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flowerlad 1 days ago [-]
This will have no impact on Adobe's shenanigans. They offer click-to-cancel, but then charge a cancellation fee equal to what you would have paid for the rest of the one-year term. Their clever justification is that you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment. I'm not sure where they buried that clause.
I expect more businesses will transition to this strategy to counter NYC's new rule. They won't necessarily lower the price, but you will have to sign up for a one-year term, then they will hit you with a massive cancellation fee if you "click to cancel".
They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.
Probably not, as projects like this have a tendency to die off once the initial excitement wears off and it becomes hard to find contributors who want to work on an all LLM generated codebase.
jychang 5 hours ago [-]
You're thinking in past terms, not accounting for future change.
Opus 6 or Opus 7 probably would be fine with working on an LLM generated codebase.
trollbridge 4 hours ago [-]
In which case it can just vibe out the entire app for me exactly the way I want it.
Matl 18 hours ago [-]
Worth keeping an eye for sure, but the vibecoded vibe puts me off.
sodapopcan 1 days ago [-]
How does this compare to Affinity Products? (I know I can ask "AI" but I'm asking you, though no pressure to respond).
spiderice 1 days ago [-]
Canva now owns Affinity. So regardless of the answer to that question, more options are nice. I have 0 faith that Canva will be good stewards of Affinitys original mission, despite making all of the Affinity products free (for now)
TeMPOraL 19 hours ago [-]
They're already proving not to be good stewards, as Affinity now got compressed into one app, AFAIK it's still lacking 100% feature parity with the original ones, and it being free is just a vehicle to make you sign up for an account, and to continuously show you upsells for the cloud subscription, right there in the UI, with the growing amount of "pro" features only available on paid subscription tiers.
InsideOutSanta 15 hours ago [-]
I have no doubt that they will eventually enshittify Affinity, but combining the three apps into one was, imo, a good move. The suite was clearly meant to be one app from the start, but was sold as three separate apps for commercial reasons.
All three original apps contained each other's functionality. As a result, the new combined app is barely larger than one of the three previous apps, and switching between the modes is now much more convenient and has a better UX.
sodapopcan 13 hours ago [-]
That actually does sound nice, hmmmm.
sodapopcan 13 hours ago [-]
> Canva now owns Affinity.
Insert Michael Scott "God no" meme
That's terrible news. I only use photo-editing software to lay stuff out for print once in a while, so hopefully I can get away without upgrading indefinitely.
stronglikedan 15 hours ago [-]
Linus Tech Tups tested this and determined that it's nowhere near ready for professional use. It's good enough, or even great, for amateur stuff though, so it has it's place. However, that won't even make a dent in Adobe's books, since the vase majority of their licenses go to professionals.
td521534f12 13 hours ago [-]
The LTT video was not about this project. It was some other, significantly more "vibe coded" project.
dzonga 9 hours ago [-]
there was a company that provides decent alternative to adobe products. I think they were acquired by Canva. used to be one time purchase.
not these llm vibe coded shit.
axus 15 hours ago [-]
Isn't the main audience for these applications opposed to AI? And the businesses that like AI would skip using artists altogether.
troupo 20 hours ago [-]
> Worth keeping an eye on ArtCraft
No. No it's not.
Fort all of Adobe's faults, Photoshop and other offerings are products, with support timelines, features added etc. [1] This so far is "let me vibe-code some thing with no intention of maintaining it further".
[1] And there are others competing as well. From opensource like Gimp to Affinity Design, Pixelmator etc.
vessenes 17 hours ago [-]
Since it's open source and you, too, can run a coding agent, perhaps that concern matters less than three years ago.
oblio 16 hours ago [-]
That assumes the necessary maintenance and enhancements are cheap or even doable since vibe programmed code bases aren't beacons of maintainability.
TeMPOraL 19 hours ago [-]
Products are exactly what AI is set to subsume, so yes, it's worth keeping an eye on IMO.
troupo 16 hours ago [-]
lol. AI was never set to subsume products. The marketing around AI pretends it is.
TeMPOraL 15 hours ago [-]
Sure it is. That's literally the main use of it anyone has at this point.
troupo 15 hours ago [-]
People in tech should learn to talk to real people at least once in their life.
Or to actually try and maintain/change/fix vibe-coded software for longer than a few days.
No, AI isn't subsuming products. Not now, not in the forseeable future.
TeMPOraL 14 hours ago [-]
Sure it is. I know of e.g. people doing graphics and copywriting that barely even open Canva / Figma or Word anymore, because they learned how to get 90% of the work done directly inside ChatGPT. And it's not low-quality work, it's just the same or better work, done much more efficiently, and without the need of some previously-used products.
And software developer's perspective on this is exactly how future looks, because for me, Claude Code now manages my personal computer fully - installs new software as needed, and uses it as needed.
troupo 8 hours ago [-]
> And it's not low-quality work, it's just the same or better work, done much more efficiently, and without the need of some previously-used products
Oh, I highly doubt this. Since I use ChatGPT for generating images quite often. There's no chance in hell they are doing consistent high-quality work in ChatGPT 90% of the time. Or your (and their) definition of high quality work is far from a common definition.
This is especially true in the past few months when OpenAI removed any way to directly prompt their image generator. So ChatGPT is often stuck in the same generator seed, the generator never gets the full prompt, regenerates images (inconsistently), messes up details, ignores input (because the model never generates the prompt to the image generating model correctly) etc. etc.
Good enough to generate a restaurant slop-menu or a quick TTRPG image. Consistent high quality? Lol.
robbiep 23 hours ago [-]
JFC first release of photocraft was 2 October
walrus01 1 days ago [-]
Why wouldn't they point their LLM tools at forks of gimp and inkscape (for raster and vector work), which already have many of the necessary features?
TeMPOraL 19 hours ago [-]
Because the point isn't to kill Gimp, it's to kill Photoshop.
internet2000 1 days ago [-]
Those projects come with existing culture and ways of working which isn't compatible with how to do things with AI.
mattmaroon 1 days ago [-]
Forks don’t.
ares623 24 hours ago [-]
But think of the hype though. "Vibe-coded fork of Gimp with UI and UX equivalence to Photoshop" may hit the HN frontpage, but not media outlets.
teaearlgraycold 1 days ago [-]
LLMs have already ingested that code as training data.
inSumErgoCogito 23 hours ago [-]
My guess is that the AI companys already decompiled any binary that makes money internally - and used the source as training data.
SXX 1 days ago [-]
Btw its likely still possible to change subscription with Adobe to different one and then cancel it free of charge due to new 14-days window. Not sure if it works right now, but worked like charm before.
bart7782 20 hours ago [-]
Did they change this recently? Or did you sign up somewhere else than the website?
Because if i try signing up on their website today, the difference seems pretty clear to me.
But nobody wants to take personal responsibility for consciously choosing the cheaper monthly option. It comes with the annual commitment, as opposed to the more expensive monthly option that does not have the annual commitment.
I have zero love for Adobe, but at the same time in this particular case it really is people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want the cheapest monthly price, but also the ability to cancel.
If you think you might need to cancel, that's what the monthly option is for.
bko 20 hours ago [-]
If they offer you two prices, one month to month and and other for 1 year, and the 1 year is discounted, I would think that the 1 year one is a commitment. Is this not the case? Why would they offer a discount compared to the month to month if there is no difference as to whether you can cancel?
mmmlinux 13 hours ago [-]
It's cheaper to pay your car insurance up front then per month too. They still give you a prorated refund if you cancel early.
HDThoreaun 10 hours ago [-]
Adobe offers 3 payment options. A yearly payment upfront, a monthly payment, or a monthly payment with a year long commitment. OP was on the monthly plan with a year long commitment.
TeMPOraL 19 hours ago [-]
Because they get more money up front?
As for why they would set things up like this? Who the frak knows? Pricing tiers is literally the primary means of legally scamming people. The only logic it follows is that people who believe it does follow obvious logic are easier to scam.
DeusExMachina 20 hours ago [-]
> I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment.
I think that's handled by the rule. From their webpage:
> Companies must clearly explain subscription terms to you
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> you received a significant discount for committing to a year, so you still owe them for the remaining months if you cancel early. I didn't even realize I had signed up for a one-year commitment
Does this law apply retroactively?
You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.
close04 21 hours ago [-]
Rare to have these laws apply retroactively. The costs will probably be explained very clearly with the usual "take the 1 year discount". People look at the final price and ignore the implications.
I bet going forward everyone will prominently implement a fake massive discount or waive a fake one time fee when signing up just to have something to claw back if you ever want to cancel.
P.S. Just checked Adobe's site from the EU, prominently displays a "Save 50%" badge and a crossed out original price with the discounted price next to it. There's also a link to the cancellation policy which tells you exactly what to expect for a refund. The cancellation process itself looks 1-click. Hard to claim misinformation.
This reminds me of the ISPs where the technician would insist to plug in your internet cable and a "check" that took all of 5s but was billed heavily in a waived one time fee. When you wanted to cancel the contract they'd ask for that fee back.
trymas 1 days ago [-]
Where I am from this sort of dark pattern is used by most service companies at this point. There’s some regulation, though too little.
Most gyms, ISPs, mobile carriers, any sort of services with continuous subscription have this scheme:
- they sell you subscription with some ridiculous (and perpetual) discount (often with “first three months - it’s free”);
- there’s minimum commitment clauses/fines (so you won’t leave too early);
- there’s clause to “pay up all given discounts on canceling the contract”;
- they “balance” two rules above in such a way that it is never “good time” to leave.
oatmeal1 1 days ago [-]
That falls under deceptive advertising.
20 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
If you buy an annual subscription of course you have to pay for the whole year. They offer a monthly subscription for people who don't want to lock in for such a long time.
dmonitor 1 days ago [-]
What they offer is an annual subscription on a monthly fee, which is a pretty deceptive offer
LordAtlas 16 hours ago [-]
No, while they've been deceptive with how the "annual, billed monthly" plans were advertised — and previously without clear disclosure of the cancellation fee of 50% of the remaining annual commitment — they've always had monthly plans. It's just that the true monthly plans were 3x to 4x the price of the "annual, billed monthly" plans, which was ridiculous and intended to discourage people from going for those plans. I've been an Adobe CC subscriber for more than a decade. The only thing that keeps me with them is that Photoshop has no real alternative that's equally powerful. Hate the company but let's get our facts right.
sokoloff 22 hours ago [-]
Isn’t basically every typical residential lease advertised exactly that way?
wallst07 20 hours ago [-]
Good point, Adobe MBAs: Make the commitment 30 years just like your mortgage. :facepalm:
vrganj 21 hours ago [-]
"Why are my apples harder to peel than my oranges?"
deadbunny 1 days ago [-]
I hate to defend Adobe but it literally says "Annually, paid monthly" right under the price.
They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
alistairSH 1 days ago [-]
So it's not really a cancellation fee, but is that how they message it?
