Yet another Hacker News

NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect

142 points gregsadetsky 2 hours ago 52 comments

apparent 1 hour ago | parent

> A person making an automatic renewal or continuous service offer to a consumer must provide the consumer with the option to cancel at any time using a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent and that is through the same medium that the consumer used to provide consent

So if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.

Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.

Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.

simpaticoder 1 hour ago | parent

There's a funny thing when people don't like something where they can intentionally misunderstand it or impart artificial complexity onto it painting a picture like the rule is hard to comply with. I suppose to variation of a straw man argument. I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web. If you can sign up through the phone you should be able to cancel through the phone. Companies knowingly an intentionally make it harder to cancel than to sign up for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by the consumer. This is a very good law and it should be adopted everywhere.

Vortigaunt 1 hour ago | parent

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

cwillu 1 hour ago | parent

And if you didn't have to click through a bunch of offers to subscribe, you shouldn't have to to cancel.

notimetorelax 1 hour ago | parent

I think the point of the law is - the same medium. If you signed up online, you should be able to cancel subscription also online.

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect that something as simple as 2-3 emails prior to renewal, each with a one-click (no auth needed) clear, unobscured "unsubscribe" button would be sufficient.

dcrazy 55 minutes ago | parent

Maybe those people who’ve spent so much time A/B testing where to put the signup buttons can use those skills to figure out where to put the cancel buttons so that they are as easy to find.

whycome 29 minutes ago | parent

Worse. We are going to see signup flows that are initially simple but take the user through several steps to do it but not in a way to make them abandon the process.

expedition32 53 minutes ago | parent

In my country the rule is "unsubscribe the same way you subscribed". So no bullshit with having to write a literal physical letter through the mail (yes really this happened) or having to call a callcenter in India and having to explain why you want to your stop subscription.

wat10000 45 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think anyone will have trouble figuring out a good way to comply with this. It’s not clear exactly where the line is, so just don’t go near it. Make it easy to cancel, job done. If a company wants to push the boundaries by making it as difficult to cancel as the rule allows, they’re running the risk of being on the wrong side of the line and suffering the consequences, and that’s their choice.

The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.

rlpb 35 minutes ago | parent

> ...and possibly declining various offers to stay

Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.

dfxm12 21 minutes ago | parent

But where is the line exactly?

This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.

Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform

Why not?

Some examples would be helpful

The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.

pixl97 15 minutes ago | parent

Ya, a reasonable interpretation would likely mean that where you sign in and manage your accounts and payments you have the means to discontinue further service. Anyone trying to push these boundaries will likley find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

happyopossum 8 minutes ago | parent

> This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.

So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.

That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.

walt_grata 15 minutes ago | parent

Heres what you should do to be safe. On the user's settings/profile/whatever user page you have, add a cancel button. When the user clicks it say "are you sure? Yes/no". If the user clicks yes, cancel the account.

No extra hoops at all.

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago | parent

Previous discussion on the announcement:

New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48863464

cyberclimb 1 hour ago | parent

You can only submit my snail mail or Fax.

So close yet so far

robertlane0 26 minutes ago | parent

There's a big blue button on the homepage that says "File a complaint" - I presume that goes through the web.

blakeashleyjr 51 minutes ago | parent

While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....

woodruffw 47 minutes ago | parent

As far as added complexity goes, a rule for a city the size of NYC doesn’t seem like that far of a bridge to cross.

dominotw 46 minutes ago | parent

its hard being a dick

joshuat 46 minutes ago | parent

To avoid the overhead, we could simply adopt pro-consumer practices across the board? Easier than segmenting users and deciding which cancellation mechanisms are available to them based on region.

wat10000 43 minutes ago | parent

It’s an easy rule to comply with and nothing stops you from complying with it everywhere.

We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.

mananaysiempre 42 minutes ago | parent

Alternatively, let people cancel easily everywhere. If you think it’s worth the extra revenue to geofence easy cancellations, then—well, you do you, but you are making a business judgment that the additional development cost is justified. This is different from VAT/sales tax etc., where it is in fact impossible to comply everywhere without discriminating by jurisdiction.

pixl97 11 minutes ago | parent

Worse by following NYC laws and putting everyone else in a different harder to get away from bucket you may be setting yourself up for future legal problems. You now have a chain of documentation on your evil practices rather than them just being a norm you may have verbally agreed on before.

