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FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

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Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#751

Post by askafriend »

megiddo wrote: post #715
askafriend wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you're bringing screenshots to the conversation because so often people just talk about what they feel without grounding it in anything. What the screenshot makes clear is that you'd have to be a single-celled organism to not understand what you're signing up for... The screen is extremely clear, upfront and even the supposed "fine print" is in huge font with any easy link to learn more.

This is not how it was presented when I signed up, 8 years ago. I am aware of the differences between monthly and yearly subscriptions with discounts.

8 years is a long time in life and in business.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#752

Post by minkzilla »

consteval wrote: post #730
minkzilla wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on "our fundamental rights extend to the modern era" and how that connects to the legality of abortion being based on the right to privacy?

The "right to privacy" includes the right to medical privacy and privacy over your body. It's not the government's concern to dictate what and how you can treat your own body. The natural extension being that it violates the 14th Amendment for the government to surveil intimate medical decisions. The "modern era" part comes from the majority opinion of Roe, which notes that abortion was viewed in a much better light…

    The "right to privacy" includes the right to medical privacy and privacy over your body. It's not the government's concern to dictate what and how you can treat your own body. The natural extension being that it violates the 14th Amendment for the government to surveil intimate medical decisions.
This puts the cart before the horse. This assumes abortion is already a fine thing to do. Think about the other applications of privacy. Here is a pretty extreme hypo (we could get into a more subtle one maybe but this is the first thing that came to my mind). You are entitled to privacy in your home. In your home you can abuse your spouse and you can drink orange juice. Abusing your spouse is obviously wrong so we would never say privacy covers it. Drinking orange juice is obviously fine so we would say you are entitled to privacy from others to know if you drank orange juice or not. In both cases the police may never know you did either but that has no bearing on their legality. It seems to be the real central question and where a right would need to be grounded is if it is your body or the child's body. A lot of people disagree on this. If you don't think it is your body than the privacy argument makes no sense.

In terms of the history I have not dug into it but there seems to be conflicting arguments based on your priors. It doesn't seem cut and dry enough to just say it was a right then so it is now, if it was why not just do that instead of the whole privacy deal?

From Dobbs majority opinion: "English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treaties' statements that abortion was a crime."

I am also skeptical of origionalism. I don't know how much bearing 13-18th century common law should have on modern day law, especially when there was assuredly a diverse set of opinions on abortion just like today. Why shouldn't the 20th century have the same amount of weight as the 18th?

To me it seems that even if you believe abortion is morally right Roe was legislating from the bench. These things should come from congress not the supreme court.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#753

Post by consteval »

minkzilla wrote: post #752
consteval wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "right to privacy" includes the right to medical privacy and privacy over your body. It's not the government's concern to dictate what and how you can treat your own body. The natural extension being that it violates the 14th Amendment for the government to surveil intimate medical decisions. The "modern era" part comes from the majority opinion of Roe, which notes that abortion was viewed in a much better light…

The "right to privacy" includes the right to medical privacy and privacy over your body. It's not the government's concern to dictate what and how you can treat your own body. The natural extension being that it violates the 14th Amendment for the government to surveil intimate medical decisions. This puts the cart before the horse. This assumes abortion is already a fine thing to do. Think about the other applicatio…

It doesn't assume abortion is an okay thing to do. It assumes you have complete control and privacy over your own body - which you do.

An unborn fetus has never been granted rights in our constitution or anywhere else. It does not have personhood. There is only then one person here: the owner of the body.

> Abusing your spouse

This doesn't work, because your spouse has personhood and therefore rights.

To be clear, this has never been solved by any courts in the US. We still do not consider the unborn to be American citizens with individual personhood. The Supreme Court decided that's hard, so they just didn't do it when Roe was overturned. They essentially "carved out" an exception to privacy for exactly one-use case - Abortion.

You can certainly drink while pregnant. You can certainly smoke while pregnant. Because that is your body and your right, and you are exactly one person. None of that has changed from a legal standpoint. Now, you are one person with every right to privacy... except one.

I think, if you wish to ban abortion, you have to start at the core issue - who is considered a person, and who isn't? WHEN does an arrangement of cells become coherent enough to be considered a person? The reason nobody wants to answer this is because it's very hard, and there's a lot of unfortunate implications.

Then the Supreme Court "cheated", in my opinion.

> These things should come from congress not the supreme court

They already did come from Congress, when Congress passed the 14th amendment, in my opinion.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#754

Post by kulahan »

hedvig23 wrote: post #718
kulahan wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's more a matter of companies just having different focuses. If you're wondering how to grow your userbase, you're thinking fundamentally differently than if you have an established one and are wondering how to monetize them.

Or maybe it's all one cycle with different phases? Not saying you did this, but is this a technique one uses to distract or diffuse a critical attack - break a system into parts and claim the parts are unconnected? Anyways to the above, e.g. spider spins it's web, attracts the prey, mummifies, etc.

