Well they specifically said "renewal" so the business just wouldn't renew them and therefore not cost them any more money.
Obviously some services like insurance or storage don't work like this, though. I don't want to use them, but I want them to be there if I do need them.
Could you just give the option for them to delete the account if they want to at the same time? I assume most wouldn’t want to, but if it costs them money to keep inactive accounts then they can choose to. Out of interest what sort of services were you thinking of there?
> People who can't wake up without an alarm, should be late for things.
> People who are busy, clearly need to be punished!
> Punishment is the best way to change behavior, it's why I always hit my dog!
> Humans are better at remembering and scheduling things than computers are, obviously we should require humans do these types of things even when it would be trivial to do so programmatically.
> I can punish someone, so I should be allowed to!
Or... you could not be a dick, and go, huh, that would be a very nice thing to do to help out your fellow human! I'm glad someone else is willing to help someone else out just because it's the nice thing to do!
> Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
What in the world are you going on about? Continuing to pay for something that you agreed to pay for and didn't cancel is not a "punishment". If it is, that is the silliest definition of punishment I've ever heard. It is certainly not anywhere close to "hitting my dog". So I fixed it for you:
> People who don't cancel subscriptions will continue to pay for them.
> People who can't wake up without an alarm will be late for things.
Neither of those things is an injustice.
Paying for things you agreed to pay for is not a punishment. Punishment is fining companies that do not proactively cancel subscriptions on your behalf. You can set a reminder to cancel something (on a computer). Any argument you can make for a computer being used can apply just as well to the consumer as to the business.
It is very well known in basically every sphere of human endeavor that the less you do something, the less competent you will be at that thing. This doesn't need a citation – this is how humans work.
> > Giving people a free pass for not paying attention to their own finances is exactly how you end up with people that are even worse at managing their finances than before.
[citation needed]... because I'm pretty sure you just made that up, and it's not true at all.
I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
> I am not sure what to think about this topic in a whole, but that argument isn’t much different than why we teach responsibility for kids. There might be some truth in it.
Teaching as a whole actions (or inaction) has consequences, is different from trying to interact fairly with the world. In the above case, the punishment is so far divorced from the mistake (forgetting to cancel a subscription), that cost has nearly no chance to actually correct the behavior.
But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This *still* wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
> But, even if you think that anxiety and paranoia is a healthy way to go about things... This still wouldn't teach the correct behavior. Punishing people for mistakes does not teach them how to manage finances correctly, it teaches them fear about recurring subscriptions.
Unfortunately, consequences often are the only guiding factor. I am assuming that we are talking about normal system here where the user has full control to cancel the financial occurrence. We are not talking about some abusive system that is pretending or denying the cancellation. In that case, it is not different that paying your rent.
If people feel anxiety and paranoia for that, that is not normal and they should do something about it. Like having a confidence that they are in control of their own life. It is a basic life skill.
About the power of consequences - that dictates the world. Almost always it is impossible to provide better carrot than the ill actions are producing.
Look no further than the U.S. politics. If there are no consequences for ill actions, those actions will continue as long as it is possible.
Russia will annex new land until it faces the hard stop.
Companies will push boundaries of the law and ethics until there is a financial consequence.
People will trash the park until the fine is large enough and someone is patrolling in the park.
People will drive beyond speed-limit until the fine is correlating their income level. Otherwise only rich people can break the speed-limit.
> Russia will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> Companies will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People at the park will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
> People in cars will do [bad thing], unless they're stopped
I don't disagree with any of these. We as a society, should punish bad behavior! (Note that the as a society is a critical component of my agreement here)
Is forgetting to cancel a recurring subscription a bad thing, that should be punished? Does it hurt society, or exclusively that individual?
The problem is that there are still huge amounts of services with awful dark patterns out there. There’s an instagram gym clothing brand called Fabletics which is £55/month for their vip tier. They auto subscribe you with a purchase (and when I say buried in the fine print, I really do mean _buried_ in the fine print). To cancel, you have to do it between the 1st and the 4th of the month, and it’s a multi page form where every page is a confirmation that is designed to look like you have unsubscribed . When services are still doing this there needs to be some rules.
Interesting take. I kinda take this a bit personal because I forgot multiple times about some subscriptions I had and I think I have my finances well under order.
I think there is a major difference between spending more then you have for example or getting into the subscription trap of: paid annually but advertised with monthly rates, paid monthly but is part of a separate subscription: Amazon channels, Apple TV channels etc.
I subscribed to a TV service for the Eurocup which was something like 5€ per month. I only realized this after half a year because they send me an email suddenly with the newest shows I can watch. All the time this payment flew under the radar.
If your understanding of managing finances is monthly book keeping down to the penny then yes I might have issues with my finances.
People can leave their computers behind for vacations and try to not use their devices during said vacations or small sabbaticals, you know.
Also, not all people use Kagi for their "search engine" per se. It also has other AI related services, so they might not need a GPU powered parrot every day, sometimes for longer periods.
The status quo is equal footing. Profits and companies are not being put over people when you require people to cancel a subscription that they created. To claim that is to assign almost zero agency to "people".
Forcing companies to do this would absolutely be putting people over profits and companies, however.
Depends. When you remove the "1-click cancel" mandate, it's profits over people, for example.
We had this. You had to fax the company a petition for cancellation before 7 to 2 days to renewal, and call them too to set this in motion. If you fail, you can try next year. Now, they have to integrate with e-gov, and I can cancel my membership from e-gov with one click.
If the integration fails, it's their head under the guillotine, not mine.
I don't think "people over profits" a bad approach. We don't live to feed corporations to feed us junk in return. Corporations shall be there for us improve our lives, if we let them. We are not their slaves.
