they only work on naive people.
Me, I use Chaos Computer Club's https://anonbox.net/ :)
Accounts are created on the fly, and last just 24hr.
No affiliation, just enjoy the utility.
CCC is using a self-signed cert, and I haven't vetted it. But then, I'm not using it for anything that requires security. It just allows me to get a confirmation link.
Obviously I take different tacks depending how much I want to access the site. In this case I'm talking about the subscribe-or-close popups, obviously not a real account or anything.
Alternatively a far more interesting (but much more difficult to set up) solution would be to use chrome.runtime.connectNative to execute the native whois command on the user's OS.
Can you elaborate please? I've taken a very brief look at the chrome.runtime API and didn't see how to.
Essentially you need to add a native messaging app manifest to Chrome to tell it about the app on the host, and then Chrome reads that JSON file to find where to execute it, what to use to talk to it (eg stdio), what it's called, etc. On Windows the location of the JSON file has to be added to the registry (which is prohibitively annoying), but on OSX and Linux it's just saved in a specific folder. Once you've done that it's a simple case of calling a method on the chrome.runtime object, or setting up a couple of listeners to actually make the call.
https://whois.icann.org/en/whats-horizon
Or for a moderately amusing confirmation of ICANNs assertion that the current model is broken, try to whois microsoft.com, apple.com or google.com (NSFW language).
I think the current plan is to make whois data mandatory for commercial entities, and abolish the current decentralized model, but AFAIK no work has started yet.
Any negativity conveyed is purely by virtue of the grim state of affairs.
Edit: I just checked your profile and you probably know a lot more about the situation than I do. Feel free to correct me where I'm wrong! Your domain "gtld.club" does not work either, by the way :)
Typically, merely putting their letter in the outbox and getting it returned to them is enough to get them to stop, at least after a few times. As a side benefit, it gives money to the USPS, wastes theirs, and saves you have to walk to the trash!
Completely agree with the rest of the approach though. The real question is what to do with the "broadcast" flyers the post office has gotten involved in spamming. Stamp "return to sender" and stuff in blue mailbox? I don't see that employee frustration adding up to any change.
I can see why they are focusing on finding subscribers who think they are only paying a fraction of that.
There are people that might find enough value in the journalism of the Boston Globe to want to spend that kind of money on it, compared to the "entire internet" that can be, broadly, not the most reliable source of information (wether the Boston Globe is a good newspaper I have no idea, but it might be for some people).
That is a completely different discussion than looking at the deceptive tactics they use to make people that don't want to pay that amount to actually subscribe.
But the globe has also never charged my that much. They've been charging me roughly $200/year for the last 3 years for a digital subscription.
It's disgusting and way too many companies are utilizing these tactics rather than building a solid business model.
More companies that are doing this should be called out. Ive seen naturebox, justfab and others just to name a few.
(disclaimer, I am an investor)
https://www.truebill.com/how-to-cancel
That's pretty awesome. I'm just going to check this list from now on before I put my credit card info into a web form.
We plan to make money by recommending new services (i.e. we see you have X and Y, would you like to try Spotify).
https://www.hellofax.com/info/pricing
Then I changed address. They might still be billing me for all I know.
Since it is actually a bit challenging to correctly pull your free credit report, start here: https://www.ftc.gov/faq/consumer-protection/get-my-free-cred... (Simply Googling "free credit report" and clicking willy-nilly can lead to sadness.)
In fact I'm overdue to pull mine myself; thanks for reminding me.
Correct. Former vendor, worked with their cell network crew on many occasions.
To be more fair, all the large carriers are mostly laden with corporate procedures and bureaucracy so it's hard for worker bees to make progress even if they know what's needed. T-Mo's procedures are just more broken.
I can't remember the names of most of the companies though. One was definitely Match, because they expect you to call them to cancel (or did at the time)
Essentially, if these things ever get to court if you contacted someone other than the agent they can claim they weren't notified, didn't know, etc, if they are shady, but a registered letter to the registered agent is like the gold standard of having contacted them.
Please be careful. That is not necessarily the case, and depending on your local laws you may be left owing money, going to collections, and/or having your credit damaged for non-payment.
EDIT: If it's just text I'm after, I'll also go in with elinks.
Most of the times the news are loaded without popups and sometimes with wrong CSS but still readable.
Sometimes I need to enable js only for the actual host for it to work. In the end it's worth the hassle.
There's no law to say that you can terminate by email. Most companies won't bother chasing, but there's nothing to stop them really hurting you.
It's a silly situation that arises because of the (almost) zero marginal cost of providing digital media. It makes sense in the physical world: you can't claim your money back because you didn't read the magazine they sent. But these laws are much the same in the virtual world.
If they provided and you agreed to a way to cancel, and you don't use that way, they are totally within their rights to continue (passively) providing access, and charging for it. In perpetuity, yes.
But in the case of a passive web site subscription, if the customer stops accessing the site and stops the method of payment, no services have been rendered, and no cost has been incurred by the company. Web server logs could even prove this (although the company could also falsify them).
So a better analogy would probably be a gym membership. Imagine a gym refuses to allow a customer to cancel in-person or on the phone, instead requiring the customer to mail a letter. So a customer, justifiably angry at this, calls his bank or credit card and stops future payments, and never sets foot in the gym again. Now, no services have been rendered after that date, and no costs have been incurred by the gym. They are owed nothing--if not legally in all jurisdictions, then ethically and morally, and therefore legally it should be the same.
I would like to see this tested in court, even a small claims court. In the case of a company intentionally making it difficult and time-consuming to unsubscribe, and a customer cancelling the payment method due to that difficulty, I have a feeling that most judges would side with the former customer. And as has been pointed out, in many places this is not legal, and I would not be surprised if that included several U.S. states.
Yep, you'd be screwed there too. If your agreement with the gym said you would unsubscribe by mail, and you just stop paying without doing so, they could recover the money.
Gyms make their money by having people pay without using the gym, so they wouldn't care that they aren't 'rendering services'. That's a big reason many companies, and most gyms, use subscriptions.
You could fight it in court if you want to. You might even win. You might even win the following battle to recover your credit score. But all that's going to be a lot more of a hassle than picking up the phone and cancelling in the first place. It takes a special kind of person to willfully seek such a pyrrhic victory.
In most of Europe, there is.
In Germany, for example, the business has to allow cancelling via the same way as you signed up.
That seems reasonable.
Do you know a lot of companies that will let someone sign up via e-mail? I don't.
For any subscription services I run, if someone mails us asking to cancel, we normally direct them to the on-site cancellation process. This does use all our normal security and log-in procedures, and is fully automated and can be used in moments at any time.
However, if someone did not cancel that way (or in one of the other ways we allow for in our terms) and just blocked their payment, we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us. In practice we're only charging a small amount in these cases so we'd probably just cancel their service when payment didn't go through, but there is no guarantee any other business would make the same decision, so your strategy is risky.
If a real person replies to my mail, it's reasonable to expect that it has been delivered.
They're more than welcome to ask any question via mail or initiate the call in the time I specify (outside of my working hours) - which I wrote. Or they can have an online form to do it as well, just like they did when they accepted my money in the first place.
> we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us
I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to. That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.
Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.
That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.
I don't know where you're from, but in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with, it seems unlikely that would be the case.
From a purely practical point of view, I'm not sure it should be the case either, even though I'm generally in favour of reasonable consumer protection laws. For e-mail specifically, there are too many problems with relying on it, particularly if significant amounts of money or other commitments are affected by whether or not a subscription continues.
Depends on the laws I suppose. I Denmark you cannot bind a consumer to pay for a service for any period except for a few special cases (for instance, phone service up to 6 months).
I'm from Denmark, and we have some fairly strong consumer protection laws exactly to prevent things like this. If I cancel any kind of prepaid service, not only do they have to stop charging me money after the periode is finished, they also have to give me back the money equivalent to the remaining period from the end of month + 1 month and forward.
There is still a question of what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation, though. If you're subscribing to a service based in a country other than your own, there may be other laws that are relevant as well.