If I see:
"Annual Subscription - $120/year, billed $10/month"
I assume I'm paying $120 even if I cancel after 6 months.
But, if I cancel after 6 months, and the message to me is "$60 cancellation fee", I'm very confused - I thought I was paying the remaining $60 I owe them...? The amount may be the same but it's confusing nonetheless.
firtoz 1 days ago [-]
Wait, so you'll pay the $60, and then, will you lose access?
alistairSH 1 days ago [-]
Any time I've had a similar subscription, you retain access for the full period.
The messaging has usually been something like:
"Annual subscription cancelled at the end of current period. Access ends on 12/31/2026" (even if today is 6/1/2026)
That's why the "cancellation fee" comment is weird to me - there's no need to message that way, since "pay the rest of the committed period" seems to be a common (and at least to me, very understandable) way to handle this.
Even with monthly services, I don't think I've ever had an immediate loss of access - it's there until the end of the billing cycle. As it should be, IMO. The only exception would be if I force-deleted my account as well as that's a very explicit "I'm done-done" signal to the service provider.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
Probably? There are services that are relatively nice and will let you use your membership until the last day (even for trials!), but there's also others that are non-refundable and will just yank your access.
ericd 1 days ago [-]
Hm so you're saying all the SaaS runners should put "Lifetime, paid monthly" in small print under their price? Bam, goodbye churn.
adolph 1 days ago [-]
> They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
Buried prices are the next frontier of consumer protection. I've gotten burned by looking up a store product online and then when attempting to purchase finding that unless you ordered it through the site for in-store pickup, you get a higher price. Car dealerships were the same the last time I bought one. And while I appreciate Tesla's challenge in expressing TCO, subtracting average fuel costs from the price of a car smells bad in the same way.
soulofmischief 1 days ago [-]
Seems intentionally manipulative.
flowerlad 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
mathgeek 1 days ago [-]
The cancellation fee is usually the part that's buried.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
Maybe years ago, but today it very plainly says:
>Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Nov 01
but the nyc website has a one-button "file a complaint". think it will make a difference?
18 hours ago [-]
user3939382 1 days ago [-]
If you actually ask them and push a little they’ll forgo that fee. Disclaimer: Adobe is the worst and can’t wait to see them crumble. If Intuit could also go…
SnowProblem 1 days ago [-]
I found FreeTaxUsa and Claude to be a wonderful combination this year
dalyons 1 days ago [-]
Freetaxusa still can’t import many and various investment account forms. Sadly It’s still worth paying a little to TurboTax so I folding have to manually input all my betterment , etfs, etc
kaonwarb 1 days ago [-]
Second this. FreeTaxUSA is great. Better interface, lower cost (truly free for federal, no catch). And coding harnesses are very good at handling taxes as well as a cross-check.
johnnyanmac 16 hours ago [-]
Probably worth it. They are trying to re-invent cable contracts from first principles again without realizing why people cut the cord to begin with. oppressive contracts are indeed one of those factors.
Adobe as a huge market leader won't be affected, but I don't know how many other studios will get away with that.
tomnipotent 1 days ago [-]
> discount for committing to a year
It's worse than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.
colejohnson66 1 days ago [-]
Yes they do, but they hide it. On the plans page,[0] if you click "see all plans", a true monthly subscription option appears. But the prices are unreasonably large to force you into the "annual, billed monthly" trick. For example, the full creative suite (Creative Cloud Pro) is $35 "a month" with the annual contract, or... $105 on a monthly contract!
They always had it, I'm checking my email receipts from 2011~2013
tomnipotent 1 days ago [-]
They've always billed monthly, but the thing they got in trouble for was that it was attached to a 1-year commit where customers were getting hit with early termination fees pro-rated to the rest of the contract. If they did offer this it was hidden deep in the sign-up flow enough that they lost a lawsuit over it.
kalleboo 1 days ago [-]
I'm looking at adobe.com in the wayback machine for 2015 and while the CSS is missing, the <select> dropdown right on the /plans page include:
* Annual plan, paid monthly
* Annual plan, prepaid
* Monthly plan
And this is how I remember it back when, I signed up for a short gig where I only needed it for 3 months and went for the monthly plan, and then when the gig became a contract I switched to the annual paid monthly.
I think what changed is now the plans page says upfront "early termination fees apply" right next to the price.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
They have always had a monthly subscription.
1 days ago [-]
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
I mean, if you sign up for a year yes you’re on the hook for a year. What’s the problem here?
echelon 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Loughla 1 days ago [-]
I feel real dumb asking this but how will AI help here? I'm sick, so if this is a stupid question, let's say it's because of that.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> how will AI help here?
I've been using Claude in what I call iKaren mode. Basically, all the little complaints where I know I'm in the right against a large corporate other but don't want to get emotionally invested into a petty dispute go to it.
I recently had a room in Milan where they were rude at the rooftop–I was ignored after being seated for thirty minutes–and then refused to enable A/C (which they could do remotely) until I called twice, finally yielding at 1AM. I had a terrible night's rest and, resultantly, difficult day of travel the next day. It was a single night at an expensive hotel–I'd ordinarily ignore it.
This time, I passed my booking details and a short blurb to Claude. Between the flight and ferry to my next destination, it negotiated first, a night's free stay (which I rejected) and then a 25% reïmbursement.
(Granted, OP might be imagining that one can replicate everything one does with Adobe's software with an image-generating AI. Which one might be able to. But it's not going to be cost competitive with anything Adobe offers for at least half a decade given current power- and chip-buildout schedules.)
echelon 1 days ago [-]
I'm imagining we own our iPhones, Androids, and John Deeres.
That every robot out of Figure or Unitree gets its Verilog popped on day one.
A world where Instagram and YouTube and Reddit -- everything -- have no moat anymore. Where these become protocols.
And eventually Anthropic and OpenAI are caught up with and abundant open weights models are everywhere.
This future is not only possible, it's close.
JumpCrisscross 20 hours ago [-]
> I'm imagining we own our iPhones, Androids, and John Deeres
This should be an option. I should also have the choice to buy my parents something other than a malware trap.
The only way that friction disappears is if we abstract away human preference.
aurelien_gasser 1 days ago [-]
AI makes it easy to replicate existing software. One can ask a LLM to replicate Photoshop functionalities and, to some extent, it will.
vjvjvjvjghv 1 days ago [-]
"to some extent" is the keyword here. There is a lot of fine tuning in Photoshop that's very hard to replicate.
These things get forgotten in weeks if not days. Software maintained by professionals with domain expertise who talk to end users is a different thing from vibecoded slop. It may work for some people, but that is far from "replacement".
I don't believe Photoshop/Lightroom will be replaced until I see actually exodus from these products.
footydude 1 days ago [-]
Another way it would help is making it easier for users to analyse the T&Cs they are signing up for.
Most people aren't well versed in reading T&Cs and whilst LLMs won't do a perfect job, they would likely do a decent job at assessing and highlighting potentially unfriendly clauses such as this.
brookst 1 days ago [-]
In addition to disrupting big software that’s now easy to clone, AI makes it easy to be very persistent as a dissatisfied customer.
I never used to bother with asking for discounts and refunds because of the hassle. Now when Instacart delivers crappy produce or the heat press controller tracks to a different temp than a thermometer shows, I just have Claude deal with opening, tracking, responding to support.
edoceo 1 days ago [-]
There are a couple of vibe coded "alternatives" to Adobe Suite.
mitxela 1 days ago [-]
I think the idea is you'll just ask Claude to make a photoshop and you won't need adobe
mzajc 1 days ago [-]
This is brilliant news, I can't wait for a future without OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the like.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> love the downvotes
You're being downvoted, perhaps, for throwing out a generic (albeit literal) deus ex machina. I flagged for the "comment[ing] about the voting on comments" [1]. Happy to undo if fixed.
> Companies that are user-hostile have no place in the future.
All I can think of reading this is that bit from Futurama when Bender goes: AHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA. Oh wait you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Yeah we've had near four decades of massive expansion of software, free and not, and AI is definitely what's going to finally make it so companies can't be user hostile. That was what we were missing. 100%.
echelon 1 days ago [-]
Man, people on HN have no dreams. It's so sad and gloomy.
We can do so much good by just looking up instead of down. We can make the world better.
solid_fuel 1 days ago [-]
Dreams are one thing. People here are tired of fantasies and wishful thinking. Looking at the problem here - Adobe treating customers like crap and exploiting them - most of us realize that the solution is simply regulation. Leveraging the power of society and government to force the company to behave properly.
Gesturing at LLMs and going “this and the free market will fix it” is laughably naive, especially in 2026. That is why people are reacting harshly. This is a problem that was created by the free market, it’s not magically going to be fixed by some new product.
ToucanLoucan 1 days ago [-]
Better reply than I would've written.
FWIW GP, I'm not bitter. I just know what won't fix this and cosigning this comment, it's more free sodding markets and more new products.
You want companies to act user-first? Cool. Make it fuckin illegal for em to NOT do that, and watch it happen. I see no percentage in it for anyone, apart from the worst people in our industry, permitting companies to have the option to act unethically. I don't think that adds value for anyone.
echelon 1 days ago [-]
I'm all for antitrust and pro-consumer regulation, but there appears to be a faster path now.
It's all stochastic hill climbing, and the gradients are changing. The new salient is using AI to tear down moats and make the grading factor how good companies are to customers.
ToucanLoucan 16 hours ago [-]
You know what, I'll bite.
> It's all stochastic hill climbing, and the gradients are changing. The new salient is using AI to tear down moats and make the grading factor how good companies are to customers.
If we take this hyperbolic future at face value, against all the indicators of how bad and unmaintainable AI code is, especially the more it scales up, if we just ignore that and pretend for a moment that Claude can make actual, honest-to-god, functional software based on nothing but prompts: then why do any companies survive at all, apart from Anthropic? Why would you buy Photoshop, any Photoshop, irrespective of it's quality and how good Adobe can be, when you can just have Photoshop, for the cost of the Claude subscription you're already paying for?
Why does ANY software house survive? Why does ANY game developer?
binlog 1 days ago [-]
With LLMs in the picture there’s no excuse for signing a contract without reading it because it was too long or hard to understand. Adobe makes its terms pretty clear. You are entering a one year commitment.
woodruffw 1 days ago [-]
It seems like a good rule, and I am eager to see what NYC’s enforcement is going to look like. I have historically been disappointed (as a life-long resident) by the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement, particularly when public interest in any given topic fades.
(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
1986 1 days ago [-]
NYPD parking on sidewalks is more of a "who watches the watchmen" problem unfortunately.
woodruffw 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't have to be! Parking enforcement wasn't always within the NYPD's remit. Until 1996, NYCDOT was responsible for parking enforcement.
master_crab 19 hours ago [-]
Parking enforcement in NYC is currently also handled by the sanitation department. They can and do ticket cars blocking street cleaning operations, which parked personally-owned vehicles of cops do interfere with.
mikeocool 1 days ago [-]
Sadly, even if this were the case, there is no mechanism for one NYC city agency to fine another one.
