Nothing I like better than a big dose of frustration to start up the morning…
Glen Greenwald may be a fine and brave independent reporter, but he’s an unethical one, as I have pointed out here before. I am apparently unable to get out from his clutches, or at least from the con artists he hangs out with. As I wrote about earlier this year, I subscribed to Greewald’s substack, which he stopped contributing to because of some personal matters, but I was still charged for the subscription. (I also have had to endure some personal setbacks this year, but I have managed to fulfill my obligations to Ethics Alarms readers nonetheless, none of whom have paid me for subscriptions. Cry me a river, Glenn.) Then he announced that he was leaving Substack.
On December 10 of 2023, I received a “friendly reminder” from Glenn that my subscription to his new platform would renew in six days. I had never subscribed to the new platform, as indeed I wouldn’t trust Greenwald with another subscription if it cost me only ten cents. I had bigger metaphorical fish to fry a year ago, and never took the time to figure out what the hell was going on, but apparently my subscription renewed.
I have not heard a peep from Greenwald since that message last year, but today I received the same “friendly reminder” as you can see above. The email was “no-reply.” Nowhere was there a link to cancel the subscription, which I had never agreed to any way.
Clicking on the link for the site took me to this mess. There is no customer service line. I read through the entire terms of agreement to learn that I could cancel a subscription by going to “settings.” I cannot find “settings.” I searched for it using the site’s search function and got nothing. I used the “Find in page” function on my browser: still nothing. Given that I am frequently confused by user-unfriendly website, I will concede that I may be missing something, but when an organization makes it this difficult to cancel a subscription one didn’t make and gets nothing from while apparently paying for it, the rebuttable presumption is that the obstacles to cancelling are intentional.
This is an unethical site and every “creator” who uses it, including Glenn Greenwald, is complicit in its scam. Now, as I did with Experian (which makes it impossible to cancel a subscription you have agreed to), I have to track down the payment I never authorized and tell my bank to cancel the charge.
Screw Greenwald, screw Locals, screw them all. I don’t have time for this.
Nobody does.
Ethics Alarms 
https://support.locals.com/en/article/how-do-i-cancel-my-subscription-1wlywyd/
”At the Manage Support page, click cancel to end your subscription (you will still have supporter access until the end of your billing cycle). If you cancel an annual subscription, then you will still have supporter access for the year but the subscription will not auto-renew when it expires (you would need to re-subscribe to keep having supporter access after it expires).”
Hope this works for you and I am sorry he hasn’t posted anything but has gotten paid for it. I am in the wrong business, apparently because I don’t get paid for nothing.
Good job finding that. Given what you provided, I was able to track it down from the home page, but it is certainly not obvious.
I really prefer for sites to put an ‘About us’ or Help or FAQ link at the top of their home page. We shouldn’t need to go rummaging around in the cellar to find things.
I also noticed that some of the pages have a ‘Last updated on xxxx’ line that uses non-U.S. dating conventions, e.g. 15/6/2022. I wonder if that has any relevance.
Gee, I can’t. All the articles send me to pages telling me how to cancel, but the actual link to a page where I CAN cancel is yet to appear.
Do you actually have an account on locals.com? My impression is that unsubscribing would require you to log in first.
Of course, if you don’t have an account there how can you have a subscription on the site?
I wish you luck. I don’t think I’m going to set up an account with them just to chase this goose.
Maybe there is someone within the commentariat who already has an account?
If I have an account it’s Greenwald’s fault, because I never heard of it before the renewal notice I got last year.
I went into the “FAQ” page and put ‘cancel subscription’. I am a fan of online shopping (I’m 90 miles from the nearest Wal-mart) and have used many subscription services over the years. They rarely make it easy, but I’ve found typically you can find the answer in the FAQ section or under settings or profile under payment. Look for unsubscribe or cancel.
If it was my account, I would go into profile/payment and delete my card. It is possible this is an automatic email based on anyone who has ever viewed one of his articles on this site, for free or not, and there isn’t a payment for it. I think this is likely since you don’t think there’s been a payment made.
Or when Greenwald transferred to this site, whatever he used to do that just sent a list of substack subscribers to the new place, and these emails generate from that list. In which case, there probably has never been a charge for it since he left substack.
I think I would just monitor your credit cards and see if anything actually happens.
That’s what I’m going to have to do, clearly.
In regards to Locals, what differentiates unethical behavior from incompetence? It is not unusual for software developers to use what amounts to professional beta testers, so what is obvious/easy for them is not obvious or easy for customers.
My question really revolves around intent since the end state is similar.
Overall, what I suspect is a “trap” for the lack of a better description that is all too common. Amazon started doing the same thing years ago… give people the runaround and make it difficult. I would be willing to bet that it was determined that a certain percentage of people would get frustrated and quit pursuing a resolution. In a similar fashion, Locals are doing the same thing (maybe knowingly, maybe not). This is not unlike other subscription services over the years such as records by mail. They rely, in part, on people getting frustrated and/or forgetting and just paying for their services. Like social engineers, it is a game of low percentages. They only need a few people to keep paying to make it worthwhile.
Re: “unethical” vs. “incompetent”…
I would say (and I suspect Jack would tend to agree) that incompetence *is* unethical.
“I do not agree. There are many things I am incompetent at. For instance, I cannot play the violin. I would be unethical the moment I claim I can play the violin, and even more so if my best friend is getting married and I promise to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March on the violin.
And your a lawyer, too. What a frustrating life… Just wait for user interface design to be the next racist boogyman. Hope and change!
I do greatly appreciate EA, and the occasional humorous typo.
From a general practices standpoint, as a last resort to an auto-renewal (if there really is one) you can ask that credit card issuer to cancel your existing card and send you a new one with a different account number. Of course, if you have other renewals on that card you’ll have to tie the new card number to those, or wait until you get a notice that your auto payment failed & reset it then.
If you dislike auto renewals, you can generally get a virtual (“one-time use”) number for those types of things. One or more of your card issuers should have that option, although it may be a bit tricky to use.
This brought up an “incompetence” ethics issue I experienced. My father died several years before my mother. When I was settling her estate, I found monthly auto-payments for some type of insurance policy my father had (maybe long-term care, or something of the sort) that had continued to be paid out of one checking account. There were about 70-80 payments of around $80 each. That’s not the incompetence issue (except maybe for my mother not checking her accounts regularly)…the company wasn’t notified of his death, and they quickly agreed to refund the payments with a little paperwork.
The incompetence is that the refund arrived in the form of 80 individual checks mailed with an included explanation letter in 80 individual envelopes, instead of just one check, one envelope, and one letter. I had to endorse each check, and fill out multiple deposit slips to get them all into the estate account.
Last time I deposited a lot of checks, the bank teller was able to use a calculator to sum the checks onto a single deposit slip, and stamped them all “For Deposit Only”.
Incompetence is so widespread these days that mentioning that ‘the bank teller was able to use a calculator’ is worthwhile