Personally, I'm a fan of the symmetry argument: you should be able to cancel a service through equivalent methods to what you could use to sign up for it, and without requiring an unreasonable amount of effort.
While that's one aspect of the situation - and yes, a matching notification requirement is sensible - this discussion of "cancellation" is missing the important question: were goods delivered or services used?
Using a newspaper publisher as an example, if we're talking about a simple contract (for either a predefined period or specific termination criteria) where some amount of money is regularly exchanged for the regular delivery on dead trees or electronic means (email) of their publication, then there is a debt that needs to be repaid. The publisher fulfilled their obligations created by the contract.
However, this is a very different situation if no debt has been created. If the contract was a regular payment to gain access to their back archives, if you haven't used their services, then there isn't a debt[1]. Also, I suspect most businesses using contracts of this type will include some sort of clause that terminates all of their obligations if the payments stop.
The point being that there is going to depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, so it's dangerous to generalize.
[1] Some jurisdictions might treat use of the service separately than a "retainer" for access. This doesn't really change anything, though it might make the situation much more complicated.
That is certainly true. I do think a few people here seem to be taking a rather narrow interpretation of when services have been provided, though.
Say you sign up for access to an on-line newspaper, but then as it happens you're busy and don't actually read it. The newspaper still had reporters writing stories, and servers and Internet bandwidth to pay for, and admin staff dealing with the tax records triggered by your subscription, and so on. I don't see why someone should necessarily expect to get back their money under those circumstances.
Perhaps a more obvious example would be an insurance policy. For obvious reasons, you can't get a refund at the end of the period of insurance just because in practice you didn't need to make a claim.
Whenever I've been putting terms and conditions together for a new service, the lawyers always seem very careful about exactly what constitutes offer and acceptance to form the contract, when provision of services starts, how the agreement can be ended and any terms that survive termination, and other details like that.
You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.
That's a very entitled POV.
What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with? In any business I run, it takes maybe 10 seconds, and the service is completely transparent about how to do it. It's secure, it's fully automated, and it's in the customer's own interests as well because it will also cancel any recurring payment arrangements with other services immediately and automatically.
What is entitled is things like the person who mailed us the other day, after hours on a Friday and just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due, saying very rudely and aggressively that they weren't using the service and they'd forgotten to cancel before but now they wanted to and they didn't authorise any further payments and they'd do all sorts of nasty things to us if we charged their card again. I mean seriously, they were told three times when they signed up what the charging basis was, and they could have cancelled using the normal facility in far less time than it took to write their little rant. It was only through luck that one of us saw their message in time to act on it, and if we hadn't, it would have been entirely their fault.
You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.
There is nothing remotely extortionate about the business practices we are talking about. The services in question are completely transparent and up-front about both what the charging basis is and how to cancel, and our terms are legally unremarkable.
As for "services not rendered", anyone is free to cancel their subscriptions with any service I help to run at any time, and none of those services use any sort of sneaky long term commitments or ever have. But if you stay signed up, and you have access to the services, you don't get to decide later that you want your money back because you didn't actually use them that month. If you think that's unreasonable, I wish you luck in getting all your insurance premiums refunded if you haven't claimed on them at the end of the year.
The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.
> just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due
What's wrong with that? Are customers required to provide notice? It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday. It's your system.
> they were told three times when they signed up
Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights... All that sounds rather entitled to me.
We've spent several years building that particular service. We pay the bills for running it whether or not any particular customer uses it, because we have to have enough computers and bandwidth and so on available so that our subscribers can get what they're paying for. Our expenses don't magically disappear just because someone didn't use a service that they had previously used and were still signed up for during a certain period, nor can we telepathically tell whether intermittent users will not actually use the service during the next billing period.
What's wrong with that?
What's wrong with sending an e-mail to an address no-one is likely to be monitoring in real time, denying permission for a fully automated scheduled payment to be taken a few hours later? Well, no-one might read the message before the payment gets taken, for one thing.
It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday.