This is why the sidewalks next to city parks take forever to get shoveled after a big snow storm.
woodruffw 1 days ago [-]
I would settle for a bit of towing, or even just fining the individual cops who park their personal cars on the sidewalk. Parking of city-owned vehicles is also a problem, but the former seems easier to enforce per your point.
andrewchilds 1 days ago [-]
Not to mention completely opaque tinted windshields and windows, and intentionally defaced or corroded license plates..
richiebful1 1 days ago [-]
I'd love to see a division of DOT have a bounty program for illegal parking. They do it for idling trucks, why not do it for vehicles parked in bike lanes/illegal double parking/etc?
cucumber3732842 12 hours ago [-]
The type of enforcement that the public supports is only a tiny sliver of what the kind of people who make the most use of such programs are willing to submit.
It only works for idling trucks because the person letting the truck idle is almost never the owner and the person idling the truck is usually doing work so they're not around to notice they're being reported and there's a lot more public apetite for enforcement against businesses than the general public and they write it off as a cost of doing business.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
__float 1 days ago [-]
Corruption is part of the job description, for the NYPD.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
Not a NYC-only problem though. There are tons of federal, state, and local laws that go under-enforced or unenforced. Legislators love the performance art of writing these kinds of popular laws, but law enforcement often doesn't care enough to enforce most of them. In this case, the website says the penalty is "starting at $525" which is basically nothing to a corporation, and nothing to the police/government. So you can file a complaint but it will probably go to /dev/null. After a year of this people will give up on even filing complaints.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
woodruffw 1 days ago [-]
Naturally. I mean only that NYC is an instance of this.
(It's worth noting that the city does sometimes enforce new regulations well, and in a way that the public is aware of. For example, businesses in the city are required to accept hard cash as payment, and the penalties for not doing so can be significant. Friends have told me that the city is very proactive about responding to those complaints. Anecdotally, the city has also become much better about responding to some forms of illegal parking and idling over the past few years. It certainly helps when the incentives are aligned, i.e. the cost of the enforcement program is supported by the fines collected.)
the-smug-one 1 days ago [-]
525 bucks per cancellation sounds like a lot to me tbh
bradleyjg 18 hours ago [-]
See also: driving electric motorcycles in the bike lane and displaying a fraudulent license plate.
__float 1 days ago [-]
I've also been disappointed by the lack of enforcement, and it's not necessarily for violations with little harm.
Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.
CPLX 1 days ago [-]
It's not clear why enforcement would be needed necessarily.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
tsimionescu 1 days ago [-]
If the business simply doesn't offer click-to-cancel, so you haven't actually canceled your subscription, how could you successfully claim the payment was made fraudulently? The law doesn't mandate that you can unilaterally exit any agreement, it mandates that businesses have to offer an easy way for you to do so.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
CPLX 17 hours ago [-]
Have you ever actually submitted a credit card dispute? It's like a little miniature arbitration. You can submit whatever documents and justification you want.
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
tsimionescu 15 hours ago [-]
By my understanding, the new law says "a business must offer a way to cancel a subscription that is at least as simple as creating the subscription, and in the same medium".
However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.
CPLX 12 hours ago [-]
That's not how the burden of proof works. In a credit card dispute the merchant needs to have there be no ambiguity that you did, in fact, authorize the transfer of money to their account and that the authorization is still in effect. The absence of evidence means you win.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
tsimionescu 11 hours ago [-]
Their part of the proof is simple - they can prove that you signed a contract to receive service. They keep offering this service. It's then up to you to claim that you attempted to resign from this contract. How would you prove this? It is you who are claiming you attempted to close the contract.
The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.
I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.
CPLX 7 hours ago [-]
> I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system
Obviously.
woodruffw 1 days ago [-]
Surely we agree that paying with cash or a debit card should entitle you to equal treatment under the city's rules and laws.
CPLX 17 hours ago [-]
Surely we agree that clicking to cancel will not produce cash in your hands, and that, by definition, you physically were in a location when you paid the cash, and going back there to collect the cash is no longer unreasonable.
wallst07 20 hours ago [-]
Unpopular opinion: QOL enforcement with recent administrations has also gone down even though there are programs designed not to.
Anonboxis 1 days ago [-]
Look out for the "Digital Fairness Act", which will be tabled by the European Commission in November. It is expected to include the same "Click to Cancel" principle continent-wide.
Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.
Hnrobert42 1 days ago [-]
In the US, tabled means something is not going forward. Am I correct that it means the opposite there?
neilo40 1 days ago [-]
Yes tabled means the opposite on either side of the Atlantic. Has caused me a lot of confusion over the years. Personally as a Brit I just can’t see the logic in the US meaning
yreg 1 days ago [-]
Table the motion. (discuss);
Table the discussion. (postpone)
Continue the story. (keep reading);
Continue the trial. (suspend)
Drop the album. (release);
Drop the charges. (abandon)
Sanction an event. (approve);
Sanction a country. (penalize)
Cleave to principles. (stick);
Cleave wood. (split)
Clip keys to belt. (attach);
Clip the hedges. (cut off)
Dust shelves. (remove);
Dust pastries with sugar. (add)
Hold fast. (fixed in place);
Walk fast. (moving quickly)
Make oversight. (omission);
Provide oversight. (scrutiny)
Peruse the ancient manuscript. (read in detail);
Peruse the magazine. (look through casually)
The alarm went off. (activated);
Turn the alarm off. (deactivated)
Head to either side of the street. (one or the other); Plant trees on either side of the street. (both)
It's yet to be found. (not found); Yet it's found. (found)
They're all but forgotten. (nearly); They're known but to God. (only)
mafuy 23 hours ago [-]
Does "all but" always mean "nearly"? I've been conversing in English for 20 years now but this one eluded me.
I guess I am just unable to parse the words to piece together such a meaning. In my mind, there are two ways to interpret it: "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is not" (all but = everything except), or the opposite "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is for sure". And neither of these means "nearly" :(
chias 20 hours ago [-]
Yes. I think the idea is that on the path of events or actions between the starting point and the target, you have already completed every single one, and all that remains now is the final step before you can call it done.
You've walked all but the last step of the journey.
mafuy 16 hours ago [-]
Thank you, that makes sense!
namenotrequired 19 hours ago [-]
The outcome of the meeting was negative (bad); the outcome of the cancer screening was negative (good)
NetMageSCW 14 hours ago [-]
That one doesn’t belong - if the meeting was deciding the death sentence, negative could be good.
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
Mostly correct but peruse only means read in detail. Any other intended meaning is mistaken.
gausswho 1 days ago [-]
Funny, I noted that one but in the opposite direction. In North America I've never heard it used in anything but a casual sense. An unserious activity.
schrodinger 1 days ago [-]
Agree with siblings. Living in NYC and born nearby, and I've always known peruse to mean casually browse. Flip through pages. NOT read in detail.
antonvs 1 days ago [-]
Both Merriam-Webster and Cambridge dictionaries disagree.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
As an American, I can't see the logic in having the relationship between a proposal (which is an idea that may be embodied in documentation) and a table (which is a thing that we rest our beer upon) as having any importance at all -- regardless of which way it goes.
It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
footydude 1 days ago [-]
I think in the UK sense 'tabled' is borne out of a pretty literal meaning - based on the proposal literally being brought to the table where the committee are meeting to assess (and potentially vote) on its viability.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, perhaps. But the table also has all kinds of other things on and around it. Random papers of varying importance, microphones, Representative Smith's porn phone with the privacy filter, and maybe a ham sandwich.
A table (if there even is one present at all) seems like about the least important part of a group discussion of an idea.
ligne 16 hours ago [-]
it's the item of furniture that everyone is sitting round. the fact that people might put other things on it is about as relevant as asking why one particular person is called the Chair when everyone is seated, or why it's a conference room when the cleaners happen to also do hoovering in there.
delecti 1 days ago [-]
The US sense came about from the sense of "I'm setting this on the table while we discuss other things". The meaning then evolved a bit of sarcasm with "while we do other things", starting to mean "forever". I do agree that the UK meaning makes more sense though.
petu 1 days ago [-]
I guess US `tabled` means put in a writing table drawer, hidden and soon to forgotten.
bhandziuk 14 hours ago [-]
I think it (The US version) means putting papers from my hands because I'm discussing them back down on the table surface where they will rest with my other notes.
In contrast to the UK meaning which seems to be to take the topic from a briefcase under the table and place it for discussion on the table in front of everyone.
yoavm 1 days ago [-]
This looks really great, thank you for your work! However, "Entry into force" really is expected only around 2030? I'm not even sure most people will be consuming the internet using a browser then. It's sad to see that a process like this, which is very much needed, starts at 2020 and ends 10 years later. Clearly not your fault, but I'm just a little shocked.
Damn this looks too good to be real, where's the provision to make any kind of encryption illegal ?
gbin 1 days ago [-]
It looks good reading it like this but I am always scared about the unintended effects. Like the ... cookie banners. Dynamic pricing absolutely has to go this is so unethical
chias 19 hours ago [-]
The cookie banners are not required to be this way. They are deliberately designed to be as annoying as they can legally be (many actually moreso), in part to influence your perspective against GDPR.
mrguyorama 8 hours ago [-]
The big problem with cookie banners is that they are quite often just outright in violation of the law, and just getting away with it.
I was really hoping for the EU to be more strict in enforcement. Guess they don't feel so strong in trade negotiations right now.
Here in the US, there is also the problem that people are way too overcome with FOMO about the dumbest stuff. I knew someone who would hit "Accept all" instantly for every dialog, and then I helped her with something and clicked the (mostly required and reliable) "Reject all" button instead, and when the site just loaded up and worked after that, she was shocked and said "I didn't know you could do that"
I don't know how to respond to that! The dialog openly tells you every single time that only the "Necessary" cookies are required and you can't turn those off, and every other option can be turned off.
People just don't read! Ever! At all! Their life could depend on it and they would panic instead of just reading one damn sentence in a dialog box and at this point I no longer accept "The industry trained them this way" as an excuse since this affects multiple generations who had dramatically different computing experiences.
In the modern day, every single American can usually access information about anything they want. They can try to answer any question they have. They can try and clear up anything confusing to them. They can form educated opinions!
They watch TikTok instead
hpjev 21 hours ago [-]
> [...] tackle [...] Addictive design of apps, games and digital services [...]
My guess is age verification + ID to access social media, "inappropriate" games, etc.
Anonboxis 1 days ago [-]
I made that website!
ryan_glass 1 days ago [-]
I looked at the page you linked and could not see any reference to cookie banners.
flexagoon 1 days ago [-]
Where does that page mention anything about cookie banners? I couldnt find it
ACCount39 1 days ago [-]
Probably this bit:
> “Dark patterns” (also called deceptive or manipulative design) are interface choices that steer users towards decisions they would not otherwise make, for example:
> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
Not a direct reference, but it's clear exactly what it's getting at.
