Anecdotally, it took ten minutes to unsusbscribe this morning (going through an online chat service rather than calling them), which is much longer than it should take, but worth it. It may be worse now due to this incident.
I think it's beyond the pale that they require you to chat with a sales representative to cancel a subscription. To reiterate, the only reason a company would do this is because they know it will suppress the number of people successfully unsubscribing. The NYTs is using the same sort of strategy commercial gyms are infamous for, albeit in a less extreme form.
Contrast it with Netflix's model of unsubscription, which you can do at any time with a single click. They've even gone as far as automatically cancelling inactive accounts. Netflix is obviously a company with confidence in their own product, so they don't resort to any dark patterns in their unsubscription process like the NYTs does.
I’ve developed a habit of canceling things via email. It tends to get a fast response. Any run around is dealt with easily by keeping responses short. And if they charge my credit card again I’ve got a record of exactly when I contacted them so I can pretty easily issue a chargeback. It can also be helpful to make it clear that if they ever want my business in the future they ought to be showing me good service now by canceling without wasting my time.
Netflix is obsessed with data. Easy cancellation lets them define a much more accurate loss function for the AI they eventually want to run their whole business for them.
Strongly agree. My original plan on unsubscribing was to come back if they blinked on SlateStarCodex (everyone makes mistakes), but after being made to jump through these extra hoops, I'm through with this company.
I got through their virtual agent and reached a human agent who decided to transfer me once she got to know I'm asking for cancellation. I got this response "Please wait one moment while I transfer you to an account specialist." Now I'm just waiting after another automated response "Sorry our wait times are longer than expected. Thank you for your patience." This really sucks.
As others have said, it actually wasn't a law that was put in place -- it's court-created.
Qualified Immunity says that an officer can't be sued for violating civil rights (Section 1983) unless it was clear at the time of the action that it was in violation of the law. It has nothing to do with criminal liability in the event the officer commits a crime; it's a restriction on the civil side.
There is a grain of good policy here, becuase if there is a lawsuit which plantiff is inevitably going to lose, having a clear rule that stops the lawsuit before discovery saves serious time and money.
There are two independent problems with it, though:
1. A judge who just doesn't like 1983 lawsuits can always find a trivial manner to distinguish the case from existing precedent; e.g. distinctions-without-differences like "the court has ruled you can't detain someone for 72 hours without access to water but the plantiff was only detained for 70."
2. There is no incentive for anyone to be the first mover to file a lawsuit against any particular practice since the first mover will lose on qualified immunity grounds.
Good point -- appellate courts have been known to make rulings of the effect "this govt employee gets qualified immunity, but future govt employees are put on notice," but this is far from every case.
The issue is that they are “put on notice” for extremely precise things and it can usually be argued that technically the new case is very slightly different to the old case and so qualified immunity applies again.
