Cancelling for XboxLive has always been a pain (at least until 5 years ago, I don't know now): they make it easy to subscribe online and pay with a credit card, but cancelling forces you to look for a phone number buried in help pages and call a hotline that's only open during business hours or something. Pure dark pattern.

I cancelled mine a few months ago, and could do it through Microsoft's web site. It was a pain to find the option though.

The best way to handle Xbox payments is to buy pre-paid codes in the store and use them (assuming that's an option where you live).

This kind of stuff should be illegal. In GDPR, they put a clause that rescinding consent must be as easy as granting it, precisely because of that.

(Not that I've ever seen a site on which there was an obvious way to bring the consent popup back up after it was closed, but hopefully one day data protection authorities will unclog their pipes and the fines will start flying.)

As of 2018, it is illegal in California:

https://www.cnet.com/news/companies-must-let-customers-cance...

I cancelled through their website around 6 years ago. I didn't find it particularly hard, and it definitely didn't require a phone call, but maybe I just got lucky by randomly happening across the correct page.

How does this even happen? I'm just curious here. Don't you check your bills? I find it hard to imagine I would miss a recurring payment on my credit card receipt.

There are people out there who make enough money that they don't bother with an item-by-item check of each charge. I can't blame them. Being that careful is a huge cognitive load that scales with the number of charges even if it comes back to bite them when times aren't so good.

Now that I think of it, in the US people probably pay everything with a credit card? That would definitely be a longer list of expenses to check. In Europe the default is to use debit for physical card transactions, and credit much more rarely mostly for subscriptions and online purchases.

Debit cards are pretty popular in the US. Cash is used more than in Europe, partly because about 20% of the country doesn't have a bank account, partly because a significant number of who do still prefer using cash.

Personally, I use cash for day-to-day transactions, credit if I want the third-party record or it is a larger transaction. I never use debit because the protections are stacked against the user, and CC cash back schemes refund a portion of the credit card cartel tax. So not using it except at the bank ATM means I don't have to worry about the number being abused, unless my bank's ATMs are compromised.

my current bank app (in europe) just sends me a push message on any transactions made in my name. and the previous bank had a sms service for the same

not much cognitive load or anything (i disabled sound for these and just check em once a day) and very hard to miss any transactions you didn’t really authorize

My expenses are 30% of my income and I use a credit card for everything. Bank automatic deduction at the end of the month. I have a ballpark expenses figure I pay monthly. If I don't see a >10% increase in spending, I don't bother to check each item.