Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel

Re:Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to c... by _Algernon_ on Friday January 19, 2024 @07:16PM (#39063227)

Personal responsibility only works if parties are roughly equal in terms if power. This is not the case in corporation-consumer relationships. Corporations can employ hundreds or thousands of people whose sole goal is to employ the forefront of scientific psychological knowledge to design dark patterns to make end users not cancel their subscriptions.

I hope you wouldn't ask a person who gets harassed by their boss to take personal responsibility, and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are.

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Re:Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to c... by robertlagrant on Friday January 19, 2024 @07:36PM (#39063367)

> and such a relationship is a lot less asymmetric in terms of power balance than corporation-consumer relationships are

For these subscriptions, the customer holds not just equal power, but all the power. Clicking unsubscribe really isn't very difficult. If corporations held any power, some of them wouldn't try dark patterns.

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Re:Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to c... by _heimdall on Saturday January 20, 2024 @08:05AM (#39067234)

If personal responsibility requires a roughly even power balance, does that mean we have almost no personal responsibility today?

Between large corporations and large governments, most areas of our daily life are impacted in some way. I prefer to think that I can take personal responsibility in spite of an authority attempting to take that away from me "for my own good."

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