You don't seem to understand how this works. The money would already have been taken by the automated systems at that point. That means we would have to actively refund it, which may in itself incur a charge depending on the payment processing services involved. In any case, it requires significant manual intervention to do that and update all the records accordingly, which is at best wasting time we could otherwise spend on more useful activities.
Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights...
We are perfectly within our rights. That's the point.
As it happens, we often do go out of our way to deal with messages from our subscribers as helpfully as we can. We take considerable pride in offering very good customer service, and we receive far more positive messages than complaints. In some cases, we will even voluntarily refund someone's subscription fee for a month, perhaps if we believe their situation wasn't entirely their fault or they had some honest misunderstanding about something.
But make no mistake, doing these things costs us time and, in some cases, money. We will do it anyway for most people, because that's the kind of business we want to run. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do so, either legally or morally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also had little inclination to do so in the case of someone who by their own admission had known what to do and failed to do it, yet who felt the appropriate reaction to that was to write to us rudely, making an unreasonable demand and immediately threatening us if we failed to comply, instead of simply asking for help if they needed it.
Your of a different opinion, that's your prerogative. Just don't expect everyone to feel the same way. I certainly don't.
I don't care how much you've poured into automating your business processes. That's what you do to increase your profit margins. I only care about two things: My input (time, effort, money), and your output (services provided).
That's just business. If someone is rude, be happy to see the back of them as a customer. Or fire them as a customer. Both those are acceptable. Taking a consumer to court if you think you'd have a case (you wouldn't) is also your right.
It's also their right to take you to small claims, which depending on the state may require you to send an employee to their state, without a lawyer, to justify your actions to a judge. I think you'll probably discover they're not going to be very sympathetic to your perceived right to take people's money just because you have business expenses in predicting future costs.
They probably do if it was a special order placed for a specific customer who then cancelled once the food was already delivered to the store. And why shouldn't they, if it was entirely the customer's fault?
The rest of your post is just wishful thinking, like most of your other comments in this thread, so I see little reason to continue this discussion. Businesses can and do take non-paying customers to court or through a collections process, and routinely win under the kind of circumstances we're talking about.
In particular, cancelling a payment you owe does not in itself relieve you of any contractual obligations you have, it just means you're in default. You might not like it, but it is the law almost everywhere. As I said in another post, try getting a refund on an insurance policy at the end of the year just because you haven't made a claim, or getting part of your phone bill refunded because you didn't need to make a call in a certain period. If you try cancelling your payment without cancelling your service in those cases, and then refuse to pay what you owe, you'll be taken to court or collections, and you'll lose.
And you didn't special order anything. Your argument here is all kinds of moving goal posts.
Bottom line: Unless you have an actual contract, don't expect to win. And even then, be prepared to demonstrate that your product worked as advertised and explain why, despite communicating by email with the customer as routine, that was not sufficient for cancellation. Pretty sure you haven't addressed this at all except to say "because I thought I could sell the things I bought!". Sorry, but no, you don't get to change the rules just because yours is an Internet service. Especially not for a month to month pre-pay authorization. That's just ridiculous. I haven't even seen pre-paid cellular networks try to pull that scam.
https://consumerist.com/2008/01/21/suing-big-companies-in-sm...
We do have an actual contract, the moment someone signs up and pays us money under our advertised terms. It is as clear and legally binding as if we sat down at a table and signed a piece of paper. I suspect that not understanding this is the cause of many of the incorrect things you've been saying in this thread.
Edit: Just to be reiterate in case it wasn't clear from my other comments, one of the points in those terms specifically says what the process for cancelling is and that an e-mail is not sufficient, for precisely the kinds of reasons we've been talking about on HN today.
And you think that'd stand up in small claims. I'd like to be a fly on the wall when that gets tested. ;-) And the collection agency willing to sign on as a co-defendant? That better be some monthly subscription fee.
Also, there's no way you win a chargeback claim in this case: https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnwin1213/stopp...
You're going to have a rough time explaining why you thought you were within your rights to ignore her cancellation notice. Do you also think your ToS would allow you to ignore certified mail? You might want to talk to an actual lawyer.
Since he/she cited a specific case however, doesn't seem like "strawman" qualifies.
