It's pretty much the rule rather than the exception, and the rule pretty much has no exceptions in existence: Whenever you sign up to a paid subscription of something, whether it be a real-life product or a digital product, your subscription will be set to auto-renew (usually yearly unless the subscription interval is something else) by default, often without even telling you. Or even if it's somehow shown during the subscription process, it's usually relatively unnoticeable and, quite egregiously, there will quite often not be an opt-out option right then and there.
Be it a PlayStation Plus subscription, or an anti-virus subscription, or an online website subscription (such as, for example, geoguessr, chess.com, YouTube, etc.), or whatever it is, the automatic yearly renewal option will be on by default. And most often than not, as mentioned, this fact will either not be prominently displayed, or if it is, there's usually no checkbox to turn it off.
Many such sites will offer an option to turn the auto-subscription off, so that you'll then start getting an email or other notification telling you that your subscription is about to end and it will not be auto-renewed, but quite often this option will be hidden under layers of settings pages and myriads of options.
And then, when you renew the subscription manually a year later, what do you know, the auto-renewal will most often be turned on again, behind the scenes. Often without even telling you outright. Thus, every time you manually renew the subscription you need to go to turn it off again.
This is, of course, a predatory form of marketing. And it goes way back. For as long as there have existed some kind of paid subscription models, this practice has been used, probably going back to the 1970's, 1960's and probably even earlier (in this case mostly with newspapers and magazines, and later with other products such as dietary supplements and the like.)
It abuses the normal behavior of most people that they don't usually go and check what exactly they are billed. Some people might check their bank accounts from time to time and notice "hey, why am I being billed for this thing that I subscribed only once many years ago and that I don't use anymore? I need to cancel this." However, those are a small minority of people. Some people might also be hesitant to turn the auto-renewal off at first, thinking that it's "convenient" that the service will continue without them having to manually renew it every year, and thus years along the line they just forget about it, even long after they have stopped using the service (eg. the services of some website.)
Some services are nice and consumer-friendly enough that they will send you a notification (eg. by email) when your subscription is about to be automatically renewed, giving you the opportunity to opt out if you want. Kudos to them for being so transparent. Unfortunately, those are just a small fraction of all such services. Most of them will just send you the bill without informing or warning you in advance.
The main problem with all of this is, of course, the practice of having the auto-renewal be turned on by default whenever someone subscribes. It's opportunistic, and it's deliberate. The auto-renewal is deliberately an opt-out system, not an opt-in one. And that's predatory.
Laws about this vary by country, but there's very little oversight or enforcement even in countries where this kind of "opt-out" system is illegal, particularly when it comes to foreign services. (And even then, such services will often just change the default setting on a country-by-country basis, in order to comply with local laws. The predatory behavior will still be used in countries where it's legal or the law is poorly enforced.)
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