Strongly disagree. You gave them the means and permission to bill you on a regular basis. These area valid and legal transactions. There are no protections from poor judgement (if you deem a subscription to be a poor choice).

So willingly going to netflix.com, picking a plan, entering your credit card info, hitting subscribe and watching TV for the next month is the same as getting pickpocketed?

I signed up for a service years ago - scent bird - and it was nearly impossible to cancel.

They kept changing the app and I could never find the way to cancel (turns out it doesn’t exist). I would just eat the most monthly because I never wanted to spend the time to figure it out. One day I sat down to check their website. No way to cancel.

So I went to the support page. It has a deep-link to the cancellation page. The link is broken. Reddit and others couldn’t find a valid link. Everyone said to DM them on social media.

So I tried to contact support, but they don’t publish a valid email or phone number staffed conveniently in my time zone.

So I blindly emailed “support@“ and asked to cancel. The response was another broken deep link. I replied no I wanted support staff to do it. They refused. So I told them I was a California resident and we have a law on the books requiring that online signups can be cancelled online and support staff is legally required to honor a cancellation request. No reply.

I got an email a few days later cancelling my account for violating their arbitration clause in their TOS.

This is basically pickpocketing.

It is when systems are intentionally designed to be extremely low friction to initiate and extremely high friction to cancel. In a lot of cases that’s exactly what happens.

To be fair, there should probably be a national consumer protection law that ties complexity of cancellation to complexity of sign up.

Some states in the US have laws on the books so that if you can sign up to a service online, you need to be able to cancel online—at least.