What PayPal should do is offer a “PayPal subscriptions” product where the terms require cancellability through PayPal. So NYt and others can’t offer PayPal unless they agree, and when a user cancels through PayPal, PP agrees to send an API call to NYT notifying them.
That’s not entirely true; it seems to depend how much effort you put into informing them that you want to cancel. If they make it too difficult, then they’re creating all sorts of legal issues. They’d have to be pretty ballsy to sell it to a debt collector at that point—it does happen, but it’s pretty rare, and I’ve never heard of anyone actually being forced to pay in the end. That BS just isn’t going to hold up in a courtroom.
Say you sign up for a gym. The agreement is for $50/month with a year commitment. You give them a credit card to pay.
6 months in, you cancel your credit card (or it expires or whatever).
The fact that they can't bill you doesn't change that you agreed to the plan and that you owe the second 6 months anyway. That's a debt and the gym can (and some do!) choose to go after you for it in whatever legal way they feel. That's collection agencies, and direct lawsuits.
An open ended agreement ($10/month for a newspaper) often will have this same style - you agree to pay $10/month for access, they give you access. Valid until cancelled. If you simply ghost - is that cancellation? Probably not, and it's up to the contract. Of course, most consumer things just drop it and shrug, but that is not a given.
Well explained. Privacy.com gives the illusion of control in this regard (and I love the service) but to enable full user control like this you have to be untraceable after ghosting, which means signing up with a "fake" (I prefer "per-use") identity.
--amend yes it's (close to) fraud so be careful. Lots of things were illegal before they weren't; union strikes come to mind.
This is true, but only in regards to actual commitments like a yearly gym membership. If your intent is to mitigate dark patterns that frustrate the cancellation of a pay-as-you-go relationship, it's better described as shielding yourself from fraud and extortion.
Still, everybody should routinely use nyms when interacting with parties that needlessly ask for them - if for nothing else than to hinder the surveillance society.
Contracts can be yearly, with or without your will, with the possibility to cancel or not. That could become debt if not paid but not necessarily, there are consumer protection laws against abusive subscriptions, but maybe not in the US.
Services that care about cancellation and charge backs always charge the full duration upfront at the reduced price. Not month to month.
The gym, the newspapers or tinder will charge you ahead for the next month. If they can't charge you, they terminate your access and it ends the contract. You stop paying and you stop being able to use the service.
> The gym, the newspapers or tinder will charge you ahead for the next month. If they can't charge you, they terminate your access and it ends the contract. You stop paying and you stop being able to use the service
Maybe it's different in the UK but many people have got caught out assuming this is the case for gyms.
If you sign a contract saying you will pay £X each month until you cancel then just stop paying, you still owe the money.
What if the service agreement is simply per month, and not a contract? Then privacy.com regular use is fine, no?
As in, suppose a service advertises it open endedly as you stated, but I only needed 3 months of the service, then forgot about it or was traveling, is that considered illegal?
If you have a contract for a service, quite often simply stopping paying does not end the contract - it just builds up charges and past-due fees. If you stop paying your electricity bill, the utility doesn't cut you off immediately - they keep providing service (availability of electricity, even if you're not using any because you flipped the circuit breakers) and charges keep accruing.
Eventually services will be cut off, but contractually you're likely responsible for charges up to that point and the companies involved may end up selling that debt to collection agencies (often for pennies on the dollar).
For utilities, you always pay much later after it was consumed. At least a whole month usually. It's a fundamental constraint with distributing water and electricity. You're always in debt with the utility provider.
For a newspapers subscription, you always pay in advance. They can cut it anytime. There is no reason for them to give you access if you didn't pay.
In the UK the utilities take money to meet an estimated bill; meaning most people are usually creditors to the utility. If a customer doesn't rein it in then the utility will often take stupid amounts to meet an anticipated bill.
I think they were threatened with regulation and so stopped being so blatant, but they make money off holding customer's cash.
The projection is roughly the monthly consumption from last year if I am not not mistaking. You should change provider if you're being charged stupid amounts.
The provider certainly allows debt when moving in, while the contracts and payments are setup. Afterwards, I am not sure if the last bill if for the next or past period, probably a bit of both.
This is no joke. If you get tired of dealing with an annoying Comcast "customer retention specialist"[1] and simply stop paying and stop using their service, they'll keep charging you for awhile, then sell the bill to a collections agency. This hurts your credit rating, and can have all sorts of side effects and take years to repair. It sucks, but it's how things are.
Just because you stop paying doesn't mean you stopped the subscription. This is why there are late fees in the first place.
If you do this with any sizable company, you will just end up accumulating the original charge along with late fees until it is sent to collections and hits your credit report. Even if you get lucky and they just cancel your service, your lack of payment will still be reported to payment networks and eventually you will be deemed high risk when paying for other things.
You don't get out of contracts just by ghosting on them.