A company representative is notified of cancellation. A company offering a month to month pre-pay service isn't entitled to anything else. End of story. IMO. Anything else is unethical.
That seems perfectly reasonable. No you're not within your rights to dick with people in bad faith, no matter what a ToS says. You can put whatever you'd like in there. Doesn't mean it'll pass muster when you're in front of a judge.
Beyond that she (the customer) is perfectly within her rights to cancel at any time. So the "but but but, I spent money!" is the real straw-man here. Silhoutte would have considered it his/her obligation to spend that money either way, the customer could have cancelled at the literal last second, through her/his preferred online method even, and that doesn't change a thing. There's a strawman.
Mostly it's probably because I had AT&T try something similar on me in the past year, trying to hold me liable for $1,300 for UVerse service at an address I've never lived at, going as far as to pursue collections against me.
They and the collections dropped their claim pretty quickly when I made it clear I'd be taking them to small claims over this.
Those are different circumstances. I suppose it just irks me that some people think they have a "right" to your property because you were rude?
It's nobody's "right" to dip into your wallet for a prepaid service. It's not moral. It's not ethical. Can you think of another service where that'd fly? I can't. The utility companies only seek to recover services rendered. Prepaid phone services will simply suspend service until you pay up. It's your right to suspend payments on your credit card to your MVNO whenever you like. It's their right to suspend service if you do. It's not their right to do much else.
That seems totally fair.
Of course, most of the time it never gets that far, because as I said before, we try to provide very good customer service. Among other things, that means we are up-front about our pricing and we give our subscribers quick and effective ways to manage their subscriptions. I wouldn't want to run a business that did the sort of shady things mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. We get very few complaints in the first place, and in reality it's far more common for us to help out someone who made an honest mistake and then get a nice mail back.
All I'm saying here is that we don't have any obligation to go beyond what our terms and the relevant laws require, and in particular, we don't have to accept some random e-mail as cancellation when we explicitly say we won't, for good reasons, and when we provide a quick and effective alternative that is readily available to all subscribers. I honestly can't see why anyone would have a problem with that.
Something approximately the same as that is true across the EU under the recent changes to the consumer protection rules.
On your other points, I'll just mention that this subthread was originally about whether accepting e-mail as a cancellation method was appropriate, not so much the original topic of trying to force people to call as an aggressive way to deter cancellation. It seems we all agree that making it excessively difficult for someone to cancel when they're entitled to is scummy behaviour, and I imagine the law in many places would take a similar view.
But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?
Except to make the customer (especially international customers, which may have to call in the middle of the night and who may incur significant charges) jump through a whole lot of hoops and to make it as difficult as possible to cancel.
To me this reeks like a shit ton of bad faith by the service provider, which has nothing whatsoever to do with security.
I suppose if they had some sort of credentials set up for phone access then that would be a point in its favour. My bank do have well established security procedures for me to contact them by phone, for example.
To be clear, I am not in any way condoning requiring phone cancellation as a technique for making it artificially difficult or frustrating for someone to cancel when they are within their rights to do so. As you say, it stinks of bad faith.
In general, there is nothing that you can ask me over a phone that cannot be asked to someone pretending to be me who can get the details in a variety of ways. To static questions there are static answers. If you perform two factor authentication properly, this is actually easier over a website than the phone.
In any case, one isn't more or less secure than the other. The physological effect of speaking to a phone just makes someone feel one is more safe. I'd say that if you send an email to the address you have on the account details, you can reasonably expect to get the right person to the same degree as you would when calling the phone number on the account.
Of course, you normally can't sign up for services that require payment via e-mail anyway, since no-one credible is going to ask for enough details that they can charge you through an insecure medium like e-mail.
Some people would probably argue that we make it too easy for customers to leave, but as I've said, we prefer to run these services a certain way, and if it doesn't completely maximise profit then that's just too bad. It's not uncommon for some of these services to have a pattern of seasonal memberships, so from an entirely self-interested point of view, the trust we earn by making it easy to sign up and easy to cancel is probably of some value anyway.
