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Posted by Walter Roberson on December 19, 2005, 12:27 pm
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>Here goes:...
>Having had the dubious pleasure of being a victim of fraudulent charges
>to my credit card, I decided I no longer want to allow any e-business
>to store my credit card details on their computers in any form. I want
>any trace of my credit card details to be erased as soon as they get
>the CC company's OK for the transaction.
>I wondered if anyone knew what was my legal position on that as the
>credit card owner. For example, are businesses obliged *by law* to
>obliterate any such data once a customer requests them to do so.
That would depend upon the jurisdiction, which you don't state.
And considering you are discussing e-business, you run into the
possibility of international business, in which case you are into the
nebulous area of treaties and international consumer rights.
Cynically speaking, your assumption as a consumer should be that
you have no enforcable international consumer rights. Now if you
were doing all this as a business, then you would have the protection
of WTO, bilaterial agreements, extended NAFTA and so on...
Most people who fail to state jurisdictions when asking about law
are in the USA; your google posting host IP suggests you might be
in Israel. Sorry, I have no information about consumer protection in
Israel.
Some of the clearest consumer-data protection laws around are those
of the EU; the UK laws are relatively easy to find, and Australia and
Canada have enacted similar laws. The USA has much weaker consumer-data
protection laws.
>Also, I have recently come accross two annual-subscription based
>services, whose 'terms and conditions' fineprint revealed that...
>(guess what?...) - the subscription will be automatically renewed at
>the end of the 1 year subscription term. Unless I *then* demand
>otherwise I suppose, but even that is not clearly stated in that text.
>Beside being more-than-slightly disgusted by businesses who try to make
>money in these ways, I am wondering if I can insist in advance that no
>renewal would take place without my prior explicit consent, and more so
>any charges to my credit card, based on some legistlation, rather than
>just my bargaining position as a potential customer.
>What's the legal state of affairs on that?
To play on the famouse phrase in Real Estate:
"The three most important elements in law are Jurisdiction, jurisdiction,
and jurisdiction."
To take local examples:
- In Ontario, Canada, apartment rental leases automatically
renew as "month-to-month" unless you specifically terminate them or sign
a renewal at the proper time
- In Mantioba, Canada (next province over), apartment rental leases
automatically terminate unless you specifically renew them at the
appropriate time -- but you can get out of any residential lease with
2 months notice
Both of these are based upon specific local laws. Do they generalize
to other kinds of contracts in the respective areas? Not necessarily --
in both provinces, your residential phone lines continue month-to-month
until you terminate them, but cellular phone service is usually multi-year
with month-to-month cellular service difficult to find.
On the whole, around -here-, automatic-renewals are legal (and mandated
for household insurance!) provided that the conditions for termination
notification are "reasonable". A court would, for example, be unlikely
to find it "reasonable" that in order to terminate a contract that was
good for a decade at a time, that you had to give notice between 14:07
and 14:11 on one particular day 6 1/2 years in advance.
--
Programming is what happens while you're busy making other plans.
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