It's easy for things to get hidden, especially when changes in already small amounts of money. I'm a bit embarrassed that this happened to me once. My spotify student account ended and it got switched over to premium automatically. Probably got an email somewhere but they also send spam so it likely got misread or filtered. On the bank statement, which it was a payment I was expecting, just not the right amount and it occurs at a similar time of the month as a bunch of other bills.
I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd actually suggest a legal route is because there's many companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.
If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive practices, full stop.
While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending spam from the same accounts they send important information. This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very controversial take.
I think there is a rather easy way that we could solve this in a fairly robust way. It could be a legal requirement that when pricing on reoccurring subscription transactions changes that the user has to log in and confirm the change. The reason I'd actually suggest a legal route is because there's many companies that are highly incentivized to create dark patterns that will enroll people in subscriptions at a low or zero rate and then automatically transfer them to higher or paid accounts. It can happen to the best of us, but I'm more concerned with the not best of us. Personally I'm not a fan of a system that allows the easy extraction of money from people who are not as technically literate (i.e. most people). And I really don't think it is a good system to allow legitimate businesses to employ the same tactics as spammers.
If you read the article you'll find that the cases they talk about are specifically mentioning people who signed up for one thing but got a different thing instead. These are deceptive practices, full stop.
While we're at it, I'd love it if companies could stop sending spam from the same accounts they send important information. This dark pattern successfully teaches people to ignore any incoming email to them and explicitly allows this shit to happen. If contracts change, they should simply require a confirmation of that change. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, but this sounds like a very reasonable and not very controversial take.