On Sun, 22 Apr 2018 20:47:31 +0100, John Rumm wrote:

On 22/04/2018 09:16, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Amazon signed me up without my say so for 'Prime' and if I had not
taken prompt action it would have cost me £75 a year.


They probably signed you up with your agreement, but you just missed
what you were agreeing to (because they make it very easy to do
"accidentally")

IIRC, this web gui trick is named "Dark Patterns" (or something like).
It's where the buttons they want you to click on are all in nice friendly
and inviting colours (usually large green buttons with duplicates
scattered about the web page) and the ones they'd rather you didn't
select are shown in grey, the default for a de-activated option, further
aggravating this obfuscation of function by leading you through more
hoops where there are tiny preselected tick boxes with even tinier ticks,
along with more empty tick boxes that require a tick to avoid unwanted
'freebies' for options no one in their right mind would even consider
(assuming they were in their right mind by then).

Add to this, the trick of randomising the order and the sense by which a
commonly repeated set of options are presented to catch out those who've
seen it all before and know reflexively which boxes to check and which to
leave alone. Believe me, these web sites represent the efforts of a high
pressure salesman on a mission using every sneaky trick in the book just
a gnat's dick away from being on the wrong side of the law.

The only reason you even have a 'sane choice' at all at the end of this
process is purely to avoid prosecution for inflicting crapware, spyware
and malware onto their users' computers by being able to claim, hand on
heart, that user options to avoid such selections do actually exist on
their website pages and are fully functional.

But for the fear of serving time in prison, there'd be no opt outs at
all for even the savviest of user to choose, leaving the savvy user to
navigate away from the site before ever giving out any personal details,
followed by a cookie clean-up session before surfing for alternative
sources of whatever free goods or services they were trying to track down
which they know will almost certainly fail when that adage, TANSTAAFL
finally hits home yet again.

As to the question posed in the op, yes there are laws but the scummy
*******'s know just how close they can skate to the edge of legality to
cajole their visitors into signing up for an over-priced service or an
unwanted download of spyware and worse.

The process of using "Dark Patterns" should be banned outright but it
takes time for the legislation to catch up with the ever evolving digital
landscape. You just have to be ultra careful when using these websites
and never Ass/U/ME that you're protected in law against making bad
choices when buying goods or services on line.

--
Johnny B Good