Yes, I am saying all this in full agreement that there should be requirements for cancellations to be as easy as subscribing, which we have. That said...
Companies are a collection of people. They are not your slaves either.
Saying "I want there to be a mandate that companies auto-cancel my subs if I don't use them" can be re-phrased as "I want a developer somewhere (or a team of them) to be forced (under threat of punishment) to write a bunch of code so that I don't need to do something which is very arguably my responsibility".
European countries like the UK have consumer protection laws and they get enforced all the time. There’s a few ways:
- Act on customer complaints (or consumer protection organisation complaints)
- Proactively investigate and check
- Require businesses to submit proof that they follow the regulations e.g. test results
I’m sure there’s other ways and you can do one or more of these things to ensure compliance. It’s really context dependent on which methods one would use.
Yes, however fines don’t mean anything without enforcement. An interesting example is, on the subject about DEI at the FAA on the front page today, where the FAA was messing around with FOIA responses because they knew an individual couldn’t afford to sue over every single one. However a good regulatory body with teeth absolutely could do this.
It's built in. EU laws usually have a fining mechanism that says X % of {global/EU/regional} sales or a fixed sum, whichever is higher.
For example the GDPR says in Art. 83(5) [1]:
> Infringements of the following provisions shall, in accordance with paragraph 2, be subject to administrative fines up to 20 000 000 EUR, or in the case of an undertaking, up to 4 % of the total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher [...]
(An "undertaking" in EU law speak refers to any entity that is engaged in economic activity, regardless of its legal status or the way in which it is financed.)
Can you explain what you mean? I get the sense of sarcasm, but I'm not sure. 4 % of annual turnover [1] or 20 Mio, whatever is higher, appears substantial to me. If Alphabet would have been fined once in 2024 it would have to pay 4 % of its annual turnover of the year 2023, 307 billion US$, which amounts to ca. 12.3 billion US$. Or do you think 4 % is not enough?
Recital 37 [2] of the GDPR gives a definition of what an undertaking means in the context of the GDPR.
not the one who asked the questions, but I actually think 4% are not enough.
If Google or Meta makes 10% of their earnings with that shit and they have to pay max 4% they still have a 6% margin over - not doing it.
IMHO there should be a 4% fine additionally to paying back all the illegally generated earnings. Also, more executives should go to jail for it - And that's the C-Level Executives, because it's them which are accountable.
Problem with those things: usually it still hits the little ones harder than the big players...
I'm thinking of the time I had a membership with Anytime Fitness. Entry into the gym entailed scanning a key fob, so it was readily possible to have a record of when I entered, and (relevantly) when I didn't.
This was an exact point I raised when they attempted to charge an expired card twice and then sent my bill to collections. The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet and wouldn't have until after I had already left my old city. They also surely had electronic records confirming that I had not set foot in an Anytime Fitness since that time - or else, no ability to prove that I had set foot in one since that time.
That they had the nerve to not only keep charging my card but send the progeny of their multiple degrees of utter failure to collections is exactly why they never got a dime out of me. If anything they owed me money, not the other way around. That hundred or so dollars has since rolled off my credit report, but until then I wore that delinquency as a badge of honor. That shithole of a company can shove it.
...anyway, that'd be the way to enforce it: by checking access logs to see if the customer actually used the service. Don't have access logs? Well then, you know the saying: customer's always right.
If anything like that happens again, or something like you purchase a second hand car but weren’t supplied the signed registration paper / no receipt… need a day off work due to illness but don’t want to pay to see a doctor / telehealth etc etc
You can statutory declaration, a written statement you declare to be true, many professionals can witness them, teachers, dentists, vets, engineers, mostly anyone who’s practice requires they be a member of a professional organisation.
If you were to serve such to Anytime Fitness, either before you intended to leave serviced area, or any time prior to them selling the dept to recovery, they are obliged to cancel from the date they were served or the date you state in the declaration.
A Process Server can hand them the declaration, or you can in person, or registered mail to head office.
This also tends to work for parking ticket fines issued by private car park operators whereby you make a reasonable offer for the time you were parked there—eg ten minutes prior to the first ticket, so one whole hour of parking as a reasonable counter offer to their punitive ticketed fee—though these all tend to be electronically gated these days so mostly moot.
I tend to do a higher than average level of minor civil disobedience type behaviour, and tend to find it quite enjoyable arguing my point knowing I’ll typically win the argument.
Yes, but that problem would've been moot if they were prohibited from charging me for months I didn't use it (i.e. every month after the one wherein I attempted to cancel).
Even if I'd simply "forgotten" to cancel, the prohibition on charging me for the months I didn't use it would've made this a non-issue. Hell, I'd probably still be a customer today, now that I've long ago moved back to a city with Anytime Fitness locations.
But you didn't. You clearly stated that the burden of cancelling was too high: " The gym staff admitted to remembering that I attempted to cancel because I was moving to a place with no Anytime Fitness locations; they refused to let me cancel my contract early without me showing them my new lease, which I didn't have yet"
This is the root of the problem. Not the "prohibition to charge for services you've subscribed to but don't use".
My prepaid mobile service is configured to auto-renew. The service provider messages me two times prior to renewal, something like three days before and the day before. The SMS contain details of how to change my payment settings, which is also the same place you remove your payment card / bank account details.
We also have legislation that provides warranty on electronic devices and household appliances, everything really, except things like cars and boats etc etc, for the reasonable lifetime of the product. So a cheap washing machine, three to five years would be reasonable, an expensive unit? I want that to last six to eight years. An expensive fridge, at least ten.
Especially if there was an expectation that someone might forget to use a service and then expect all their data to have remained in storage for them to use when they returned?
I would love to see the FTC mandate a policy that prohibits automatic renewal billing if the service hasn’t been used for some time.