Give me a break.

Which commercial on television blasts you with "THIS COSTS $XX!!!!" before even showing you the product?

I think you already saw one of the images of the offers in question above. How much more clear do they have to make it than the text above the button that says, "You authorize us to transfer your credit card information" or the text on the button saying, "Yes, sign me up." Or the image on the side saying, "Free for 30 days $12 a month thereafter."

Comparing that to having the Slashdot submit button charge your CC number is ludicrous.

I have never seen a service offered by any of the three companies in question that auto-signed you up where you had to call them within 24 hours. If you click the continue button and enter your email address (or other verification information) on the page rather than clicking no thanks then you are agreeing to all the little details they put up there.

I have heard of such things through Facebook where you sign up to get points in a game such as Farmville or Mafia Wars and you do it by putting in your cell phone number and they sign you up for something that way.

Again though, read the fine print before entering any of your information on a page. If you are getting something out of going to the page (even "FREE" points), then inevitably you are entering into a transaction. The only reason people ask you to enter personal information such as email or anything else is either to verify that you have read something or to collect that information to use in email communications/marketing or a transaction.

Corporations should only exist for the betterment of society? Come on. You are living in some fantasy land if you think that is how things will ever work.

The other assumption you're making here is that there is nothing to be gained from these services that people sign up for, when in reality there is plenty to gain. A friend of mine signs up for these things regularly and takes advantage of the free month and then cancels before getting charged. If there was nothing that these things offered then they would have been shut down completely a long time ago. Scams come and go. You see those sorts of businesses pop up, make a few million off the backs of unsuspecting consumers and then disappear. Affinion,Webloyaly,Vertrue, these guys have been in business doing this same thing for ten years now.

I like how we've gone from online marketing to Enron and Worldcom and global financial collapse. Talk about completely off topic. Spare me the claptrap about policing markets. Government is only interested in policing those businesses that don't supply them with enough lobbyist cash.

http://www.xconomy.com/wordpress/wp-content/images/2009/08/webloyalty_offer_changes.jpg

Take a look. Marketing, it's what drives e-commerce. Everything is spelled out on the page. What's the trickery here? When you sign up for any recurring service they try to sell you on something before telling you about what you have to pay for it, but in the end they do tell you. Hell, there is a big burst there on the side that states 30 Days Free then $12 thereafter.

Legitimate merchants are the ones working with Affinion, Webloyalty and Vertrue. Look at the list of companies that are on their rolls. Buy.com, Fandango, Orbitz, Classmates, pretty much every flower sales company out there.

These programs have been so successful that some of those "legitimate" companies have implemented their own rewards programs and cut out the middleman.

I'm replying to the guy who said that he would prefer to re-enter his credit card information for every transaction he makes on the Internet.

The obvious benefit to marketers and retailers of you not having to re-enter your credit card information is that you think less about making the purchase. As you pointed out, people with less self control will tend to purchase using One-Click without thinking about the purchase as much.

The Affinion,Webloyalty,Vertrue offers all take advantage of this tendency to make it easy for you to purchase. The assumption here is that there is some sort of scam, when in reality all the information is there on the page, but they just make it easy to sign up by transferring most of the information from the partner. The "scam" is them taking advantage of this lack of self control. So, now we are in effect creating legislation to regulate personal responsibility.

There's a difference between being honest and being stupid about how you market a product.

Outside the viewable area?

http://www.xconomy.com/wordpress/wp-content/images/2009/08/webloyalty_offer_changes.jpg

You have to scroll down the page to get to where you enter your information, passing by every piece of information that informs you about what you are getting into. I've never been fooled for one minute by one of these offers, because it is all there in black and white.

I'm of the opinion that the less government intervention in e-commerce the better.

I also find it ironic that the guy leading the charge on this is one of the richest Senators out there and his money comes as a result of one of the biggest monopolies in history that used some of the shadiest business practices ever created.

We need to start allocating more towards our tech research so we can get to that Fusion Power upgrade before too many more turns elapse and the Indians declare war!

So, you're saying that Amazon One-Click scam should be abolished because it's obviously causing consumers to buy without thinking about the consequences?

Zombies don't require electricity, so that zombie apocalypse is the answer to all our problems!

The difference between signing a receipt and these offers is that you aren't being presented a page with just a box to enter your email address and a button to click.

It's a page that is obviously trying to sell you something, with the details spelled out.

Is this really that unclear?

http://www.xconomy.com/wordpress/wp-content/images/2009/08/webloyalty_offer_changes.jpg

How much protection does the average consumer need from marketing at this point? You're sliding down a slippery slope when you say that reading the fine print (which in the case of these offers isn't exactly that fine, there are various call outs all over these pages indicating that you are signing up for a service, that you get a month free and then pay money thereafter) is just too onerous for the average consumer and that the government must intervene to protect them. When offering something up like this is the company expected to just put up a big banner at the top saying, "HEY, WE ARE CHARGING YOU FOR SOMETHING IF YOU CLICK YES!" before even trying to sell the person on the product?

People like to say that they didn't know what they were getting into when they clicked through on these things. Well, how did you not know when it is spelled out in great detail on the page?

And they want to see it. I suspect the drop off this coming weekend will not be nearly as big as for Wolverine.