<story><title>Say goodbye to hold music</title><url>https://blog.google/products/pixel/hold-for-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>So why can&amp;#x27;t we simply refuse to pay? We should be able to just cancel the payment and that should be the end of it. They&amp;#x27;ll cancel the service for us when they see we didn&amp;#x27;t pay for it. No user interaction necessary.</text></item><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold:&lt;p&gt;1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user&amp;#x27;s time.
2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.&lt;p&gt;I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they&amp;#x27;re wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.</text></item><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.&lt;p&gt;Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can&amp;#x27;t solve their problem without human intervention - if you don&amp;#x27;t want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).&lt;p&gt;Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dbcurtis</author><text>This seems like a great credit card benefit.  CC&amp;#x27;s offer all sorts of &amp;quot;cash back&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;insured against loss&amp;#x2F;damage&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;miles&amp;quot;, and other things to attract customers.  How about a &amp;quot;no hassle cancellations service&amp;quot;.  How about: &amp;quot;Switch your monthly Comcast bill to pay through us, and cancel any time with one quick call or do it online!&amp;quot;  CC company gets a nice stream of monthly charges out of it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Say goodbye to hold music</title><url>https://blog.google/products/pixel/hold-for-me/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>matheusmoreira</author><text>So why can&amp;#x27;t we simply refuse to pay? We should be able to just cancel the payment and that should be the end of it. They&amp;#x27;ll cancel the service for us when they see we didn&amp;#x27;t pay for it. No user interaction necessary.</text></item><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>The whole point of not allowing you to cancel the account is twofold:&lt;p&gt;1. To make it difficult and frustrating to cancel by wasting the user&amp;#x27;s time.
2. To allow the company the opportunity to haggle the price of the subscription down, convince you not to cancel, or worse, upsell you on other services.&lt;p&gt;I can totally foresee some kind of Google Duplex detection in the future intended specifically to ensure that they&amp;#x27;re wasting the time of a human, not a pile of linear algebra in a Google datacenter. Or perhaps they play legal games with two-party consent states to try and find a way to sue Google into not offering the service.</text></item><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Does anyone else find this to be a pretty hilarious example of a tech arms race? It solves a real problem, assuming it works, but what a strange, rube-goldberg-esque use of technology.&lt;p&gt;Service Provider buys voice recognition software and sets up complex maze of phone tree options to drive users away from the human support agents (even though the users can&amp;#x27;t solve their problem without human intervention - if you don&amp;#x27;t want to pay for enough support agents for your call volume, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it just be simpler to let me cancel my damn account online??).&lt;p&gt;Now user can deploy their own speech synthesis bot to wait on hold, with what is presumably a complex system of AI decisionmaking to be able to navigate the maze and find a human support agent to connect you with.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nextgrid</author><text>In most cases you can. If you&amp;#x27;ve taken reasonable steps to cancel in good faith and the merchant is uncooperative then canceling the payment is the logical next step.&lt;p&gt;They can still send your account to collections or ding your credit record, but you can still refuse to pay; ultimately the only way they legally force you to pay is by going through the courts system but I expect that if you have documentation of your (unsuccessful) efforts to cancel the case should be in your favor (which is why this will never reach the courts in the first place).</text></comment>