Amazon Executives May Be Personally Liable for Unintentional Prime Registrations ⇥ arstechnica.com

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica:

But the judge apparently did not find Amazon’s denials completely persuasive. Viewing the FTC’s complaint “in the light most favorable to the FTC,” Judge John Chun concluded that “the allegations sufficiently indicate that Amazon had actual or constructive knowledge that its Prime sign-up and cancellation flows were misleading consumers.”

[…]

One such trick that Chun called out saw Amazon offering two-day free shipping with the click of a button at checkout that also signed customers up for Prime even if they didn’t complete the purchase.

“With the offer of Amazon Prime for the purpose of free shipping, reasonable consumers could assume that they would not proceed with signing up for Prime unless they also placed their order,” Chun said, ultimately rejecting Amazon’s claims that all of its “disclosures would be clear and conspicuous to any reasonable consumer.”

This is far from the only instance of scumbag design cited by Chun, and it is bizarre to me that anybody would defend choices like these.