Especially regarding the seemingly constant watch I have to keep on my subscription, which has been reset to auto-renew several times previously, I am hopeful that these new directives will put a stop to the practice for good.
Maybe it will also lessen the volume of similar issues I see posted pretty regularly here. It’s a nasty, insidious yet of course common problem with all these greed-obsessed corps and they need a sharp legal reigning-in I think.
Yes, it has to be intentional for these companies to enable autorenewal by default, hoping people forget, or worse, not even know that this is the case. I can’t tell you how many times I cancel a subscription, just to be billed again, again, probably hoping I don’t realize it until it is too late. The last two subscriptions both told me that I would get an email before a trial was up, and both failed to do so. I canceled a third one; it offered me 50% off, which I took, but it billed me full price anyway. My wife tried to cancel a subscription for over a year, and every month she got billed again; she had to close the bank account to make the madness stop. There is a service called Cloaked that lets you spin up cloaked debit cards, so all you have to do is turn the cloaked card off.
Yeah first thing I do with any subscription after I bought it, is cancel it and put a reminder in my calendar to renew it. If there’s benefits in keeping the sub and not cancelling then I just put a reminder, well up front. I got burned too many times not realizing it was on or still on.
Unfortunately the problem is that I indeed did cancel the auto-renewal and it was reset, twice that I remember and possibly a third time - would have to check. That was extremely annoying, so hopefully this law will negate the need to constantly monitor it, as the onus shifts to the seller, as it should.
