The FTC Makes Click To Cancel A Thing In The US

Taking The Pain Out Of Cancelling Subscriptions

You may have noticed a trend towards making it difficult to cancel your subscription services, assuming you can keep track of them.  Many online services force you to jump through a number of hoops to cancel a subscription with them, often with an unhelpful chatbot as the only way to request the cancellation.  There are also a large number of services that might offer a discounted or free trial period, after which you are immediately signed up for their full cost services. 

In general the responsibility to keep track of your free trials should fall on your shoulders; you did sign up for it after all!  However there are companies that do their best to hide the fact that you are signing up for more than you realize, and that is what the FTC’s Click to Cancel ruling is aimed at.  There were no enforceable rules to prevent that behaviour previously.  The Click to Cancel ruling will also require those services with an automatic renewal to attempt to contact customers before renewing their subscriptions.  If you fed them an email address you don’t use or doesn’t exist, that would be on you.

What isn’t quite clear are the penalties which could be applied to companies who ignore this ruling, the FTC is famous for light wrist slaps after all.  It will be interesting to see how effective this ruling is at bringing light to some of the more questionable subscription services out there.