Wouldn't call it a big win though. If it's not established as a browser level setting instead of some shitty per-website banner that expires every 3 weeks as the site adjusts its ad serving system once again? We're still in cookie law hell.
flexagoon 1 days ago [-]
> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
Isn't this already illegal? By law the websites are required to make full opt out single click. They just don't care.
buzer 1 days ago [-]
Yes.
Honestly all these kinds of laws should take an example out of EU261 (the flight compensation regulation) book. Set statutory damages and allow private right of action. Air carriers certainly have started to follow law much harder than many other industries after people realized they could fairly easily get compensation when carriers didn't fulfill their obligations.
games will be regulated and cant be easily shut down. Lets see what "Stop killing games" will say.
edit: According above website had too optimistic interpretation. Anyway it looks like Stop Killing Game transforms into pro-consumer video games association. And thats overdue and yet very interesting and missing.
Alifatisk 1 days ago [-]
Its incredible how much changes Mandani is doing to benefit the citizens. I start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing.
jml7c5 22 hours ago [-]
I get that people are excited about Mamdani, but the internet is really overselling his successes. New York state already has an automatic renewal law: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/GBS/527-A . The NYC version reuses much of that law's text!
This is a consistent pattern. I've seen people praise him for the use of snow melters (they use them most blizzards), praise him for switching to garbage bins (the decision to switch happened under Adams), praise him for putting his desk backwards to send a message of solidarity (the desk was not backwards, it just has drawers on both sides), etc.
He seems like a decent mayor, but there are a lot of overeager boosters who have warped him into some miracle maker. It reminds me a bit of when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in the enthusiasm after his election — it's nice to feel like a politician is "your guy", but don't get too swept up in it!
Gareth321 20 hours ago [-]
I agree on all points. His social media team is arguably the best of all previous mayors, and I think that's largely why we're seeing people praising him for things he didn't actually do. He is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and DSA members are *HEAVY* social media users, so they tend to give him a lot of praise because he's on their team.
stbtrax 20 hours ago [-]
you're kinda cherry picking minor accomplishments here. There are things like the doordash settlement, public toilets, rent freeze, childcare funding that are unprecedented.
throwaway2037 19 hours ago [-]
Mamdani is a master of social media.
dewey 17 hours ago [-]
Communicate what you do -> "master of social media"
Don't communicate what you do -> "what did they even do?"
throwaway2037 15 hours ago [-]
To be fair, Bloomberg and De Blasio held a lot of press conferences which is fine for people over 40 years old. The secret sauce of Mamdani is creating viral content on social media that hits well with people under 40 years old. Did you see the YouTube video[1] where he was a phone operator for 311? It is so raw and funny. It hard not to be enthusiastic about a mayor (leader) like that.
The right is making him out to be the literal anti-Christ. Which is a strong signal that he will actually be effective at making positive change.
dominicrose 22 hours ago [-]
I live in France and we just had a good week with the Pope followed by a terrible week with the hard-left. The actually conquered a university, tagged it completely, made piles of stones to throw at cops, put soap on the ground to make it slipely. It's not only the students, many are complicit in this loss of values.
ligne 16 hours ago [-]
> put soap on the ground to make it slipely
they dropped a piano on a CRS's head and all his teeth turned to piano keys. does their perfidy know no bounds?
yoyohello13 10 hours ago [-]
Just be thankful you’re privileged enough that their behavior doesn’t make sense to you.
throwawayfifo 21 minutes ago [-]
Both ends of the political spectrum read this comment and think you're calling out the opposing end.
throwaway2037 19 hours ago [-]
Is France planning to address the concerns of the protesters? The state of some public schools is terrible.
ligne 16 hours ago [-]
last i saw they were mostly interested in firing stun grenades at children
throwaway2037 16 hours ago [-]
As a result of that horrible incident of a student losing their hand, the government suspended the use of certain weapons and stun grenades.
The French gov't also announced the "Five Point Plan". There are lots of good details here[1].
wild that it requires children to be permanently maimed before the cops stop shooting at them, but there you go.
then again, it's wild that it took such large scale protests for Lecornu to commit to filling long-vacant teaching posts, ensuring school buildings are fit for human occupation with functioning sanitary facilities, and implementing basic reforms to the notoriously bad university application system. my expectations from Matignon were always low but,
20 hours ago [-]
throwaway2037 19 hours ago [-]
The previous mayors were doing lots. Just ask any LLM for a list of their major accomplishments.
Michael Bloomberg launched NYC311 in 2003. 311 has fielded millions of calls in the last twenty years. A huge part of 311 is being able to report quality of life issues. Plus Bloomberg made it easier to build, which unleashed a massive development wave in Manhattan and Brooklyn. More homes to house people, and more offices to grow the economy.
Bill de Blasio started Universal Pre-Kindergarten and reduced Stop-and-Frisk by 90%.
Eric Adams was a doofus and will soon be forgotten.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing
The last productive mayor New York had was Bloomberg. Then we had a leftist idiot (who did, granted, pass universal pre-K). Then we had a reactionary centrist muppet (who did, granted, pass some decent pro-development policies). So over a decade of bad executives coming to power with one or two good ideas that they implemented in their first year and then became pests.
TitaRusell 20 hours ago [-]
The problem is that the Democrats have NYC in their bag.
The other party in America literally hates New York and basically all cities.
Imagine if you will an America were every vote counted equally. The GOP would actually have to campaign in the cities and cater to urban voters.
NetMageSCW 14 hours ago [-]
The Democrats seemed to have hard time learning that in reverse with today’s rules, I wouldn’t count on the GOP being any smarter.
JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago [-]
> problem is that the Democrats have NYC in their bag
New York has elected independents (Bloomberg and Republicans (Giuliani) to Gracie Manor. Staten Island tends to swing that way in general. It’s really only post-Iraq War that New York went pretty much permanently Democrat, a fate sealed by the collapse of the GOP into MAGA.
> other party in America literally hates New York
Trump is a New Yorker. I haven’t seen that much hate for it compared with the California metropolises.
throwaway2037 19 hours ago [-]
Bloomberg won three terms as a non-Democrat.
01284a7e 1 days ago [-]
Why stop at mayors? How about legislators... city, state, and federal, hell, what about governors and presidents?
Aloisius 1 days ago [-]
Several states have click to cancel laws including New York state.
Mamdani simply has better PR.
dyauspitr 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, like it or not at this point if you have to be an effective politician, you have to be a good influencer too much as I hate saying that sentence.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
Cuomo is a morally-bankrupt man. But he was an effective governor in many respects.
tombert 1 days ago [-]
No, he was clearly always a corporate shill his entire time as governor. He tried to get NYC to pay for half the subway without giving us increased power of how it's run [1].
Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.
He sucked. He probably still does.
[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
He kept the budget on time, played an equal role in getting the 2nd Avenue subway opened and presided over economic growth. He fumbled with COVID and was being a rapist in the background, which is unforgivable, but it’s not unreasonable to say he had positive impacts, even if I’m not sure whether he was net positive.
> the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent
I’m cautiously doubtful. We lost control for a reason. And the current MTA is pretty well run, especially if you include commuter rail in the mix.
tombert 1 days ago [-]
It was still under his role that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today.
I guess I don't concede that he did anything competently, or at least more competently than any other politician would be.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today
Do you have a source or dataset that shows this delineation? (Not challenging you, genuinely curious.)
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.
ETA:
That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started
I will totally agree with you that Cuomo—nor Hochul—did anything around improving the MTA’s fiscal efficiency. I’m just not convinced he even accelerates that.
tombert 1 days ago [-]
Sure, I'm not sure he made it "worse", just think it's fine to blame him for making no significant effort (as far as I can tell) to fix it in the ten years he was in office.
But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.
AuthAuth 1 days ago [-]
It might seem this way because he is showing off his wins on different channels. In terms of passing policy its not different than other mayors. Maybe you think the policy is good and the other mayors policy was bad and thats the gap.
ehsankia 1 days ago [-]
This was actually started federally under Biden, but thrown out as soon as Trump came in
So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.
CGMthrowaway 1 days ago [-]
I'm old enough to remember that everyone said the same thing about Giuliani when he was mayor. Now everyone hates him
Tangurena2 16 hours ago [-]
After 911, all he talked about was 911 and how he was in charge when that happened. Then, when Trump got into office, if you wanted a presidential pardon, you paid Giuliani $2,000,000 for one.
Did he put up though? Do you have multiple examples of pro-consumer wins he had early in his tenure?
CGMthrowaway 1 days ago [-]
Doubled the police force and cut crime in half, including murders down 66%, shootings down 72%
Zero-tolerance policy against public disorder, panhandling and public nuisance crimes (unheard of today!)
Cleaned up times square transforming from a seedy red light district into a major tourist destination
Converted a $2.3 billion city budget deficit into a $2.9 billion surplus
Reduced or eliminated 23 different city taxes, saving taxpayers over $9 billion
Overhauled the welfare system, helping people get jobs and successfully moved over 600K people off assistance
Led NYC and USA through the immediate aftermath of 9/11
Earned the title America's Mayor, Time magazine Person of the Year and an honorary knighthood
blalala 21 hours ago [-]
Imagine a world where every city has its own special laws for computer and internet use, that businesses globally have to comply with at all times…
This type of thing should never have been up to the mayor of any city to legislate.
vjulian 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, better decided top dowm by a cabal. The more uniformity, the better.
1 days ago [-]
Vaslo 1 days ago [-]
It’s incredible how much virtue signaling this is. He has no power to enforce it - I’d just ignore him anyway, nothing he can do about it.
yoyohello13 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, much better just to sit around and do nothing. Wouldn’t want randos on the internet to accuse you of virtue signaling.
irl_zebra 1 days ago [-]
Fines to the non-compliant businesses and forcing them to refund are two major ways he will enforce this.
rixed 1 days ago [-]
Are representatives necessarily either virtue signaling or vice signaling?
LeBit 1 days ago [-]
I thought Yandex was taken out
moomoo11 1 days ago [-]
did it make you _feel good_ though?
arjie 1 days ago [-]
California has had this for a while, and it's a pretty good feature. Until then it was a nightmare to unsubscribe from newspapers like the WSJ or the NYT. Now (well, for a few years now) it's trivial. Hopefully this will be federally available in the next few years.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
> A person making an automatic renewal or continuous service offer to a consumer must provide the consumer with the option to cancel at any time using a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent and that is through the same medium that the consumer used to provide consent
So if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.
Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
simpaticoder 1 days ago [-]
There's a funny thing when people don't like something where they can intentionally misunderstand it or impart artificial complexity onto it painting a picture like the rule is hard to comply with. I suppose to variation of a straw man argument. I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web. If you can sign up through the phone you should be able to cancel through the phone. Companies knowingly an intentionally make it harder to cancel than to sign up for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by the consumer. This is a very good law and it should be adopted everywhere.
cwillu 1 days ago [-]
And if you didn't have to click through a bunch of offers to subscribe, you shouldn't have to to cancel.
calvinmorrison 1 days ago [-]
so in order to unsubscribe from go daddy, you must also opt out of the 9.99/mo virus scanning?
apparent 1 days ago [-]
This is actually a hilarious point. Some companies might end up making the sign up process more complicated in order to make clear that their cancellation process is equally "simple"/"easy". I guess godaddy is ahead of the curve on this one.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
The HN guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and I try to do so here. Comments like yours take a good faith question like mine and treat it as if it's being asked by someone who is "intentionally misunderstand[ing]" it.
You say:
> I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web.
If that's all they were trying to do, they would just say that it has to be the same medium. But they don't stop there. They say you have to have a "simple cancellation mechanism" and it has to be "as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent". Then they layer on the same-medium requirement that you think is the only actual requirement.
I've read a lot of rules, laws and regulations in my day (lawyer), so I know that when there are 3 distinct requirements, then you can't just meet one of them and think you're in compliance.
simpaticoder 1 days ago [-]
So what language would you use to require parity between making and breaking the consumer relationship? You can always construct situations where a rule is genuinely ambiguous, construct situations where the counter-party is held to an unreasonable standard, or the company is risk-averse and overreacts, or they hate it so much they engage in malicious compliance, etc. Many error-modes. But that is true for every law, which is why you have case law, and why laws get revised. This happens with every law, because they are ALL ultimately ambiguous, and they can ALL be used by malefactors, and they must change in application over time with society, technology and all the rest.
What bothers me most is that these companies are actively deviating from the ordinary, obvious, symmetrical path in order to fleece customers. So to comply with the law is really to stop going out of their way to commit petty, pervasive, stochastic fraud against their customers. That is, it doesn't require positive action so much as negative action. Which makes it even less objectionable.
The other day I went to cancel Comcast. And you know what? I first logged into my acount. From there I could literally do everything instantly - sign up, add services, upgrade, everything - but I couldn't cancel. There was no button, no link, no wording. I had to Google it. And it was a phone number hidden on their website that was business hours only. And I called it and spent ~10 minutes cancelling my service. Comcast had to ideate, design, implement, staff, build organization around this behavior. Its transparently wrong, it's too common, and it's a practice that should be stopped.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
I think the most helpful thing is not to add language to the regulation, but to add 4-6 examples that illustrate what is considered to be ok or not ok.
The lack of examples/specificity makes it easier for the government to capriciously enforce this law against companies they disfavor. I'm surprised that on a startup-friendly forum, most of the comments are from folks who are worried about malicious companies, not malicious enforcement.
I totally hear you on Comcast. I've filed FCC complaints against them several times. But these rules apply equally to very small companies, who may not have the resources to make sure that they're in compliance with the spirit and letter of every rule in 50 states and 100 countries.
sensanaty 21 hours ago [-]
Is it a small business if they're doing business in every US state or country?
apparent 13 hours ago [-]
Sure, plenty of startups are small businesses and have customers all over.
Sohcahtoa82 7 hours ago [-]
> in my day (lawyer)
Ah, that explains everything.
I do believe you're commenting in good faith. The problem is, your profession requires you to be extremely explicit to a degree that nobody else in the world needs.
To a lawyer, there's no such thing as the Spirit of the Law, all that matters is the Letter, so you need incredibly rigid definitions to ensure no loopholes. Unfortunately, to people that don't know you're a lawyer, you asking questions comes off as feigning misunderstanding, rather than demanding a concrete, specific, rigid, and precise definition.
Unfortunately, it's also why people fucking hate lawyers. Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.
When a mom yells at a kid, "Stop jumping on the bed!", and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping!", you know that kids is gonna grow up to be a lawyer.
apparent 39 minutes ago [-]
> To a lawyer, there's no such thing as the Spirit of the Law
This is untrue. And when I ask questions like the above, I am wondering what the spirit was they were going for. It's too vague to know.
> Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.
This resonates for people who have never needed lawyers and think that lawyers just make things worse. They certainly can, but they can also make things better by pointing out when things are ambiguous and need to be clarified. Or helping parties realize where their interests align and how they can work together.
Vortigaunt 1 days ago [-]
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
dcrazy 1 days ago [-]
Maybe those people who’ve spent so much time A/B testing where to put the signup buttons can use those skills to figure out where to put the cancel buttons so that they are as easy to find.
whycome 1 days ago [-]
Worse. We are going to see signup flows that are initially simple but take the user through several steps to do it but not in a way to make them abandon the process.
Tangurena2 16 hours ago [-]
Many companies currently require that you call in person - during business hours only - to cancel, wait half an hour (or more) on hold to speak with a person who will get fired if too many customers successfully unsub.
Adobe's call centers have a script where they offer some "bargain" deal if you don't cancel which converts your for-real-monthly-with-no-cancellation-penalty subscription into one that has an annual requirement and a "cancellation fee" that is in effect the rest of the year's subscription charge.
NetMageSCW 13 hours ago [-]
I like Sirius XM’s handling - I submitted a cancellation, they offer me a year for the price of a month, I accepted. I don’t know if it will happen again, but it isn’t worth more to me.
Tangurena2 13 hours ago [-]
Good to know. The only channel I listened in the car was dropped from the air - right after my sub renewed. Now all the channels have "this is sirius/xm whatever channel" in between every song. I won't be renewing.
briffle 14 hours ago [-]
> Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.
But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.
its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.
notimetorelax 1 days ago [-]
I think the point of the law is - the same medium. If you signed up online, you should be able to cancel subscription also online.
rixed 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, the same medium doesn't imply parity ("To cancel, please solve this math puzzle to prove that you are not a robot"
abenga 23 hours ago [-]
Then it is not as easy to use as the mechanism you used to sign up, and it's now against the law.
rixed 22 hours ago [-]
Yet, it's the same media.
Sure, "the same media" is already something. I remember a supposedly no-strings attached phone company that you could only cancel with a plain old snail mail (that was in EU by the way, for those of you who believe EU is the paragon of consumer protection).
apparent 1 days ago [-]
I wish it were that simple. The language I quoted gives two additional requirements, however, and no examples for what does/doesn't meet them.
rlpb 1 days ago [-]
> ...and possibly declining various offers to stay
Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.
cosmic_cheese 1 days ago [-]
I suspect that something as simple as 2-3 emails prior to renewal, each with a one-click (no auth needed) clear, unobscured "unsubscribe" button would be sufficient.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
Where does it say they have to send even 1 email prior to renewal, let alone 2-3? That would be spam in my book. I'm pretty sure companies like Netflix don't do that, and I'm sure Cursor doesn't. That doesn't mean the requirement doesn't exist or isn't added by this law...but it would fundamentally change things.
cosmic_cheese 15 hours ago [-]
It doesn't, but it would make cancelling easy.
Personally I really appreciate it when a service sends me an email or to reminding me of an upcoming renewal and making sure I have a chance to cancel. It tells me that they’re not hoping for or relying on users forgetting their subscriptions to make money, which imparts am image of integrity.
calvinmorrison 1 days ago [-]
next we need to end captive portals. Don't tell me there's an invoice, fucking send it to me!
LoganDark 1 days ago [-]
"There's a new [some thing] that needs your attention" where the only email content is a log-in button needs to genuinely die.
rixed 1 days ago [-]
Don't you all automatically delete any email from noreply@.* ?
10 hours ago [-]
calvinmorrison 1 days ago [-]
Right? I understand maybe there are concerns about security, but at least let me opt in. Email delivery != email notification. I should be able to receive, digitally or not, mail from you, to my inbox!!!
1 days ago [-]
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think anyone will have trouble figuring out a good way to comply with this. It’s not clear exactly where the line is, so just don’t go near it. Make it easy to cancel, job done. If a company wants to push the boundaries by making it as difficult to cancel as the rule allows, they’re running the risk of being on the wrong side of the line and suffering the consequences, and that’s their choice.
The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.
walt_grata 1 days ago [-]
Heres what you should do to be safe.
On the user's settings/profile/whatever user page you have, add a cancel button. When the user clicks it say "are you sure? Yes/no". If the user clicks yes, cancel the account.
No extra hoops at all.
tzs 1 days ago [-]
I've seen people count clicks and complain that is not as easy as signup.
To signup they just went to foo.com and there was list of plans with links to their sign up pages right there, so click one of those, fill out the one page form, click submit.
To cancel, they have to go to foo.com, click the login link, full in the login form, click to submit, then on their home page click on the profile icon to get the profile menu, click account in that menu, and then click the cancel button on the account page.
That's 2 clicks to sign up and 5 to cancel--6 if the cancel button asks if you are sure.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
This is exactly my point. It's never going to be as easy to cancel as to sign up because signing up just requires entering cc details. Canceling requires authentication to an account to ensure that the one being canceled belongs to you, and of course finding the settings and the place where the subscription is modified. That's always going to be more clicks than landing on startup.com's website, clicking sign up now, and entering your cc details.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
To sign up: click sign up, enter a email and password to create an account, probably verify your email, enter your payment.
To cancel: enter your email and password, cancel.
What am I missing?
apparent 1 days ago [-]
You skipped over the part where the cancel button isn't on the front page of literally any website. It's somewhere in account/settings/subscription/edit. No word if this is allowed under NYC's desired regime. I don't have a lot of faith in their reasonableness, considering the politicians that are getting elected there these days.
NetMageSCW 13 hours ago [-]
It should be in every page of the subscribe option is on every page. Simple.
wat10000 17 hours ago [-]
Why would the cancel button need to be on the front page? It’s not like there’s a one-click signup button on the front page.
NetMageSCW 13 hours ago [-]
There is on many web sites - since they pop-up a form asking you to subscribe when you visit.
wat10000 13 hours ago [-]
Find me one web site that lets you sign up in one click.
Plenty of sites have a sign up button on the front page. That's going to take you to a form where you create an account and put in payment info. It's inherently a multi-step process since it requires multiple pieces of info.
apparent 13 hours ago [-]
You think there aren't sign up buttons on the front page of websites?
wat10000 13 hours ago [-]
You think those buttons sign you up for a paid service with a single click?
dfxm12 1 days ago [-]
But where is the line exactly?
This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform
Why not?
Some examples would be helpful
The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
Ya, a reasonable interpretation would likely mean that where you sign in and manage your accounts and payments you have the means to discontinue further service. Anyone trying to push these boundaries will likley find themselves on the wrong side of the law.
calvinmorrison 1 days ago [-]
well we have done it before, cookie banners. Notwithstanding that a users software running on their system (ostensibly a web client), chooses to store cookies, which are not in fact edible... now we have to suffer through it.
happyopossum 1 days ago [-]
> This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.
That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.
foltik 1 days ago [-]
Making it more specific only invites malicious compliance. If businesses TRULY make a good faith effort, they’ve got nothing to worry about.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
What does malicious compliance mean to you? I've heard it used, but never in a way that makes sense in this context. If they had examples, it would be clearer what the intent was, and businesses would be able to be held the appropriate standard. As it stands, I can't figure out if many of the businesses I deal with are in compliance, and anyone who claims to know is naive, or simply hasn't read the rule closely.
foltik 23 hours ago [-]
Complying in a way that follows the letter of the law, while clearly contradicting the intent.
For example, finding a loophole to keep it difficult unsubscribe. Or making it easy to unsubscribe, but adding an egregious cancellation fee to all subscriptions.
Another good example is when NYC passed minimum pay laws for delivery drivers, and the big delivery companies immediately all colluded to hide the normal tip screen behind a bunch of submenus (until eventually forced to change it back).
Is it really unclear to you what the intent is here? What specifically about the rule do you think is ambiguous?
apparent 1 days ago [-]
The last thing I'd want is to have to end up in court in NY to figure out what is or is not in compliance with this law. They should include examples, like many regulations do. We don't need more lawsuits for laws that could have been clarified in the first place.
NetMageSCW 13 hours ago [-]
No a law should never include
examples. If you do, you will get push back saying they can ignore the law since they don’t fit the examples.
oenton 6 hours ago [-]
They did include examples. The city’s own website has a dedicated page describing the rule with a multitude of examples[0]. What exactly do you think is missing?
> - You were not clearly told the terms of the subscription.
- It was hard to cancel the subscription. For example, you signed up online, but were forced to cancel your subscription on the phone, in person, or another way.
- The business delayed canceling your subscription
Put a nice simple cancel button easily visible in your account settings and you’ll be fine. Don’t overcomplicate it.
expedition32 1 days ago [-]
In my country the rule is "unsubscribe the same way you subscribed". So no bullshit with having to write a literal physical letter through the mail (yes really this happened) or having to call a callcenter in India and having to explain why you want to your stop subscription.
rixed 1 days ago [-]
Is it enforced? What country is that?
usefatcat 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
baby 1 days ago [-]
I spent hours trying to cancel some services with legalzoom last month, they clearly go through every shady tactics in the book to prevent you from cancelling, these companies are horrendous and this needs to be enacted as a national law
_false 1 days ago [-]
Nine states (incl. CA) already require click to cancel. This is largely a non-event
MathMonkeyMan 1 days ago [-]
But now, as a New Yorker, I can complain. And we love to complain.
But just like laws about including a salary, what's the penalty for not complying, and how will it be enforced?
souenzzo 17 hours ago [-]
Brazil's Anatel (telecommunications regulatory agency) also has a "click to cancel" policy since 2014
isolay 18 hours ago [-]
Does it affect canceling an NYT subscription?
gizmodo59 1 days ago [-]
NYTimes still doesn’t have a single click to cancel! Gotten better now. Hope they learn.
1 days ago [-]
artursapek 1 days ago [-]
New York Times in shambles over this one
clickety_clack 1 days ago [-]
I like this rule. I feel like most of the apps I use are relatively easy to unsubscribe from, but it seems like it should be a requirement.
Vishal_Max 23 hours ago [-]
The website is too good to be a government site, it looks cool and snappy
throwaway2037 19 hours ago [-]
Many UK gov't websites are excellent. Their universal design rules are superb.
blakeashleyjr 1 days ago [-]
While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....
joshuat 1 days ago [-]
To avoid the overhead, we could simply adopt pro-consumer practices across the board? Easier than segmenting users and deciding which cancellation mechanisms are available to them based on region.
ignoramous 1 days ago [-]
When folks subscribe, we make it a point to highlight the fact that the app would always have a big red button they could tap at will to either get a full refund (within 30 days) or stop the subscription payments (if after).
Not sure if it was the only cause, but in a month since then, conversion rates 2x'd (~100/mo to ~250/mo), while % of cancel/refund requests have stayed the same.
derektank 1 days ago [-]
Pro-consumer practices are not inherently compliant practices
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
In this case it very much is. If you have an online sign up but a by mail or phone cancellation process, you went through extra work purely to fuck over the consumer. Complying with this law is just not going the extra effort to scam people.
derektank 22 hours ago [-]
Compliance also requires proving compliance, which is what the point the grandparent comment was making. Proving you are in compliance to multiple different governmental entities, each with their own form of enforcement, adds further compliance work that needs to be accomplished. It’s why this kind of regulation at the national or supranational level is far superior to municipalities.
NetMageSCW 13 hours ago [-]
You only have to prove your compliance if someone complains. No one is going to start a department of cancellation requiring forms.
Projectiboga 1 days ago [-]
Nothing from stopping them from making it this easy to cancel for everyone. We all see cookie banners due to the EU's rules.
romanovcode 1 days ago [-]
EU is pushing browser settings instead of cookie banners. Maybe after 10+ years of trial and error consumers will actually get something viable.
Then again, the lobbying and resistance from Chrome must be unreal because it would be pretty huge blow for them to enable such setting.
buzer 1 days ago [-]
Commission still wants to keep it for media companies and Council wants to keep it for everyone. Parliament's final stance is still unclear.
mananaysiempre 1 days ago [-]
Alternatively, let people cancel easily everywhere. If you think it’s worth the extra revenue to geofence easy cancellations, then—well, you do you, but you are making a business judgment that the additional development cost is justified. This is different from VAT/sales tax etc., where it is in fact impossible to comply everywhere without discriminating by jurisdiction.
pixl97 1 days ago [-]
Worse by following NYC laws and putting everyone else in a different harder to get away from bucket you may be setting yourself up for future legal problems. You now have a chain of documentation on your evil practices rather than them just being a norm you may have verbally agreed on before.
woodruffw 1 days ago [-]
As far as added complexity goes, a rule for a city the size of NYC doesn’t seem like that far of a bridge to cross.
ssl-3 1 days ago [-]
Indeed. NYC's population is greater than that of a bunch of whole countries, like Denmark, Singapore, or New Zealand (to name just several).
It's a really big chunk.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
It’s an easy rule to comply with and nothing stops you from complying with it everywhere.
We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.
baby 1 days ago [-]
You managed to find something to complain about this story?
dominotw 1 days ago [-]
its hard being a dick
Analemma_ 1 days ago [-]
You can't seriously think this makes you sound like a sympathetic party, right? "Oh no, we have to maintain two codepaths now: the pro-social one for places with functional governments, and the slimy anti-consumer fuck-you one for everywhere else. Won't anyone think of our plight?"
georgemcbay 1 days ago [-]
> While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....
Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.
It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".
The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.
Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have hundreds of regional carve-outs.
artursapek 1 days ago [-]
just remember, any amount of churn rate reduction your dark patterns earn you will be paid for many times over in the afterlife
sfraxo 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
fg137 1 days ago [-]
cvs.com doesn't allow me to delete my account unless I provide an address in certain states.
So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.
Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.
_DeadFred_ 1 days ago [-]
Does this apply to all New York Times customers since they are in New York? They are a horrible offender when it comes to canceling.
winfredJa 13 hours ago [-]
even if the rule is good, i hate these state/city specific rules
irl_zebra 1 days ago [-]
This is a very bad thing and very, very scary. Very anti-capitalist. My KPIs that go into my annual review are going to be thrashed, and without the raise I was expecting, I am unlikely to be able to continue to afford my second family. This is literally going to take food out of their mouths. I do not deserve this.
cyberclimb 1 days ago [-]
You can only submit my snail mail or Fax.
So close yet so far
robertlane0 1 days ago [-]
There's a big blue button on the homepage that says "File a complaint" - I presume that goes through the web.
octoberfranklin 1 days ago [-]
I think it's obnoxious that you can't send a cancellation request through your credit card company's website.
Just find the charge, click the "I want to cancel the service that caused this charge". The merchant has to either cancel or reply with a message clearly explaining why they can't do that (i.e. you agreed to a 12-month minimum).
Whoever is collecting the money has all the information needed to make the cancellation request. No website logins, passwords, self-addressed stamped envelope, etc.
Apple has done this for subscriptions that collect money through the iTunes store. It's awesome.
AmEx should do this because unlike all the other cards they control the whole stack.
baby 1 days ago [-]
Wait but you can right? I've definitely stop paying services in the past like that. They usually send you to collection, and then one day they just stop sending you mail.
octoberfranklin 12 hours ago [-]
You can open a chargeback dispute. But you have to send documentation. And your credit card company requires that you contact the merchant out-of-band first... which is the thing we shouldn't have to do.
Opening a dispute is like stopping payment on a check. It's refusing to pay, not asking to cancel.
ChrisArchitect 1 days ago [-]
Previous discussion on the announcement:
New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
Passing this at the city level is dumb. It's political showboating. If you're reading this you are educated enough to realize it's practically impossible to enforce.
GalaxyNova 1 days ago [-]
What? A city can have jurisdiction over these things?
1 days ago [-]
jaleoan 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
red-breeze 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
bibhashBFP 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
privacyfixed 1 days ago [-]
For anyone worried about complying with a different rule in every jurisdiction: the practical answer for a small SaaS is to build once to the strictest version and stop thinking about it. Cancel from the same account page where people pay, in no more steps than signing up took, no retention offer they have to click past, and a confirmation email that states the end date. Most billing providers' hosted customer portals already do this out of the box, so it's usually less work than the dark-pattern flow it replaces. The cases that get hard are the ones where signup was online but cancellation was deliberately routed to phone or chat.
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
What's the justification for the phone or chat cancellation anyway? I get why they do it to make more money but it seems like it would be kind of nakedly extractive to explain the policy to anyone.
Dusseldorf 1 days ago [-]
I don't think they really try to hide the fact that they do it because it reduces attrition, they just act like that isn't wildly immoral.
OkayPhysicist 12 hours ago [-]
This is the solution to all the "oh no it's soooo hard to comply with all the protections" bullshit that MBA types bellyache about. The only reason complying is difficult is because you are trying to do just as much evil shit as you can get away with. If you just switch to the honest, upstanding approach, you won't need to work as hard to try and figure out where the line is.
maxlin 1 days ago [-]
I guess this is Mamdami's claim to the similar of "but at least Hitler liked dogs!"
the_gipsy 1 days ago [-]
When are NY and California going to secede and join the EU?
tomnipotent 1 days ago [-]
I imagine both states would end up with single-payer healthcare pretty quickly, and both already have GDP greater than all but 3 EU countries... what exactly would the EU bring to the table?
bickfordb 1 days ago [-]
Additionally, French fries are already abundant in CA and NY
ghm2180 1 days ago [-]
One abstract idea is to convert every digital event into a hook. The hook then goes into a local LLM that has a rule to figure out what to do with it. I use DDG or mozilla email aliases as much as I can. All my emails go to a local email client and for the non-spam classified mails I have a few rules(**) I am toying with right now:
1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.
2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.
All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.
None of this is rocket science.
**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.
I expect more businesses will transition to this strategy to counter NYC's new rule. They won't necessarily lower the price, but you will have to sign up for a one-year term, then they will hit you with a massive cancellation fee if you "click to cancel".
They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.
Their Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft), has around 47k GitHub stars right now.
Opus 6 or Opus 7 probably would be fine with working on an LLM generated codebase.
All three original apps contained each other's functionality. As a result, the new combined app is barely larger than one of the three previous apps, and switching between the modes is now much more convenient and has a better UX.
Insert Michael Scott "God no" meme
That's terrible news. I only use photo-editing software to lay stuff out for print once in a while, so hopefully I can get away without upgrading indefinitely.
not these llm vibe coded shit.
No. No it's not.
Fort all of Adobe's faults, Photoshop and other offerings are products, with support timelines, features added etc. [1] This so far is "let me vibe-code some thing with no intention of maintaining it further".
[1] And there are others competing as well. From opensource like Gimp to Affinity Design, Pixelmator etc.
Or to actually try and maintain/change/fix vibe-coded software for longer than a few days.
No, AI isn't subsuming products. Not now, not in the forseeable future.
And software developer's perspective on this is exactly how future looks, because for me, Claude Code now manages my personal computer fully - installs new software as needed, and uses it as needed.
Oh, I highly doubt this. Since I use ChatGPT for generating images quite often. There's no chance in hell they are doing consistent high-quality work in ChatGPT 90% of the time. Or your (and their) definition of high quality work is far from a common definition.
This is especially true in the past few months when OpenAI removed any way to directly prompt their image generator. So ChatGPT is often stuck in the same generator seed, the generator never gets the full prompt, regenerates images (inconsistently), messes up details, ignores input (because the model never generates the prompt to the image generating model correctly) etc. etc.
Good enough to generate a restaurant slop-menu or a quick TTRPG image. Consistent high quality? Lol.
Because if i try signing up on their website today, the difference seems pretty clear to me.
See: https://imgur.com/a/G8o8Viw
But nobody wants to take personal responsibility for consciously choosing the cheaper monthly option. It comes with the annual commitment, as opposed to the more expensive monthly option that does not have the annual commitment.
I have zero love for Adobe, but at the same time in this particular case it really is people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want the cheapest monthly price, but also the ability to cancel.
If you think you might need to cancel, that's what the monthly option is for.
As for why they would set things up like this? Who the frak knows? Pricing tiers is literally the primary means of legally scamming people. The only logic it follows is that people who believe it does follow obvious logic are easier to scam.
I think that's handled by the rule. From their webpage:
> Companies must clearly explain subscription terms to you
Does this law apply retroactively?
You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.
I bet going forward everyone will prominently implement a fake massive discount or waive a fake one time fee when signing up just to have something to claw back if you ever want to cancel.
P.S. Just checked Adobe's site from the EU, prominently displays a "Save 50%" badge and a crossed out original price with the discounted price next to it. There's also a link to the cancellation policy which tells you exactly what to expect for a refund. The cancellation process itself looks 1-click. Hard to claim misinformation.
This reminds me of the ISPs where the technician would insist to plug in your internet cable and a "check" that took all of 5s but was billed heavily in a waived one time fee. When you wanted to cancel the contract they'd ask for that fee back.
Most gyms, ISPs, mobile carriers, any sort of services with continuous subscription have this scheme:
- they sell you subscription with some ridiculous (and perpetual) discount (often with “first three months - it’s free”);
- there’s minimum commitment clauses/fines (so you won’t leave too early);
- there’s clause to “pay up all given discounts on canceling the contract”;
- they “balance” two rules above in such a way that it is never “good time” to leave.
They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
If I see: "Annual Subscription - $120/year, billed $10/month" I assume I'm paying $120 even if I cancel after 6 months.
But, if I cancel after 6 months, and the message to me is "$60 cancellation fee", I'm very confused - I thought I was paying the remaining $60 I owe them...? The amount may be the same but it's confusing nonetheless.
The messaging has usually been something like: "Annual subscription cancelled at the end of current period. Access ends on 12/31/2026" (even if today is 6/1/2026)
That's why the "cancellation fee" comment is weird to me - there's no need to message that way, since "pay the rest of the committed period" seems to be a common (and at least to me, very understandable) way to handle this.
Even with monthly services, I don't think I've ever had an immediate loss of access - it's there until the end of the billing cycle. As it should be, IMO. The only exception would be if I force-deleted my account as well as that's a very explicit "I'm done-done" signal to the service provider.
Buried prices are the next frontier of consumer protection. I've gotten burned by looking up a store product online and then when attempting to purchase finding that unless you ordered it through the site for in-store pickup, you get a higher price. Car dealerships were the same the last time I bought one. And while I appreciate Tesla's challenge in expressing TCO, subtracting average fuel costs from the price of a car smells bad in the same way.
>Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Nov 01
and for the prepaid option
>No refund if you cancel after Nov 01
https://www.adobe.com/#mini-plans-web-cta-creative-cloud-car...
Adobe as a huge market leader won't be affected, but I don't know how many other studios will get away with that.
It's worse than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.
[0]: https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
https://www.theverge.com/tech/894555/adobe-75-million-doj-se...
* Annual plan, paid monthly
* Annual plan, prepaid
* Monthly plan
And this is how I remember it back when, I signed up for a short gig where I only needed it for 3 months and went for the monthly plan, and then when the gig became a contract I switched to the annual paid monthly.
I think what changed is now the plans page says upfront "early termination fees apply" right next to the price.
I've been using Claude in what I call iKaren mode. Basically, all the little complaints where I know I'm in the right against a large corporate other but don't want to get emotionally invested into a petty dispute go to it.
I recently had a room in Milan where they were rude at the rooftop–I was ignored after being seated for thirty minutes–and then refused to enable A/C (which they could do remotely) until I called twice, finally yielding at 1AM. I had a terrible night's rest and, resultantly, difficult day of travel the next day. It was a single night at an expensive hotel–I'd ordinarily ignore it.
This time, I passed my booking details and a short blurb to Claude. Between the flight and ferry to my next destination, it negotiated first, a night's free stay (which I rejected) and then a 25% reïmbursement.
(Granted, OP might be imagining that one can replicate everything one does with Adobe's software with an image-generating AI. Which one might be able to. But it's not going to be cost competitive with anything Adobe offers for at least half a decade given current power- and chip-buildout schedules.)
That every robot out of Figure or Unitree gets its Verilog popped on day one.
A world where Instagram and YouTube and Reddit -- everything -- have no moat anymore. Where these become protocols.
And eventually Anthropic and OpenAI are caught up with and abundant open weights models are everywhere.
This future is not only possible, it's close.
This should be an option. I should also have the choice to buy my parents something other than a malware trap.
The only way that friction disappears is if we abstract away human preference.
I don't believe Photoshop/Lightroom will be replaced until I see actually exodus from these products.
Most people aren't well versed in reading T&Cs and whilst LLMs won't do a perfect job, they would likely do a decent job at assessing and highlighting potentially unfriendly clauses such as this.
I never used to bother with asking for discounts and refunds because of the hassle. Now when Instacart delivers crappy produce or the heat press controller tracks to a different temp than a thermometer shows, I just have Claude deal with opening, tracking, responding to support.
You're being downvoted, perhaps, for throwing out a generic (albeit literal) deus ex machina. I flagged for the "comment[ing] about the voting on comments" [1]. Happy to undo if fixed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
All I can think of reading this is that bit from Futurama when Bender goes: AHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHA. Oh wait you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
Yeah we've had near four decades of massive expansion of software, free and not, and AI is definitely what's going to finally make it so companies can't be user hostile. That was what we were missing. 100%.
We can do so much good by just looking up instead of down. We can make the world better.
Gesturing at LLMs and going “this and the free market will fix it” is laughably naive, especially in 2026. That is why people are reacting harshly. This is a problem that was created by the free market, it’s not magically going to be fixed by some new product.
FWIW GP, I'm not bitter. I just know what won't fix this and cosigning this comment, it's more free sodding markets and more new products.
You want companies to act user-first? Cool. Make it fuckin illegal for em to NOT do that, and watch it happen. I see no percentage in it for anyone, apart from the worst people in our industry, permitting companies to have the option to act unethically. I don't think that adds value for anyone.
It's all stochastic hill climbing, and the gradients are changing. The new salient is using AI to tear down moats and make the grading factor how good companies are to customers.
> It's all stochastic hill climbing, and the gradients are changing. The new salient is using AI to tear down moats and make the grading factor how good companies are to customers.
If we take this hyperbolic future at face value, against all the indicators of how bad and unmaintainable AI code is, especially the more it scales up, if we just ignore that and pretend for a moment that Claude can make actual, honest-to-god, functional software based on nothing but prompts: then why do any companies survive at all, apart from Anthropic? Why would you buy Photoshop, any Photoshop, irrespective of it's quality and how good Adobe can be, when you can just have Photoshop, for the cost of the Claude subscription you're already paying for?
Why does ANY software house survive? Why does ANY game developer?
(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
This is why the sidewalks next to city parks take forever to get shoveled after a big snow storm.
It only works for idling trucks because the person letting the truck idle is almost never the owner and the person idling the truck is usually doing work so they're not around to notice they're being reported and there's a lot more public apetite for enforcement against businesses than the general public and they write it off as a cost of doing business.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
(It's worth noting that the city does sometimes enforce new regulations well, and in a way that the public is aware of. For example, businesses in the city are required to accept hard cash as payment, and the penalties for not doing so can be significant. Friends have told me that the city is very proactive about responding to those complaints. Anecdotally, the city has also become much better about responding to some forms of illegal parking and idling over the past few years. It certainly helps when the incentives are aligned, i.e. the cost of the enforcement program is supported by the fines collected.)
Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.
I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.
Obviously.
Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.
Continue the story. (keep reading); Continue the trial. (suspend)
Drop the album. (release); Drop the charges. (abandon)
Sanction an event. (approve); Sanction a country. (penalize)
Cleave to principles. (stick); Cleave wood. (split)
Clip keys to belt. (attach); Clip the hedges. (cut off)
Dust shelves. (remove); Dust pastries with sugar. (add)
Hold fast. (fixed in place); Walk fast. (moving quickly)
Make oversight. (omission); Provide oversight. (scrutiny)
Peruse the ancient manuscript. (read in detail); Peruse the magazine. (look through casually)
The alarm went off. (activated); Turn the alarm off. (deactivated)
It's yet to be found. (not found); Yet it's found. (found)
They're all but forgotten. (nearly); They're known but to God. (only)
I guess I am just unable to parse the words to piece together such a meaning. In my mind, there are two ways to interpret it: "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is not" (all but = everything except), or the opposite "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is for sure". And neither of these means "nearly" :(
You've walked all but the last step of the journey.
It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
A table (if there even is one present at all) seems like about the least important part of a group discussion of an idea.
In contrast to the UK meaning which seems to be to take the topic from a briefcase under the table and place it for discussion on the table in front of everyone.
I was really hoping for the EU to be more strict in enforcement. Guess they don't feel so strong in trade negotiations right now.
Here in the US, there is also the problem that people are way too overcome with FOMO about the dumbest stuff. I knew someone who would hit "Accept all" instantly for every dialog, and then I helped her with something and clicked the (mostly required and reliable) "Reject all" button instead, and when the site just loaded up and worked after that, she was shocked and said "I didn't know you could do that"
I don't know how to respond to that! The dialog openly tells you every single time that only the "Necessary" cookies are required and you can't turn those off, and every other option can be turned off.
People just don't read! Ever! At all! Their life could depend on it and they would panic instead of just reading one damn sentence in a dialog box and at this point I no longer accept "The industry trained them this way" as an excuse since this affects multiple generations who had dramatically different computing experiences.
In the modern day, every single American can usually access information about anything they want. They can try to answer any question they have. They can try and clear up anything confusing to them. They can form educated opinions!
They watch TikTok instead
My guess is age verification + ID to access social media, "inappropriate" games, etc.
> “Dark patterns” (also called deceptive or manipulative design) are interface choices that steer users towards decisions they would not otherwise make, for example:
> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
Not a direct reference, but it's clear exactly what it's getting at.
Wouldn't call it a big win though. If it's not established as a browser level setting instead of some shitty per-website banner that expires every 3 weeks as the site adjusts its ad serving system once again? We're still in cookie law hell.
Isn't this already illegal? By law the websites are required to make full opt out single click. They just don't care.
Honestly all these kinds of laws should take an example out of EU261 (the flight compensation regulation) book. Set statutory damages and allow private right of action. Air carriers certainly have started to follow law much harder than many other industries after people realized they could fairly easily get compensation when carriers didn't fulfill their obligations.
games will be regulated and cant be easily shut down. Lets see what "Stop killing games" will say.
edit: According above website had too optimistic interpretation. Anyway it looks like Stop Killing Game transforms into pro-consumer video games association. And thats overdue and yet very interesting and missing.
This is a consistent pattern. I've seen people praise him for the use of snow melters (they use them most blizzards), praise him for switching to garbage bins (the decision to switch happened under Adams), praise him for putting his desk backwards to send a message of solidarity (the desk was not backwards, it just has drawers on both sides), etc.
He seems like a decent mayor, but there are a lot of overeager boosters who have warped him into some miracle maker. It reminds me a bit of when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in the enthusiasm after his election — it's nice to feel like a politician is "your guy", but don't get too swept up in it!
Don't communicate what you do -> "what did they even do?"
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1vbAdFkVvA
they dropped a piano on a CRS's head and all his teeth turned to piano keys. does their perfidy know no bounds?
The French gov't also announced the "Five Point Plan". There are lots of good details here[1].
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/05/from-school-blockades-to...
then again, it's wild that it took such large scale protests for Lecornu to commit to filling long-vacant teaching posts, ensuring school buildings are fit for human occupation with functioning sanitary facilities, and implementing basic reforms to the notoriously bad university application system. my expectations from Matignon were always low but,
Michael Bloomberg launched NYC311 in 2003. 311 has fielded millions of calls in the last twenty years. A huge part of 311 is being able to report quality of life issues. Plus Bloomberg made it easier to build, which unleashed a massive development wave in Manhattan and Brooklyn. More homes to house people, and more offices to grow the economy.
Bill de Blasio started Universal Pre-Kindergarten and reduced Stop-and-Frisk by 90%.
Eric Adams was a doofus and will soon be forgotten.
The last productive mayor New York had was Bloomberg. Then we had a leftist idiot (who did, granted, pass universal pre-K). Then we had a reactionary centrist muppet (who did, granted, pass some decent pro-development policies). So over a decade of bad executives coming to power with one or two good ideas that they implemented in their first year and then became pests.
Imagine if you will an America were every vote counted equally. The GOP would actually have to campaign in the cities and cater to urban voters.
New York has elected independents (Bloomberg and Republicans (Giuliani) to Gracie Manor. Staten Island tends to swing that way in general. It’s really only post-Iraq War that New York went pretty much permanently Democrat, a fate sealed by the collapse of the GOP into MAGA.
> other party in America literally hates New York
Trump is a New Yorker. I haven’t seen that much hate for it compared with the California metropolises.
Mamdani simply has better PR.
Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.
He sucked. He probably still does.
[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.
> the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent
I’m cautiously doubtful. We lost control for a reason. And the current MTA is pretty well run, especially if you include commuter rail in the mix.
I guess I don't concede that he did anything competently, or at least more competently than any other politician would be.
Do you have a source or dataset that shows this delineation? (Not challenging you, genuinely curious.)
Non-paywalled: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103141201/https://www.nytim...
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.
ETA:
That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.
I will totally agree with you that Cuomo—nor Hochul—did anything around improving the MTA’s fiscal efficiency. I’m just not convinced he even accelerates that.
But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...
Then there's the defamation lawsuits that he lost:
$148,000,000 for Georgian election workers:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trial-over-rudy-giulia...
And $1,300,000,000 for Dominion Voting Systems:
https://archive.ph/eRkG5
This type of thing should never have been up to the mayor of any city to legislate.
So if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.
Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
You say:
> I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web.
If that's all they were trying to do, they would just say that it has to be the same medium. But they don't stop there. They say you have to have a "simple cancellation mechanism" and it has to be "as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent". Then they layer on the same-medium requirement that you think is the only actual requirement.
I've read a lot of rules, laws and regulations in my day (lawyer), so I know that when there are 3 distinct requirements, then you can't just meet one of them and think you're in compliance.
What bothers me most is that these companies are actively deviating from the ordinary, obvious, symmetrical path in order to fleece customers. So to comply with the law is really to stop going out of their way to commit petty, pervasive, stochastic fraud against their customers. That is, it doesn't require positive action so much as negative action. Which makes it even less objectionable.
The other day I went to cancel Comcast. And you know what? I first logged into my acount. From there I could literally do everything instantly - sign up, add services, upgrade, everything - but I couldn't cancel. There was no button, no link, no wording. I had to Google it. And it was a phone number hidden on their website that was business hours only. And I called it and spent ~10 minutes cancelling my service. Comcast had to ideate, design, implement, staff, build organization around this behavior. Its transparently wrong, it's too common, and it's a practice that should be stopped.
The lack of examples/specificity makes it easier for the government to capriciously enforce this law against companies they disfavor. I'm surprised that on a startup-friendly forum, most of the comments are from folks who are worried about malicious companies, not malicious enforcement.
I totally hear you on Comcast. I've filed FCC complaints against them several times. But these rules apply equally to very small companies, who may not have the resources to make sure that they're in compliance with the spirit and letter of every rule in 50 states and 100 countries.
Ah, that explains everything.
I do believe you're commenting in good faith. The problem is, your profession requires you to be extremely explicit to a degree that nobody else in the world needs.
To a lawyer, there's no such thing as the Spirit of the Law, all that matters is the Letter, so you need incredibly rigid definitions to ensure no loopholes. Unfortunately, to people that don't know you're a lawyer, you asking questions comes off as feigning misunderstanding, rather than demanding a concrete, specific, rigid, and precise definition.
Unfortunately, it's also why people fucking hate lawyers. Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.
When a mom yells at a kid, "Stop jumping on the bed!", and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping!", you know that kids is gonna grow up to be a lawyer.
This is untrue. And when I ask questions like the above, I am wondering what the spirit was they were going for. It's too vague to know.
> Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.
This resonates for people who have never needed lawyers and think that lawyers just make things worse. They certainly can, but they can also make things better by pointing out when things are ambiguous and need to be clarified. Or helping parties realize where their interests align and how they can work together.
― Upton Sinclair
Adobe's call centers have a script where they offer some "bargain" deal if you don't cancel which converts your for-real-monthly-with-no-cancellation-penalty subscription into one that has an annual requirement and a "cancellation fee" that is in effect the rest of the year's subscription charge.
My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.
But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.
its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.
Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.
Personally I really appreciate it when a service sends me an email or to reminding me of an upcoming renewal and making sure I have a chance to cancel. It tells me that they’re not hoping for or relying on users forgetting their subscriptions to make money, which imparts am image of integrity.
The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.
No extra hoops at all.
To signup they just went to foo.com and there was list of plans with links to their sign up pages right there, so click one of those, fill out the one page form, click submit.
To cancel, they have to go to foo.com, click the login link, full in the login form, click to submit, then on their home page click on the profile icon to get the profile menu, click account in that menu, and then click the cancel button on the account page.
That's 2 clicks to sign up and 5 to cancel--6 if the cancel button asks if you are sure.
To cancel: enter your email and password, cancel.
What am I missing?
Plenty of sites have a sign up button on the front page. That's going to take you to a form where you create an account and put in payment info. It's inherently a multi-step process since it requires multiple pieces of info.
This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform
Why not?
Some examples would be helpful
The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.
So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.
That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.
For example, finding a loophole to keep it difficult unsubscribe. Or making it easy to unsubscribe, but adding an egregious cancellation fee to all subscriptions.
Another good example is when NYC passed minimum pay laws for delivery drivers, and the big delivery companies immediately all colluded to hide the normal tip screen behind a bunch of submenus (until eventually forced to change it back).
Is it really unclear to you what the intent is here? What specifically about the rule do you think is ambiguous?
> - You were not clearly told the terms of the subscription.
- It was hard to cancel the subscription. For example, you signed up online, but were forced to cancel your subscription on the phone, in person, or another way.
- The business delayed canceling your subscription
...
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/main/click-to-cancel
IL has had click-to-cancel since 2022. (Actually 2000, but updated in 2022, with continuous amendments being put forward all the time.)
Not sure if it was the only cause, but in a month since then, conversion rates 2x'd (~100/mo to ~250/mo), while % of cancel/refund requests have stayed the same.
Then again, the lobbying and resistance from Chrome must be unreal because it would be pretty huge blow for them to enable such setting.
It's a really big chunk.
We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.
Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.
It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".
The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.
Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have hundreds of regional carve-outs.
So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.
Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.
So close yet so far
Just find the charge, click the "I want to cancel the service that caused this charge". The merchant has to either cancel or reply with a message clearly explaining why they can't do that (i.e. you agreed to a 12-month minimum).
Whoever is collecting the money has all the information needed to make the cancellation request. No website logins, passwords, self-addressed stamped envelope, etc.
Apple has done this for subscriptions that collect money through the iTunes store. It's awesome.
AmEx should do this because unlike all the other cards they control the whole stack.
Opening a dispute is like stopping payment on a check. It's refusing to pay, not asking to cancel.
New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863464
1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.
2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.
All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.
None of this is rocket science.
**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.