The FTC sued Amazon on Wednesday, accusing the tech and retail giant of deceiving customers into subscribing to Amazon Prime, then convoluting the process to cancel their subscriptions.
The Federal Tradeon Wednesday, accusing the tech and retail giant of deceiving customers into subscribing to Amazon Prime, then convoluting the process to cancel their subscriptions.
“For years, Defendant Amazon.com, Inc. has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in its Amazon Prime service,” theand filed in the U.S. District Court’s Western District of Washington. “Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as “dark patterns” to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions.
Stating that “the primary goal of Prime is increasing subscriber numbers,” the FTC claimed that those dark patterns from Amazon made it harder for customers to make purchases on the site without also getting a Prime subscription, and that when buying a product, it’s easier to find buttons to subscribe to Prime than to decline the subscription offers and finish a purchase.
The FTC also claimed Amazon made it difficult to cancel a subscription. The FTC alleged in the suit that Amazon internally called its cancellation process “Iliad,” which the agency said referred to the literary classic about “the long, arduous Trojan War.” The FTC described cancellations as a “four-page, six-click, 15-option process.
“The primary purpose of the Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but rather to thwart them,” the FTC said.
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