For me: Cancelling paid subscriptions should be as easy as subscribing. I hate the fact that they actively hide the unsubscribe option or that you sometimes should have to write an e-mail if you want to unsubscribe.
Dating sites besieging their users with bots and fake profiles.
I don’t know how this works in the US, but where I live after a year subscription (let’s say for your internet provider or something). They can only renew per month. So if the year subscription is over you can cancel any service every month and they can’t hit you with any fees.
Back in the day if you’d forgot to cancel your plan you’d be stuck with them for another year. It sucked!
The FTC under Biden was actually craking down on that. It was called the “Click to Cancel” rule, but that was literally a month before the election. :/
Lina Khan was a perhaps once in a lifetime bureaucrat doing good for the people at a rapid pace on normal government timelines and now she’ll probably never get that job or a better one again.
In the US, unsubscribing from email spam is legally required to be easy under the CAN-SPAM act. For paid subscription services, I believe they also are required to be as easy to leave as they are to join in the EU and California.
Somewhat related, many dark patterns are treated like fraud.
Companies changing the terms of the contract on you.
Loaning money to your own political campaign and then paying yourself back, including an interest rate set by you, using donor funds.
There are a number of things that are legal here in the US, which would count as corruption in other places.
all i’m going to say is whatever shit adobe is pulling because i could yap about this forever with anyone
Which particular part? I’m interested and somewhat outside of the situation.
the fact that they decided to charge $90 a month and $65 to cancel is truly evil
Any type of exit fee like account closing. Any costs for leaving should be charges before leaving as part of business costs either at the start or part of monthly or whatever. Leaving should be free.
Looking at you, Adobe.
Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don’t need and didn’t even want until the ad sold us on it? It’s fucking wild.
Marketing wasn’t really a thing until sometime around the Industrial Revolution and post-WW1. Before then, we didn’t really have the capacity to produce more than what people needed. Marketing basically just consisted of “here’s my product, here’s why it’s superior to others.” But with the post-war boom and the rise in manufacturing, producers were suddenly able to out-produce the demand. So they invented marketing, to get people to buy things that they didn’t actually need. The idea of “create a problem so you can sell the solution” was born.
And the fact that a lot of children’s TV shows are nothing but thinly veiled toy commercials. Hilariously parodied in Dinosaurs
Worst part is, those are usually the best ones.
Ordered food at Sonic on their app. After I ordered, it popped up with ads for travel, various credit cards, etc. Completely crazy to me that they’re triple dipping on monetization now (sell me food, sell my data and then sell me other shit while trying to sell me food.)
It happened gradually, like frogs in a kettle.
When it was just a guy putting up a sign in front of his smithy it was kind of harmless. Ditto for having a single text-only paper ad for people who are new to town. But, it was a slippery slope.
You can thank Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays
Cunts buying politicians.
Is that not illegal?!
The fucking president has a shitcoin that ppl are using to pay tribute.
The fucking president
… is Coin Operated.
Corporations that don’t pay taxes being allowed to make millions in profit while their employees qualify for welfare because they pay them so little.
What’s worse is those same organisations get corporate welfare (tax breaks) but fight tooth and nail to prevent their workers from getting it.
They should just make it so that whatever they announce as their “earnings” to their stockholders should also be the amount that they are taxed for.
EULAs that say ‘using this <whatever> indicates your acceptance of these terms’. Seems like it ought to be illegal but it’s super common.
Surprisingly a lot of clauses in EULAS are and get “stricken” (even though this one still stands).
Just because they put it in the terms doesn’t it legal.
Still has a chilling effect on pushback
You know, I’m not actually sure how binding it is exactly, aside from not totally. It must do something or they wouldn’t bother getting pretend consent.
Biden administration was working on making that unsubscribe bullshit illegal last year. But then Trump so those tactics will probably be mandatory pretty soon…
I thought that happened? I’ve noticed unsubscribing is generally like 2 clicks now. I almost always see a link at the bottom of emails.
I think email unsubscribe was an existing requirement from a few years ago. Biden’s thing was about unsubscribing from paid services, like Netflix.
Ahh misunderstood
Click to Cancel was put in as a rule, but it requires active enforcement. It also had a 180 day grace period from last October, so it hasn’t even gone into effect yet.
Leaving a supermarket without buying anything
That largely depends on what you take with you as you leave.
Going through TSA.
