Companies have made it increasingly easy to sign up for services and to start a subscription. For mobile devices, if you’re already signed into your Apple or Google account, you can subscribe to a service in just a few seconds without having to fill up long forms and what not. However, canceling that subscription is a different story.While not impossible, finding how to cancel your subscription is noticeably harder compared to signing up for it, and this is something that US lawmakers want to fix. This is why a group of bipartisan lawmakers that include Senators Brian Schatz, John Thune, Raphael Warnock, and John Kennedy have introduced what they are calling the Unsubscribe Act.
This would make it so that once a free trial to a service is over, customers will find it easier to cancel their subscriptions instead of being charged because they couldn’t find out how to cancel their subscriptions in time. This would involve making it so that companies cannot automatically transfer customers over to a contract longer than a single month. It would also require that companies provide customers with a clear notice when their free trial is about to expire.
According to Senator Schatz, “When people sign up for a free trial, they shouldn’t have to jump through hoops just to cancel their subscription before being charged.”