Projectiboga 38 minutes ago | parent

Nothing from stopping them from making it this easy to cancel for everyone. We all see cookie banners due to the EU's rules.

romanovcode 19 minutes ago | parent

EU is pushing browser settings instead of cookie banners. Maybe after 10+ years of trial and error consumers will actually get something viable.

Then again, the lobbying and resistance from Chrome must be unreal because it would be pretty huge blow for them to enable such setting.

georgemcbay 36 minutes ago | parent

> While I think this is a good idea, we already have so many different regions to comply with, now we're adding cities....

Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.

It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".

The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.

Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have hundreds of regional carve-outs.

Analemma_ 29 minutes ago | parent

You can't seriously think this makes you sound like a sympathetic party, right? "Oh no, we have to maintain two codepaths now: the pro-social one for places with functional governments, and the slimy anti-consumer fuck-you one for everywhere else. Won't anyone think of our plight?"

artursapek 20 minutes ago | parent

just remember, any amount of churn rate reduction your dark patterns earn you will be paid for many times over in the afterlife

fg137 14 minutes ago | parent

cvs.com doesn't allow me to delete my account unless I provide an address in certain states.

So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.

Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.

the_gipsy 46 minutes ago | parent

When are NY and California going to secede and join the EU?

woodruffw 42 minutes ago | parent

It seems like a good rule, and I am eager to see what NYC’s enforcement is going to look like. I have historically been disappointed (as a life-long resident) by the discontinuity between the city’s eagerness to legislate and its recalcitrance around enforcement, particularly when public interest in any given topic fades.

(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)

1986 25 minutes ago | parent

NYPD parking on sidewalks is more of a "who watches the watchmen" problem unfortunately.

__float 18 minutes ago | parent

Corruption is part of the job description, for the NYPD.

woodruffw 12 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't have to be! Parking enforcement wasn't always within the NYPD's remit. Until 1996, NYCDOT was responsible for parking enforcement.

__float 19 minutes ago | parent

I've also been disappointed by the lack of enforcement, and it's not necessarily for violations with little harm.

Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.

ryandrake 14 minutes ago | parent

Not a NYC-only problem though. There are tons of federal, state, and local laws that go under-enforced or unenforced. Legislators love the performance art of writing these kinds of popular laws, but law enforcement often doesn't care enough to enforce most of them. In this case, the website says the penalty is "starting at $525" which is basically nothing to a corporation, and nothing to the police/government. So you can file a complaint but it will probably go to /dev/null. After a year of this people will give up on even filing complaints.

What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.

woodruffw 7 minutes ago | parent

Naturally. I mean only that NYC is an instance of this.

(It's worth noting that the city does sometimes enforce new regulations well, and in a way that the public is aware of. For example, businesses in the city are required to accept hard cash as payment, and the penalties for not doing so can be significant. Friends have told me that the city is very proactive about responding to those complaints. Anecdotally, the city has also become much better about responding to some forms of illegal parking and idling over the past few years. It certainly helps when the incentives are aligned, i.e. the cost of the enforcement program is supported by the fines collected.)

ghm2180 37 minutes ago | parent

One abstract idea is to convert every digital event into a hook. The hook then goes into a local LLM that has a rule to figure out what to do with it. I use DDG or mozilla email aliases as much as I can. All my emails go to a local email client and for the non-spam classified mails I have a few rules(**) I am toying with right now:

1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.

2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.

All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.

None of this is rocket science.

**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.

artursapek 23 minutes ago | parent

New York Times in shambles over this one

ourmandave 17 minutes ago | parent

Why not the State of NY instead of just the city?

IL has had click-to-cancel since 2022. (Actually 2000, but updated in 2022, with continuous amendments being put forward all the time.)

SpicyLemonZest 8 minutes ago | parent

The rule is mostly, although not entirely, a restatement of existing New York State law requiring cancellation to be easy (https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/GBS/527-A).

Anonboxis 10 minutes ago | parent

Look out for the "Digital Fairness Act", which will be tabled by the European Commission in November. It is expected to include the same "Click to Cancel" principle continent-wide.

Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.

snowpid 7 minutes ago | parent

According to https://digitalfairnessact.com/what-is-the-digital-fairness-... fucking cookie banners will be a lot better. OMG

_false 8 minutes ago | parent

Nine states (incl. CA) already require click to cancel. This is largely a non-event