The US Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon, accusing it of duping customers into signing up for its Prime service without their consent while making it more complicated to undo their subscriptions
“Amazon tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money,” said Lina Khan, FTC chair, in a statement regarding the redacted complaint, which was filed on Wednesday.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The FTC said in its complaint that Amazon had used “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions,” which offer benefits such as free shipping.
It also alleged that while the “nonconsensual enrolment” issue was “well known” within Amazon, the company and its leadership “slowed, avoided, and even undid user experience changes that they knew would reduce nonconsensual enrolment because those changes would also negatively affect Amazon’s bottom line”, according to the complaint.
Amazon had “substantially revamped” the Prime cancellation process for some users ahead of the lawsuit, the FTC said. But before it did so, consumers had to “navigate a four-page, six-click, 15-option cancellation process”, according to the complaint, while signing up for Prime required just one or two clicks.
The main goal of the procedure — which Amazon called “Iliad” after Homer’s epic on the Trojan war — was to “thwart” subscribers, the regulator alleged.
Khan and other antitrust regulators in Washington have targeted Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Meta and Google as they crack down on what they have described as anti-competitive or anti-consumer business practices.
It is the second FTC challenge against Amazon in as many months. The company in May agreed to pay $25mn to settle a lawsuit brought by the FTC and the US Department of Justice charging Amazon with violating children’s privacy laws. The regulators accused Amazon of storing children’s recordings captured by its Alexa voice assistant indefinitely and of “undermining” parents’ deletion requests. Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC’s claims.
In the Prime case, the FTC is seeking monetary penalties as well as injunctive relief to stop it from continuing to harm customers.
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