Is there a law gainst this?

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")

I think that, you think that, but what chance TNP accepting that? ;-)

Tim

I havent read all the posts but the one time I used Amazon I had unkowingly signed for prime, I phoned and they cancelled it and reimbursed my payment.

Anythin I now do online eg car insurance, travel insurance etc I ask 2 questions:

1. is the call recorded and (I then take date time & name)
2. Is it auto renewal (I then ask for it not to be auto renewed)

If it were just discounted/free delivery then that could be true. If however you want/value some of the other bundled bits (TV/Music/eBooks etc) then the package as a whole can be a bit more attractive IMHO.

The video offering is crap. Everything I wanted to see is extra money.

And the comment about "aimed at the US" was from a friend in the US, so I guess he knows what he's talking about.

I've managed rather well without ever using Amazon.

It's the "yes I'd like free delivery" (and a free trial of Prime) that most likely catches people.

No. Happened to me too - and I tried to be extra careful the second time.

I use my daughters prime account. It pays well if you choose the no rush delivery and you want kindle books as you get a pound back for each book. They actually pay me to use prime ATM as the wife reads lots of books. They would still be paying me if I paid the full £70 myself.

I find it has its moments. The video offering is probably not good enough as a standalone offering for the price - but ok as an "extra" alongside the other bits. Some of their original series have been worth watching. ("Halt and Catch Fire" being a good example)

I am not in the US so can't comment on their version of it. I was just going on my experience of the UK version.

I use Amazon Prime in both the US and the UK. I was given 4 years free US Prime, and find the video, music, and delivery benefits very useful. In the UK, I get Prime a month or so at a time, when I know I'll be ordering major amounts of stuff. The UK video streaming is of little use to me (except when travelling) as broadband service in my part of the north of Scotland is truly pitiful - as is delivery service. Prime delivery means I may get shipments in a week or so, rather than a month or so.

They do now have 100 million customers. I must have made a mistake once and I did then ring them to cancel. I find some things that Amazon sells are reasonably priced, but I have to be careful as that is not always the case.

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 bastard'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.

Absolutely useless and dearer than the many alternatives.

Have you really, or does that depend on just how your 'agreement' was obtained?

They caught me as well so I set a reminder in Google Calendar to cancel it before the renewal date.

I do the same with any 'free for a period of time' trials I may try

That's what I do. To be fair, last time I looked Amazon offer to notify you before the end of the trial.

I thought I'd accidentally signed myself up recently; but it turns out that the missus had accidentally done it, and since it regards us as a family, it was saying 'Your Prime' this and that everywhere; which was really confusing, since I also could see no option to remove it. Only when we went into the missus' account were we able to completely remove it for both of us. Bloody annoying.