Deceptive Patterns
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Canary: Difficult to cancel premium service

Author
Dark Patterns Tip Line
Date
31 Oct 2022

“To reproduce this you will have to have a premium subscription. * Scroll to the bottom to “Manage” premium service. * That takes you to a pricing page and in a small text link “Cancel Premium Service” * Clicking on that will take you to your first confirmation page detailing the feature you are going to lose. Click remove this feature. * Takes you to another page that asks why you’re canceling. Click on the reason such as “Premium is too expensive” * Takes you to yet another page that says “Maybe we can help” with a link to their help center and another plain text link “Continue to cancel” * The final page tells you to call a telephone number to cancel premium service.”

Canary was reported to the Deceptive Design Tip Line over the difficulty of cancelling its premium service. According to the report, the cancellation path runs through a long sequence of pages, beginning with a “Manage” option that leads to a pricing page bearing only a small “Cancel Premium Service” text link. Successive pages then detail the features being lost, ask why the user is cancelling, offer help-centre links with a plain-text “Continue to cancel” link, and finally present a telephone number that must be called to complete the cancellation.