via mishtalk:
In a heavily redacted complaint, the FTC complains about nonconsensual Amazon Prime enrollment and Amazon tricking customers.
Image from FTC Amazon Complaint.
The complaint is ridiculously redacted. The whole thing should be public. Paragraphs 7 and 8, not redacted, gets to the heart of the matter.
For years, Amazon also knowingly complicated the cancellation process for Prime subscribers who sought to end their membership. Under significant pressure from the Commission—and aware that its practices are legally indefensible—Amazon substantially revamped its Prime cancellation process for at least some subscribers shortly before the filing of this Complaint. However, prior to that time, the primary purpose of the Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but rather to thwart them. Fittingly, Amazon named that process “Iliad,” which refers to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. Amazon designed the Iliad cancellation process (“Iliad Flow”) to be labyrinthine, and Amazon and its leadership—including Lindsay, Grandinetti, and Ghani—slowed or rejected user experience changes that would have made Iliad simpler for consumers because those changes
adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line.As with Nonconsensual Enrollment, the Iliad Flow’s complexity resulted from Amazon’s use of dark patterns—manipulative design elements that trick users into making decisions they would not otherwise have made.