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California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

niemanlab.org

421–430 of 554 posts

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If I were a business that took phone orders, why would I care what's on the other end? As long as it's reliable and intelligent enough, I don't think people will mind. I know I wouldn't.

Because you want to make it difficult for customers to cancel.

> Because you want to make it difficult for customers to cancel.

Explain to me, in detail, how you arrived to this conclusion from my previous statement. If anything, a business accepting robocalls from customers would make canceling easier.

I await your explanation, s73v3r_.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#422
As a European, I ran into this with WSJ. Subscribing is easy and online, cancelling is only by phone. Their Dutch access number didn't work either, forcing me to use their international numbers at the cost of international phone call.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#423
There are some built in problems when it comes to this sort of regulator-esque legislation.

If a company doesn't want to "do X," but is being forced to, the specific, legalistically deconstructed definition of 'X' gets very important. On the path between the kind of grand moral statements politicians trade in to the way corporate lawyers use language... a lot gets lost

A common 'X' is "inform customers of something": pharmaceutical side effects, the real interest rate on a loan, etc. This often leads to a cat and mouse game, where companies "inform" customers by way of 10,000 word small print documents they know no one reads. Then the regulator tries to stop it, saying this information must be part of all advertising. Then we get verbal small print. Etc.

This is why regulators exist, to play this cat and mouse game.

GDPR, cookie laws, and a lot of the laws which effectively govern business have these issues. Our legislative/political system just doesn't deal with this well. On one hand we have politics, that hates detail. On the other hand, a legal bureaucracy that hates principle. It also doesn't care for economics and isn't too worried about creating environments devoid of real competition, which is an unwanted side effect of getting "regulatory."

In any case, the real underlying problem here, IMO, is that 3rd parties should not have this kind of control in their hands in the first place.

HNers will probably reach for blockchains and smart contracts, but this could be build into credit cards or any payment method. It doesn't really matter.

Just put the ability to turn payments on/off in customer's hands. Send the service a notice. Done. We've built up all these "convenient" ways for customers to authorize repeat payment, without building in an off button. Now they're regulating the use of them instead They should have an off button. That's it.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? If I were a business that took phone orders, why would I care what's on the other end? As long as it's reliable and intelligent enough, I don't think people will mind. I know I wouldn't.

I think it's a legal requirement, regarding automated calling.

I don't think it would be a problem if a business explicitly indicated that robocalls on behalf of customers are acceptable. It's convenient for both businesses who don't want to invest in online booking systems, and people who don't want to deal with the hassle involved in making calls. Win win.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#425
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be a bit careful with the "l" word - many companies instruct their reps to immediately stop dealing with people that threaten legal proceedings over the phone and tell them to contact the company attorneys. Remember that any company that doesn't empower the phone support people to help you probably didn't empower them enough to go off-script.

If I can contact the company attorneys via email, that would be preferred anyways.

Surely you don't want to speak to a company's attorney to cancel your gym membership, or to dispute a $5 purchase. I worked in retail, and people would threaten court over 10-20 euro purchases. We would immediately end the discussion, record their details and pass them on to our lawyers who would contact them within a few days, and presumably begin some arduous process.

If you had just been polite to me on the phone, I probably could have fixed your issue in 15 minutes.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#426
post #413

Are you actually deaf? Or is lying to get exceptions that are meant for the disabled actually legal?

Please don't take HN on off-topic flamewar tangents. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466555 and marked it off-topic.

dang, could I ask you to review and provide some feedback on your evaluation? I'm very confused at your comment. I was asking if the parent was in fact referring to lying, and if so, whether this was legal. This was a direct response to the parent comment's suggestion that consumers like us should lie on the phone. How is my comment off-topic when I was directly asking about the legality of the parent comment's advice? It seems to me that it was as on-topic as any comment on that suggestion could be.

I'm also confused at your flamewar comment. I saw that people were keen to challenge me on the morality aspect, but it was not what I was actually objecting to or taking the discussion on -- I was asking about the legality. If you look and see where the OP himself finally responded to my question [1], we had quite a nice discussion on that very topic that even got upvotes with no objections so far as I could see (but do let me know if you see otherwise). How this a flamewar, when we had a nice and civil conversation on the exact subject I inquired about?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466984

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#427
post #132
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually have a speech impairment (a stutter) and you’d think people would be willing to accommodate. I can speak just fine when I have complete agency over the words I choose to say, but it’s the absolute worst when I have to read out some long specific access code or account number and say it 100% correct. Stutter even once and they think I meant 2 P’s when I just wanted to say a single P. And then it becomes thi…

Have you tried text to speech dictation? macOS has this built into accessibility options under the speech category. You can assign a keyboard shortcut speak from highlighted text, simple as that. I use it to read faster cause I'm a slow reader.

I wonder if they would accept that.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#428
post #61
post #8

I recently had to cancel an ongoing subscription I had with Equifax, which requires you to call by phone. Unbelievably frustrating. I had to dial the service at least 10 times. Each time, the automated responder would make me go through a very slow menu selection process, only to randomly fail to acknowledge either my correct SSN or zipcode or street number, which I entered using a keypad. As a consumer, I've had to…

Half a year back I got a check from American Express for $50-ish because of some accounting issue they had. Bank error in your favor. Unfortunately, the local meth heads stole it out of my mailbox and I only got the check stub when someone found it in the street and turned it in to the post office. So I called them up to ask them to reissue the check. Long story short, they dodged and weaved with their phone automati…

Only reason you were refunded money was because they originally errored in their favor. You probably would’ve received nothing but a class action was threatened by private or government actor.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#429

There are some built in problems when it comes to this sort of regulator-esque legislation. If a company doesn't want to "do X," but is being forced to, the specific, legalistically deconstructed definition of 'X' gets very important. On the path between the kind of grand moral statements politicians trade in to the way corporate lawyers use language... a lot gets lost A common 'X' is " inform customers of something…

Alternatively, don’t force the company to accept/deny specific forms of communication; simply make it clear that any communication is sufficient to cancel a contract.

There’s no point for a company to build a convoluted website if any customer knows they can send an email to info@example.com or a direct message or a text "I cancel my contract with you, my account number is 1234." and the only claim the company could make to counter that is that it didn’t receive the e-mail/message. Not that it’s internal processes didn’t allow for the message to be received, but that its infrastructure never actually received it (in which case the user would have received an email bounce message). To be nice, request the company to acknowledge receipt of the notification and, if not received, repeat on multiple channels (including certified snail mail).

Oh, and make it illegal to hide surprising bits in terms and conditions due to the information asymmetry typically accompanying those :)

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "legal theory" is that you signed up for the credit card company to be a trusted middle man and to ajudicate exactly these sorts of disputes. This is part of value they provide.

It turns out you can not put anything you want in a contract. You can't contract away fundamental rights, for example you can't contract to vote a certain way. But perhaps rather than suggesting that everything in a contract is always valid, maybe you are referring to DIRECTV, Inc. v. Imburgia. And somehow that decision can be stretched to cover this case. Even so, it is clear that the call center is not acing as rem…

You can contract away basic rights. It’s called an arbitration agreement. Whatever is then written into a contract is adjudicated by whoever is defined as arbitrator. There are very limited appeal options.
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