That smelled. So instead I signed up for the ETrade checkbook, wrote myself a check for my remaining balance, cashed it, and never dealt with them again.
So yeah, it's not like any of these types of establishments care at all about their reputation. They'll gladly ignore your not-to-their-letter cancellation, stop contacting you, and send your $50 usage fees for no actual usage to collections.
Works every time.
Because the service provider is dishonest already.
There seems to me a somewhat troubling trend of reaction to the widely derided "corporate personhood" principle in law, by deliberately depersonalizing such "persons" to an extent which appears to me to increasingly include not only the "corporate person" per se, but the actual people persons who constitute that corporation, and who implement and act upon its policies - to regard the modern corporation as a faceless alien behemoth, after all, is of necessity to overlook the fact that it is an organization of people, in theory (if to a somewhat greater extent than in practice) around a common goal.
Your comment here is squarely in this line. "There's no person there", after all, is blatantly erroneous: of course there is a person there, otherwise there'd be no one to whom to worry about lying. It's been a while since I last reread The Authoritarians, but I seem to remember this kind of depersonalization being a significant theme in its analysis of how your category of authoritarian followers become willing to countenance human rights abuses. In that light, it surprises me to see you express a perspective which includes precisely that kind of elision, and I'm curious whether you see a substantive difference where I do not.
Miss Manners reports trying to get her newspaper address changed. She called several times, but no result. Finally an agent told her that they are instructed to not do anything unless the customer was angry. She politely asked "Would you put me down as having been livid?" He politely agreed.
Did she lie? We all know we're just trying to get the system to work for us. Today, when you can't even begin to talk to a real person on the other end, you have less (no?) requirement to pretend you're interacting with one.
is it unethical to lie to an automated email form or a chatbot?
Perhaps not to you. Morality is personal, and to me this comment is abhorrent.
Whenever I work from home, there's often a knock at the door from someone trying to sell me solar panels. It's always a hard sell, they don't take "no" for an answer, and I don't have the time to deal with it. So when they ask if I'm the homeowner, I respond, "No, I rent.". They thank me and continue on their way.
It's clearly important to treat people with respect, even when they find themselves in a job position whose description goes against your interests.
But you wouldn't be lying to them, as I can assure you the customer service worker couldn't care less whether you're really deaf or not. As an analogy, telling a lie via telegram only counts as lying to the recipient, not to the post office clerks typing and handling the telegram.
In fact you would be lying to a faceless entity that is not a human being, whose charter clearly states that its purpose is to extract as much money as possible from you and funnel it somewhere else. Where to? Into the (ultimate) pockets of people who have built this entire construction in order to be as removed as possible from the moral and legal implications of the faceless entity's actions. Not to mention remaining very well hidden. Cowards and thieves, at the very least.
Whether you believe I'm lying to the faceless entity or to the cowards and thieves who built it that way (which is a valid philosophical point) I have no qualms whatsoever doing either thing.
You are right. What makes it okay to lie is that no harm is done to anyone I care about not harming. That they made themselves someone I no longer care about harming is their own issue.
I'd like to think that I could do something productive with that time that would make my life or the world slightly better. Plus the frustration of sitting on hold would negatively impact my health and state of mind.
That seems like quite a lot of harm; certainly not worth an empty idealistic gesture that would not help anyone.
Being put on hold does far more damage than lying in this particular case.
Not that they are a great source for morality anyway, but if you're going to use them, at least use them properly, mom.
Sorry, deaf humor. (I agree with you).
On the upside they answered the phone immediately outside office hours and it was all cancelled in less than 30 seconds, so it's not always a hard sell on the phone
My local paper even plays games with invoicing. They bill on a weird cycle (10 week) and will send you out of cycle/overlapping invoices that you don't actually owe. Sometimes those out of cycle invoices casually jack the rate up 20-30% -- if you pay it, you're accepting new terms.
They require you mail a physical letter requesting cancellation via certified mail! And you must prove you are the account holder and then wait 6-8 weeks for them to process your cancellation, so you might just end up auto-renewed for another year unless you cancelled two months in advance.
It's actually a wonder some of these business models based on theft by deception/fraud don't get prosecuted/sued out of existence...
"Petty" issues like this don't light the activists' fire sufficiently to bring the heat required to push thru change. Another similar issue is predator towing operations. Every one agrees they have to go, but they're far down on the list of priorities.
If you use your credit card, you can wiggle your way out of it if you explain that these cancellation processes are absurd. Call the gym and ask if they'll cancel your membership over the phone first. After they refuse, tell your credit card company about it and ask them to try calling the gym with you on the line to get your membership cancelled. If the gym persists in its refusal you should be able to dispute and block the charge.
For me though this happened to be linked to my debit card (and I never ever put monthly billables on my debit card so I'm not sure what I was thinking when I signed up). However, because I had no other services linked to my debit card, I was able to have my bank just send me a new card and that was that.
As annoying as these cancellation procedures are, they are almost always laid out in the up-front contract (especially for a gym, where you signed up in person). The time to object is when you sign the contract, not when you're trying to cancel.
(Not that I don't <strikethrough>hate</strikethrough> like this practice and find it shady and annoying, but wouldn't want people to wind up in deep trouble as a result).
Keep in mind this is 140 year old company which can't change all at once.
I'd do anything to have a different ISP, but my apartment building has the choice of Comcast or 768k ATT DSL for the same price since I'd have to also get a phone line.
I'd like to say, "$0.99 a week for 4 weeks? Cool, here's a temporary number that expires in exactly one month. Please cut my subscription off after then."
Of course, I suspect that the benefit of the entrenched system in the US for everyone but consumers will guarantee that this will be really difficult to accomplish in reality.
Many banks actually offer exactly this feature. You set a dollar limit and an expiry date. E.g. Bank of America ShopSafe: https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsaf... My Swedish bank offers the same thing and even has an app to generate card #s
That's a really great idea that I've never seen before - would love to see more banks have this feature
A good example from my own experience was freelancer.com. Their account closing procedure was so bad that now I won't open another one.
Every customer starts out not paying you. What a great way to attract new customers....
That's the one thing that makes the Boston Globe's behaviour unforgivable: they're not just tricking you into thinking the subscription cost is less than 1/4th of what they actually charge you -- they're ramping the price up twice and not telling you about the second jump anywhere throughout the subscription process.
Boston Globe is all green though. https://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/www.bostonglobe.com
In Australia the full price for a product has to be displayed equally or more prominently than any other price. So that $6.93 has to be just as visible other pricing claims (like $0.99 for 4 weeks).
The same law also requires companies to include tax prominently in their pricing. More generally, a business cannot engage in misleading or deceptive conduct.
The rationale behind this is it makes things fair for consumers, and helps businesses compete fairly.
These laws probably don't exist in places like the US as businesses complain about compliance costs, and the governments have other priorities.
If you're interested, the main underlying EU rules are in Directive 2011/83/EU.
"Prices displayed by a business must be clear, accurate and not misleading to consumers. You should always display the total price of a product or service. When you present prices to your customers, you must state the total price of the good or service as a single figure, which is the minimum total cost that is able to be calculated."
It's illegal not to comply.
Interesting. Suppose you go into a fast food place and say "I'll have a burger, medium onion rings, and a small soft drink". Assume onion rings come in medium and large, soft drinks come in small, medium, and large, and fries come in small, medium, and large. Assume onion rings and fries of the same size cost the same, and one can be substituted for the other in a combo with no price change.
The clerk could ring this up as those three separate items as ordered, giving price P1.
A second option is to ring it up as a medium combo (Burger, medium fries, medium drink), substitute onion rings for fries, and downgrade the drink to small, giving price P2 which is less than P1.
A third option is to ring it up as a small combo (Burger, small fries, small drink), upgrade to medium fries, and then substitute onion rings for fries, giving price P3 which is less than p2.
Is the seller in violation of the law if the clerk does not figure out and use option three?
