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Thread: Auto-Renew dark pattern
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From: chagnon
Date: Wed, Jun 21 2023 10:22AM
Subject: Auto-Renew dark pattern
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Incredible news from today's Washington Post:
The Federal Trade Commission filed a suit against Amazon, alleging the
company has for years enrolled customers in its Prime program without their
consent and made it difficult to cancel with automatic renewals. The
practice is called a "dark pattern."
(Quote from the WaPo story:) "the primary purpose of the Prime cancellation
process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but rather to thwart them,"
the complaint alleges. "Fittingly, Amazon named that process 'Iliad,' which
refers to Homer's epic about the long, arduous Trojan War." (end quote)
Hopefully, this will be noticed by Adobe and every other tech vendor that
locks users into auto-renew subscriptions. And thank goodness the US has a
functional FTC once again that can actually do its job.
The full story is at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/21/amazon-ftc-lawsuit-prim
e/
And if you'd like to lodge a formal complaint with the FTC about any company
that uses this type of dark patterns, I encourage you to visit
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/ The system does work.
-Bevi
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From: Steve Green
Date: Wed, Jun 21 2023 11:54AM
Subject: Re: Auto-Renew dark pattern
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Amazon are far from being the first to do this. AOL (remember them?) were notorious for it. When I wanted to cancel our account I simply called the fraud department at the bank and said AOL were taking money without my authorisation. In theory you are supposed to provide proof, but the bank just put a block on AOL taking any more money - no questions asked. It all took about a minute, and I have done the same several times since with other companies.
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd