[Silhouette]

I certainly don't condone making it artificially difficult for people to cancel, but there are several reasonable points against accepting some random e-mail as cancellation. It's not authenticated or tamper-proof, for a start. There's no proof of whether or when it was actually delivered. It probably requires a real person to read and act on it, which may delay things like cancelling any recurring payment process, possibly beyond the point where more money has been spent.

For any subscription services I run, if someone mails us asking to cancel, we normally direct them to the on-site cancellation process. This does use all our normal security and log-in procedures, and is fully automated and can be used in moments at any time.

However, if someone did not cancel that way (or in one of the other ways we allow for in our terms) and just blocked their payment, we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us. In practice we're only charging a small amount in these cases so we'd probably just cancel their service when payment didn't go through, but there is no guarantee any other business would make the same decision, so your strategy is risky.

[hvidgaard]

> There's no proof of whether or when it was actually delivered

If a real person replies to my mail, it's reasonable to expect that it has been delivered.

They're more than welcome to ask any question via mail or initiate the call in the time I specify (outside of my working hours) - which I wrote. Or they can have an online form to do it as well, just like they did when they accepted my money in the first place.

> we would be well within our legal rights to take action to recover the money they owed us

I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to. That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.

[Silhouette]

I don't owe any money, since I told company I wanted to cancel before I had to.

Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.

That is enough done from my part such that the consumer laws protect me and any lawsuit would be dismissed before I even hear about it.

I don't know where you're from, but in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with, it seems unlikely that would be the case.

From a purely practical point of view, I'm not sure it should be the case either, even though I'm generally in favour of reasonable consumer protection laws. For e-mail specifically, there are too many problems with relying on it, particularly if significant amounts of money or other commitments are affected by whether or not a subscription continues.

[hvidgaard]

> Sorry, but that usually isn't how it works.

Depends on the laws I suppose. I Denmark you cannot bind a consumer to pay for a service for any period except for a few special cases (for instance, phone service up to 6 months).

I'm from Denmark, and we have some fairly strong consumer protection laws exactly to prevent things like this. If I cancel any kind of prepaid service, not only do they have to stop charging me money after the periode is finished, they also have to give me back the money equivalent to the remaining period from the end of month + 1 month and forward.

[Silhouette]

Denmark seems to have relatively strong laws in this respect compared to most places, and from what little I've seen of them, they generally seem quite reasonable.

There is still a question of what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation, though. If you're subscribing to a service based in a country other than your own, there may be other laws that are relevant as well.

Personally, I'm a fan of the symmetry argument: you should be able to cancel a service through equivalent methods to what you could use to sign up for it, and without requiring an unreasonable amount of effort.

[pdkl95]

> what constitutes adequate notice of cancellation

While that's one aspect of the situation - and yes, a matching notification requirement is sensible - this discussion of "cancellation" is missing the important question: were goods delivered or services used?

Using a newspaper publisher as an example, if we're talking about a simple contract (for either a predefined period or specific termination criteria) where some amount of money is regularly exchanged for the regular delivery on dead trees or electronic means (email) of their publication, then there is a debt that needs to be repaid. The publisher fulfilled their obligations created by the contract.

However, this is a very different situation if no debt has been created. If the contract was a regular payment to gain access to their back archives, if you haven't used their services, then there isn't a debt[1]. Also, I suspect most businesses using contracts of this type will include some sort of clause that terminates all of their obligations if the payments stop.

The point being that there is going to depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, so it's dangerous to generalize.

[1] Some jurisdictions might treat use of the service separately than a "retainer" for access. This doesn't really change anything, though it might make the situation much more complicated.

[Silhouette]

The point being that there is going to depend heavily on the specifics of the situation, so it's dangerous to generalize.

That is certainly true. I do think a few people here seem to be taking a rather narrow interpretation of when services have been provided, though.

Say you sign up for access to an on-line newspaper, but then as it happens you're busy and don't actually read it. The newspaper still had reporters writing stories, and servers and Internet bandwidth to pay for, and admin staff dealing with the tax records triggered by your subscription, and so on. I don't see why someone should necessarily expect to get back their money under those circumstances.

Perhaps a more obvious example would be an insurance policy. For obvious reasons, you can't get a refund at the end of the period of insurance just because in practice you didn't need to make a claim.

Whenever I've been putting terms and conditions together for a new service, the lawyers always seem very careful about exactly what constitutes offer and acceptance to form the contract, when provision of services starts, how the agreement can be ended and any terms that survive termination, and other details like that.

[hvidgaard]

To consumer protection laws in Denmark state that, you cannot cancel for a periode in the past. If you've prepaid they can keep payment for "30 days end of month", but anything beyond that must be returned. For monthly payment, you must be able to cancel up until the next payment is due. It doesn't matter if the service is used or not.

[CaptainZapp]

Ok, fair enough. Email is an unreliable form of cancellation for a number of reasons. I don't necessarily buy it, but let's accept this for the sake of argument.

But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?

Except to make the customer (especially international customers, which may have to call in the middle of the night and who may incur significant charges) jump through a whole lot of hoops and to make it as difficult as possible to cancel.

To me this reeks like a shit ton of bad faith by the service provider, which has nothing whatsoever to do with security.

[Silhouette]

But then how exactly is it more secure to accept a cancellation by Random Dude on the phone?

I suppose if they had some sort of credentials set up for phone access then that would be a point in its favour. My bank do have well established security procedures for me to contact them by phone, for example.

To be clear, I am not in any way condoning requiring phone cancellation as a technique for making it artificially difficult or frustrating for someone to cancel when they are within their rights to do so. As you say, it stinks of bad faith.

[BlackFly]

Call centers are in general quite atrocious as far as authentication goes. Here is one particular egregious example http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authent... I cannot remember where I read it, but there are services in Eastern Europe where you can hire someone to field questions at a call center. A calm detached criminal is going to be more convincing than a flustered person who cannot believe that their identity is being questioned.

In general, there is nothing that you can ask me over a phone that cannot be asked to someone pretending to be me who can get the details in a variety of ways. To static questions there are static answers. If you perform two factor authentication properly, this is actually easier over a website than the phone.

[hvidgaard]

They often have you state particulars of the account details. MS will send you an email with a code that you must tell them.

In any case, one isn't more or less secure than the other. The physological effect of speaking to a phone just makes someone feel one is more safe. I'd say that if you send an email to the address you have on the account details, you can reasonably expect to get the right person to the same degree as you would when calling the phone number on the account.

[ssmoot]

If you tried that with someone who cared, you could get taken to small claims court. And it would end up costing you a lot even if your defense prevailed. In TX at least, companies are not allowed to use lawyers in small claims court.

You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.

That's a very entitled POV.

[Silhouette]

That's a very entitled POV.

What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with? In any business I run, it takes maybe 10 seconds, and the service is completely transparent about how to do it. It's secure, it's fully automated, and it's in the customer's own interests as well because it will also cancel any recurring payment arrangements with other services immediately and automatically.

What is entitled is things like the person who mailed us the other day, after hours on a Friday and just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due, saying very rudely and aggressively that they weren't using the service and they'd forgotten to cancel before but now they wanted to and they didn't authorise any further payments and they'd do all sorts of nasty things to us if we charged their card again. I mean seriously, they were told three times when they signed up what the charging basis was, and they could have cancelled using the normal facility in far less time than it took to write their little rant. It was only through luck that one of us saw their message in time to act on it, and if we hadn't, it would have been entirely their fault.

You are definitely not within your rights to extort people over services not rendered.

There is nothing remotely extortionate about the business practices we are talking about. The services in question are completely transparent and up-front about both what the charging basis is and how to cancel, and our terms are legally unremarkable.

As for "services not rendered", anyone is free to cancel their subscriptions with any service I help to run at any time, and none of those services use any sort of sneaky long term commitments or ever have. But if you stay signed up, and you have access to the services, you don't get to decide later that you want your money back because you didn't actually use them that month. If you think that's unreasonable, I wish you luck in getting all your insurance premiums refunded if you haven't claimed on them at the end of the year.

[ssmoot]

> What, exactly, is "entitled" about asking someone to cancel through a simple process on the same web site they signed up with?

The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.

> just a few hours before their next subscription payment was due

What's wrong with that? Are customers required to provide notice? It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday. It's your system.

> they were told three times when they signed up

Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights... All that sounds rather entitled to me.

[Silhouette]

The fact that you feel entitled to their hard earned money, despite providing no service or value.

We've spent several years building that particular service. We pay the bills for running it whether or not any particular customer uses it, because we have to have enough computers and bandwidth and so on available so that our subscribers can get what they're paying for. Our expenses don't magically disappear just because someone didn't use a service that they had previously used and were still signed up for during a certain period, nor can we telepathically tell whether intermittent users will not actually use the service during the next billing period.

What's wrong with that?

What's wrong with sending an e-mail to an address no-one is likely to be monitoring in real time, denying permission for a fully automated scheduled payment to be taken a few hours later? Well, no-one might read the message before the payment gets taken, for one thing.

It doesn't cost you anything to back date the termination date if you don't feel like handling it until Monday.

You don't seem to understand how this works. The money would already have been taken by the automated systems at that point. That means we would have to actively refund it, which may in itself incur a charge depending on the payment processing services involved. In any case, it requires significant manual intervention to do that and update all the records accordingly, which is at best wasting time we could otherwise spend on more useful activities.

Expecting your EULA is binding, and that if you choose to deviate from it, that's because you're just such a great guy, and if you felt like attempting to take their money or tarnish their credit for not using the cancellation avenue you prefer, you'd be perfectly within your rights...

We are perfectly within our rights. That's the point.

As it happens, we often do go out of our way to deal with messages from our subscribers as helpfully as we can. We take considerable pride in offering very good customer service, and we receive far more positive messages than complaints. In some cases, we will even voluntarily refund someone's subscription fee for a month, perhaps if we believe their situation wasn't entirely their fault or they had some honest misunderstanding about something.

But make no mistake, doing these things costs us time and, in some cases, money. We will do it anyway for most people, because that's the kind of business we want to run. However, we have absolutely no obligation to do so, either legally or morally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we also had little inclination to do so in the case of someone who by their own admission had known what to do and failed to do it, yet who felt the appropriate reaction to that was to write to us rudely, making an unreasonable demand and immediately threatening us if we failed to comply, instead of simply asking for help if they needed it.

[ssmoot]

Your business expenses are not my problem. The grocery store doesn't get to charge people when they order too much perishable fruit.

Your of a different opinion, that's your prerogative. Just don't expect everyone to feel the same way. I certainly don't.

I don't care how much you've poured into automating your business processes. That's what you do to increase your profit margins. I only care about two things: My input (time, effort, money), and your output (services provided).

That's just business. If someone is rude, be happy to see the back of them as a customer. Or fire them as a customer. Both those are acceptable. Taking a consumer to court if you think you'd have a case (you wouldn't) is also your right.

It's also their right to take you to small claims, which depending on the state may require you to send an employee to their state, without a lawyer, to justify your actions to a judge. I think you'll probably discover they're not going to be very sympathetic to your perceived right to take people's money just because you have business expenses in predicting future costs.

[Silhouette]

The grocery store doesn't get to charge people when they order too much perishable fruit.

They probably do if it was a special order placed for a specific customer who then cancelled once the food was already delivered to the store. And why shouldn't they, if it was entirely the customer's fault?

The rest of your post is just wishful thinking, like most of your other comments in this thread, so I see little reason to continue this discussion. Businesses can and do take non-paying customers to court or through a collections process, and routinely win under the kind of circumstances we're talking about.

In particular, cancelling a payment you owe does not in itself relieve you of any contractual obligations you have, it just means you're in default. You might not like it, but it is the law almost everywhere. As I said in another post, try getting a refund on an insurance policy at the end of the year just because you haven't made a claim, or getting part of your phone bill refunded because you didn't need to make a call in a certain period. If you try cancelling your payment without cancelling your service in those cases, and then refuse to pay what you owe, you'll be taken to court or collections, and you'll lose.

[hvidgaard]

Btw, I'd like to add that if you provide a simple way to cancel on the web, I'd be more than satisfied with it. If I send an email, I probably couldn't figure out where to cancel after 5-10 min.

[Silhouette]

For what it's worth, if an average user of any service I'm talking about couldn't figure out how to cancel within even 1 minute, I'd consider that a significant usability failure. Typically we have an obvious button for it on whatever the main control panel or dashboard for their account is, and we rarely have more than a confirmation button and perhaps an optional question or two to complete the process after that.

Some people would probably argue that we make it too easy for customers to leave, but as I've said, we prefer to run these services a certain way, and if it doesn't completely maximise profit then that's just too bad. It's not uncommon for some of these services to have a pattern of seasonal memberships, so from an entirely self-interested point of view, the trust we earn by making it easy to sign up and easy to cancel is probably of some value anyway.

[pkaye]

Would it be fair that if one cannot cancel by email then one cannot subscribe by mail since the same risks exist (of authentication and tamper-proof) exist?

[Silhouette]

Yes, I think that's entirely reasonable.

Of course, you normally can't sign up for services that require payment via e-mail anyway, since no-one credible is going to ask for enough details that they can charge you through an insecure medium like e-mail.