Discussion
New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds
walthamstow: Subscriptions should be very easy to cancel but once that is in place I don't see why anyone should get a refund.
weli: I always thought the law should be really simple. It should take an average person (independent from the case and a large enough sample) about the same time to pay for something than to refund/return/cancel it. That's it.I gladly am in Germany and companies are more scared of implementing dark patterns here for canceling products. When I was in the US I dreaded cancelling services because I knew they would make me jump around several hoops and even sometimes require contacting customer support.
stavros: I'm worried that this regulation is overreaching and will kill innovation in dark patterns. Yet another example of how Europe trails behind the US by allowing their busybody lawmakers to get in the way of progress. If you can't trick your subscribers into being unable to unsubscribe any more, how will companies survive?
EZ-E: My honest take is: in an ideal world it should become possible to unsubscribe through our bank.This also would prevent any dirty trick from companies trying to obfuscate unsubscribing.
WesolyKubeczek: Poor trillionaires, what shall they do? I guess buy a more modest yacht, that’s what. Pure cruelty!
stavros: Listen, they're the ones holding our society up. Without the money trickling down to us from all the chefs and cleaners they employ, we'd have to scavenge in the wilderness for voles.We really should think twice before messing with the lifeblood of our economy.
fontain: You can in Europe, e.g: https://wise.com/help/articles/1CoZht05rHDEJcycXU2RMh/what-a...
martin_a: Hah! Try exiting the church in Germany then. ;-)But besides that it's really okay.
SkiFire13: I don't think that's standardized, it probably only has some heuristic to detect a subscription's associated payments and rejects them. It will not integrate in any way with merchants to cancel the subscription on their side, and in fact they suggest to first trying to cancel the subscription on the merchant side.
pndy: Don't wanna bite but... Shouldn't this also cover the tv license in the UK?