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that it's unconnected, just that they're at different places. You're right that it's almost certainly just parts of one common cycle.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#755

Post by dghlsakjg »

Spivak wrote: post #612
dghlsakjg wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note: It is up to the company to not pursue you for the money. Contractually, you probably still owe them the money, unless there is a clause in the contract that says that non-payment is a way to cancel the membership. They could legally pursue that, or sell it to someone else to pursue. Not paying is not the same thing as not owing. Many companies will just let it drop. Some won't

Eh it's probably not enforceable so long as you did something reasonable— sent a letter, sent an email and then stopped payment. Taken to absurdity they can't make you lick your elbow in order to cancel and making you jump through arbitrary hoops when an email to their support is perfectly sufficient probably falls on your side.

The something reasonable is almost certainly going to be explicitly defined in the contract that you sign (terms and conditions).

If one of the conditions is that you can't cancel without showing up in person or sending a notarized letter and giving 90 days notice, courts would find that enforceable if that's what you agreed to. Many online services will just allow you to cancel by stopping payment, many won't. That's why regulations like this are important, sleazy companies, like gyms and Adobe, are great at burying terms deep in their terms that are just on the right side of legally enforceable, but not reasonable to a normal person. The courts have to go with precedent and the law, even when it isn't 'common sense'.

If there isn't a prior contract or you never signed a terms and conditions, then sure, just stop payment, but almost any business is going to have a contract.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#756

Post by DirkH »

Can someone smarter than me explain to me why we haven't moved away from email yet, or why there hasn't been a move away from it? I don't understand why we don't have some opt-in infrastructure replacing emails. E.g. you get a message from a company and before they can send you anything else you need to opt-in to receive messages from them.

Why isn't there something like a "Proof of human" protocol where when you sign up you verify yourself with government ID (same as you do for banks) and then from this you can produce infinite unique ids for authentication to websites instead of emails. Your identity is unknown where you sign up, but wherever your ID is used it is known that it is a human being.

>80% of all emails are used for nowadays seems to just be to have a unique ID in a database for a user that can also be used to contact said user. You could have some protocol where the unique ID can be used to initiate a chat with someone, but they won't receive it unless they opt-in.

The incentives for ad companies would even align with this since what company doesn't want exclusively "proven human" users they try to send ads to.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#757

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Vegenoid wrote: post #737
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cherry picked example of CA California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population. > overrepresention of Republicans That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the po…

> [Citizens United] was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower. Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people wo…

Unfortunately, many knowledgeable and intelligent people have failed to look into CU from any angle other than the one it is usually presented from: that is is about corporate spending on elections.

Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.

I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).

However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can " (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#758

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

rootusrootus wrote: post #326
cortesoft wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I remember when Amazon Prime first started, I signed up for the free trial to get free shipping on something. Of course, I forgot about it and didn’t cancel, but then I got an email from Amazon saying, “hey, you didn’t cancel your prime subscription but you also haven’t used it at all, so we are going to not charge you and cancel it for now. Here is how you easily restart your subscription if you end up needing…

Early Amazon was pro-customer in a way that I think most people have forgotten. Maybe that was always the strategy? They were losing money for years, and maybe that was investing in the company, or maybe it was allowing really large losses to keep customers happy, planning all along to eventually clamp down when people were addicted. And here we are. Their return rate is still pretty terrible, IIRC. I bet they are tr…

> Maybe that was always the strategy?

Can confirm that was the strategy from day minus-three.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#759

Post by meowster »

DrillShopper wrote: post #617
meowster wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LPT: if you're not a customer but you get their mailing advertisements and want them to stop, create an account with them on their website then update your address to their headquarters. If you call and tell them to stop, they will only stop for 2 years then resume. Or resume when you take your vehicle to someplace that (re)sells your information to them.

If you really want to make them stop then take their return postage paid envelope, get a brick, use clear tape to wrap it around the brick, and drop it in the nearest mailbox. They have to pay the difference between the postage they paid and what it costs to have a brick delivered. You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant (excepting Alice)

Sounds like a lot more work then just getting them to spam themselves.

The USPS has an FAQ about mailing bricks, but it won't load for me. I do know they are allowed to throw away trash, and they could interpret a brick as trash.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#760

Post by osigurdson »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #729
osigurdson wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you advocating for? A government credit card or something like that?

Electronic money accounts and ability to transfer money. People shouldn’t need to deposit their money at a bank or non governmental entity. For example, USPS could provide a constitutionally protected, inalienable right (not even if you go to prison) to an electronic money account, and you can send and receive via an email address or phone number. USPS because there are already physical USPS offices all over the coun…

I would be leery of the high degree of centralization with such a scheme.
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