How about an order for multiple people but all on the same ticket? For example here in the US Arby's has gyros for a limited time. They are something like a little over $4 each, but they have a 2 for $6 deal. Suppose a family of 5 comes in. The husband orders, then each kid orders, then the wife orders and pays. Suppose 3 of the 5 people ordered a single gyro each. If this were in Australia, would the clerk be required to notice that he can put two of those gyros together and ring them up as 2 for $6?
In reality though, these laws are intended to prevent misleading price representations, not to force businesses to calculate the best deal for their customers.
The most degenerate example I'm aware of, is that my boss lives on a county border. On the other side of his street, sales taxes are 7.5%. His are 9%. The zip code, city (kind of - technically one side is part of another city, but the post office recognizes it as the same city), and street name is all the same, but the county is different, which you don't collect for shipping reasons.
Every online retailer I've seen collects it wrong, including Amazon, although maybe their backend for reporting purposes calculates it right. When searching for software solutions to sales tax, most of them seem to get it wrong too.
They do often ask for a post code at the checkout to calculate shipping, however.
However, while I was watching the documentary 'Spotlight', which was The Globe's 2002 expose on the Roman Catholic church, it occurred to me - How are good newspapers to survive and turn a profit? Readers are unwilling to pay/subscribe and online ad revenue is falling.
It's a genuine problem and I sure hope some of these newspapers survive and are still around a decade from now. The WSJ, NYT, and WaPos will, but what about some of the the others?
1. Make certain articles freely available. They're not stupid--they can figure out which ones will draw people in.
2. Do it LWN-style: the current week's edition requires a subscription, after that it's free. If it's well-written, people will pay to not be a week behind.
And in some countries they actually are. There are laws in some European countries where you always have to disclose the full price and in case of reductions and offers you have to clearly show the original price.
They might not. It doesn't surprise me, nobody wants to read objective news anymore. They'd rather seek out and read things that confirm their biases. It's one of the paradoxes of choice; more information and we actually learn less.
That should be illegal - accept the same channel for sales also for cancellations.
Much, much safer for recurring payments than continuous charge authorisation on a credit card where you have to contact the charger to cancel (or wait for your card to expire).
I'll add that the flipside is that publushers need revenues. I'm aware micropayments are making another go of it (David Brin is publishing an article shortly which I reviewed in draft). My thought is that that's actually the weong way to go and that what we need is superbundling, including possibly at the government level (an income-indexed content tax). Some asskicking in browser and web space to too shake out the cruft.
I may have to manually add "about:reader?url=" to the head of the navigation line. I'm taking to doing that by default.
A small number of sites revert to the default page, but few. NY Times isn't among them.
As for the content of the article, it has always seemed anti-user to me for a website to prompt for a subscription 30 seconds into browsing a page. I wonder if anyone has actually investigated the effect it has on traffic properly, because I always go back whenever I get prompted to subscribe.
If someone had told me in 2005 that in the future, intrusive popups would work its way back into the domains of acceptable design to the point where people will gladly have them on their personal blogs I would have laughed in disbelief. Together with "You have an outdated browser" ("Please view this in Netscape 4.0"), "Rotate your device" ("Best viewed in 800x600") this is all a terrible setback in acceptable practices.
Add to that some more recent design patterns like a "share on <social media>" button taking up 1/5 of the screen estate following you through the page only for the benefit of the publisher and the handful of users that also actively use twitter, weird overloading of scrolling behavior, "Continue reading" buttons... It's an awful mess and especially for websites that ideally would just present plain written text with some pictures it seems like designers are over-engineering their solutions for goals that in no way aligned with those of the users.
Acting as if there is a difference in kind gives implicit approval to the behavior that is lower on the scale, and solidifies a dividing line that should be continuously getting pushed downward to move more and more types of deception onto the unacceptable side.
Maybe someone should write a post on "the dark pattern of dark pattern articles."
It is - for reasons that are a conversation unto themselves - uncouth to suggest a business is acting in bad faith without airtight evidence of malice. So the language gets softened.
It's doubly crazy when talking about the press. OP is picking a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. For all the rah rah "speaking truth to power" of the press, if you question the press you have to go hat-in-hand.
http://darkpatterns.org/