Dark patterns are the bane of my existence.

My job has them for when people try to cancel services and I've been fighting like hell to get rid of them. But business is worried if people can cancel super easy, they'll do it. It's like they forget we have an actual quality product that people want to have. It ends up looking like an abusive relationship when a customer tries to leave. It takes one click to add service, but it takes a phone call and a transfer and a sales pitch, and then finally a scheduled deactivation at the start of your next bill cycle because God forbid we give you some money back.

I'm the exact type of customer who avoids businesses that do shit like this. And I'm not alone. If you make it 10 times harder to drop a service than you do to add a service, you should go fuck yourself. Gym memberships, monthly subscriptions, recurring monthly shipments with auto billing. Never sign up to this stuff without knowing what you need to do to deactivate. Or sign up with a preloaded visa gift card and a 10 minute email so you can just shut everything off when you leave and they can keep their bullshit account.

If a website has a German version, try using that. By law every web page here must have an (pretty much) directly findable button to cancel your account. Even when you are logged out. It normally is positioned in the footer of the page. Search for "kündigen" on the page and fill in the form.

Note that not all pages still do this. But normally even just threatening to sue should add it, as they really wouldn't be able to go against this in court. Tho crunchyroll does not seem to have this. Maybe I should create an account and do some trolling.

Or just use GDPR and write a cancellation mail. I am pretty sure in most countries they need to accept it. Do not forget to add a deadline of a few business days.

Open their t&c, tos, privacy, or legal policy.
Ctrl+F @
Send email GDPR right to delete.

5 min of work.

If they reject, forward rejection to your DPO and request them to help.

Never had issue with anyone.

Ironically Crunchyroll actually started off as a illegal for profit pirated-video site

I really wish government would crack down on this. Every regulatory entity should be on this because it’s nearly impossible to actually get your data deleted. Let alone even send a request without hurdle or hassle.

And everyone is like ya no this is all fine privacy buy iPhone… *flips water bottle

My piracy website has literally a link that when you click it you purge your account and its prohibited to put that link in the chat...

And yes there are accounts but they are just for keeping track and the chat + some other social features

Btw just send Crunchy roll a GDPR data removal request. They are legally required to remove all your data then.

Can't you just put a stop payment on it and watch it implode?

Their account deletion policy aside, Crunchyroll is like one of the last remaining bastions of solid streaming for a very reasonable price that hasn't increased in many years.

There's plenty of streaming services to cancel and switch to piracy on legitimately, I don't personally believe Crunchyroll to be one of them.

Partly cause I'm too lazy to go find my wallet and party because of these things I use virtual cards like privacy.com. I did for crunchy roll and I'm pretty sure Icanceled by killing the card

Wait what happened with crunchy roll that people are deleting accounts? I saw the thing about the class action lawsuit but that's all I know.

Sail!

(We need some piracy memes with this)

Some piracy sites do have accounts, just mostly small-scale.

Most of this complaint really doesn't have to do with piracy...I mean a lot of account sites don't even have anything to pirate.

Private trackers are also quite easy to delete accounts in anyways

Even though I agree that the piracy-route is easier and more comfortable, it's good that account deletion isn't as straightforward as a single button on the account page, without further verification. I certainly wouldn't like to lose my Steam library just because my Steam account details were leaked once. A second and maybe even third separate step being necessary is smart for anything that involves a substantial amount of money.

Is that fucking DOTA in the top image?

🤷 What if you just used a burner card or PayPal?

So where is the maze for the pirate ship?