Whether you’re subscribing to a streaming service or a gym chain, canceling that subscription can sometimes be difficult to do. There are plenty of write-ups online dedicated to the best way to cancel something; and the issue has come up everywhere from Reddit forums to SNL sketches. Sometimes the stakes get higher, though, with a state or federal agency stepping in.
That brings us to this week, when the Federal Trade Commission announced that it was a filing a lawsuit against Uber for a host of issues, including “[making] it difficult for users to cancel the [Uber One subscription service] despite its ‘cancel anytime’ promises.”
In the FTC’s legal filing against ride-hailing service, it argues that “[d]efendants have failed to provide a simple method to cancel Uber One, employing a series of obstacles that compound to deter and prevent consumers from stopping recurring charges.”
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Self-driving cars are getting more prominentThe FTC’s announcement of the lawsuit cited three main points of contention. The first is that Uber’s advertisement of Uber One did not lead to the savings that it promised customers. The second involves Uber charging subscribers earlier than they had pledged to. The third involves the overall difficulty level of canceling one’s subscription. “Users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel,” the agency noted.
Uber disagreed with the agency’s interpretation of some of these events, as Ian Carlos Campbell reported at Engadget.
In bringing this lawsuit, the FTC cited two laws that it believes Uber’s policies violated: the FTC Act and the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). The latter became law in 2010 and was designed to protect consumers from deceptive sales tactics online.
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