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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

> In the EU, it is a legal requirement to allow your customers the same method, with the same number of steps and complexity, for canceling as for subscribing. So if it takes 10 seconds to fill in a form online to get subscribed, they need to offer the same ease of use for canceling.

> I like this idea of ‘complexity’ as a measure for legislation.

So, if all you needed to do to subscribe was to find an ad on Facebook encouraging you to do so (which was the only place your plan was offered), to cancel, you need to... find another ad on Facebook encouraging you to cancel?

If subscribing required you to visit a physical store to verify ID (pretty common for SIM cards here), it's fine to also require that to cancel the contract, even though there's no point for it?

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No, finding an ad is a random process that you can't control, so 'finding an ad to unsubscribe' would be a complex process.

Instead if subscribing is done through an online form, so should be unsubscribing.

If subscribing requires calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then having a person on the line trying to convince you to _not_ subscribe to this service, then if taking this literally unsubscribing is also allowed to involve calling a phone number and being put on hold for 60 minutes and then have a person try to convince you to not unsubscribe.

I understand your concern, but that's not how the law prohibiting it works. That just says that unfair commercial practices are prohibited, and it is unfair to use aggressive practice, such "any onerous or disproportionate non-contractual barriers imposed by the trader where a consumer wishes to exercise rights under the contract, including rights to terminate a contract or to switch to another product or another trader". https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

So, requiring an ID check for termination, for no other reason than to make it more difficult than necessary, would still fall under this prohibition.

Do you fundamentally disagree with the intent of the regulation, or are you just putting on your software engineer's hat and using your decades-long honed skill of trying to find edge case problems in a set of rules?

You didn't subscribe from the ad itself, it's about whatever procedure you did once the ad redirected you to the subscription page.

Businesses have an incentive to make it easy to subscribe. You shouldn't need to physically move to verify ID, it's not the case where I am.

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