Insurance - Forced to call for cancellation I purchased the insurance cover online, without having to use any phone/landline. It's now close to expiration, and there's auto-renewal which I have no option to disable. In order to cancel the renewal, I'm forced to call the call center. One would ask, so what's the problem with this approach? What if I do not own any mobile/landline device/number? What if I do not have enough time to wait 30 minutes in the phone queue? I am forced to effectively &quot;work&quot; for the insurance company by wasting my own time &amp; money. Is there any consumer protection law stating that if I purchase a service by means A, i should be able to cancel by using at least the same methods (eg: online)? Update 1: Jurisdiction: England, United Kingdom.
Such a right would only exist if the legislature has created it by some act. Insurance is excluded under the class of covered contracts under The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 (see schedule 2), and The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. The only restriction on automatical renewal clauses under Consumer Rights Act 2015 is that the deadline for objecting to renewal cannot be unreasonably early (schedule 2, unfair terms); and in general, the terms may not be vague. Since there is no law restricting a contract from requiring written notice, or telephone notice, or whatever they demand, then it comes down to what the contract says. If it says &quot;you must call&quot;, then you must call.
This is possibly but not necessarily fine. The data controller (the garage) is responsible for safeguarding your personal data. They must take appropriate safety measures, but this depends a lot on their own risk assessment. For example, to protect the data from being used by employees for their personal purposes, the controller might use organizational measures like a policy “you're not allowed to do that.” Many companies allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes (BYOD). When the data controller allows this and takes appropriate safety measures, everything is perfectly fine. The company still has to make sure that the data is only processed for legal purses and deleted afterwards. Implementing a BYOD policy in a GDPR compliant manner is difficult but not impossible. A data breach has occurred when the security measures were insufficient and your data was deleted or disclosed without authorization. Your scenario would only be a breach if the company did not have a BYOD policy and the salesman used their personal phone, and arguably then only if that device is also breached. However, do not discount the alternatives: they do have a BYOD policy and the salesman is acting within their instructions the salesman was using a company-controlled device, not their personal phone If you have good reason to believe that your data was mishandled (and these alternatives do not apply), then the GDPR offers you the following remedies: You can of course complain to the data controller, especially if they have a dedicated data protection officer. You can lodge a complaint with a supervision authority, which is the ICO in the UK. They expect you to attempt to resolve your issue with the controller first. The ICO can then decide if they want to investigate the issue. You can sue them for compliance and for actual damages suffered (you have none, though). Note that all of these alternatives are more effort than they are likely worth. In particular, the garage can always correct the problem, e.g. by getting your contact info deleted from the personal device or by creating a retroactive BYOD policy.
Since you asked two questions: No and No Does a company’s T&amp;C or their house rules supersede law No and is asking private health status (including the request to wear a mask) an offence? No A company cannot require you to do things that are against the law but they can require you to do things that go further than the legal minimum. The UK and Spanish governments do not require you to wear a mask but they do not prohibit private organisations (like airlines) for making it a requirement to access their facilities. The law requires that they make reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities. But you don’t have a disability, you just can’t sleep with a mask on. If you had a disability you would have no trouble in getting a letter from your doctor to that effect. The contract requires them to take you from the UK to Spain: they don’t have to enable you to sleep. If you read the T&amp;C, you will find that they can refuse to carry you if, in their reasonable opinion, you pose a hazard to the aircraft or the people aboard it.
It is legal and quite common. Your choice as consumer is at the point of selecting insurance company. If you dislike ES enough, that would be a reason to select a different insurance company. It would be surprising if your ES contract disallows pharmacy pick-up, but even if it did, that would also be legal. This does not mean that the government doesn't have the power to break up Express Scripts, under anti-trust laws. There is no clear rule regarding how successful a company can be in attracting customers.
It is the use of a "menace" which creates the crime, not the nature or validity of the demand. That's not correct. You've inadvertently missed the other element of the offence: that it's an "unwarranted demand". A person is guilty of blackmail if, with a view to gain for himself or another or with intent to cause loss to another, he makes any unwarranted demand with menaces; and for this purpose a demand with menaces is unwarranted unless the person making it does so in the belief— (a) that he has reasonable grounds for making the demand; and (b) that the use of the menaces is a proper means of reinforcing the demand. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/21 For example, I may have reasonable grounds under the Consumer Rights Act to demand a refund for a faulty good. It might be sensible to moderate one's language, e.g. "If I do not receive a satisfactory response from you within 30 days of the date of this letter, I intend to issue proceedings against you in the county court without further notice. This may increase your liability for costs." vs. "If I do not receive the money from you within 30 days of the date of this letter I'll take you to the f***ing cleaners, sunshine." But the language doesn't make the demand unwarranted.
Each of the 50 states plus non-states has their own laws, but there is nothing general about contract or other law in the US that forces a rental facility to accept customers who don't have / won't get the insurance that they require. It is a reasonable requirement, because it protects their interest insofar as angry customers might sue the facility because their car was broken into, and many of them would mistakenly believe that their car insurance covers theft or destruction of contents (thus leading to a desire to sue, to cover the property loss). It may be just too much hassle and too risky for them to assume the correctness of a customer's claim that they already have adequate coverage and will maintain said coverage, with no practical means to verify the claim.
A text message is just as legally binding as a letter, and the lion's share of the cases have held that a text message from a known sending phone number is equivalent to a signed letter. One would have to carefully parse the exchange of communications to see if they amounted to a binding offer and acceptance, but the fact that it was in a text message, rather than on a piece of paper is irrelevant. Indeed, generally speaking, such an offer and acceptance, if the words exchange show that, could be binding even if made orally, if it could be proved by a preponderance of the evidence. Procedurally, however, once a judgment has been entered, as is the case here, the process of proving that you have complied with a stipulation regarding what is to constitute payment in full may be challenging. I'll leave the question of civil procedure in Connecticut small claims court to someone more knowledgable about it than I am as that could vary a lot from state to state, or even from court to court based upon local practice within the state.
No The contract is created at the moment that an offer was accepted. In normal circumstances: You accepted an offer that they made to the general public by sending a purchase order for specific items at specific prices, or They accepted your offer by communicating their acceptance to you (being advised that the goods have been dispatched counts). However, in this circumstance, the company has been explicit that the contract is only created when either: You checkout and pay, or They “supply an invoice to you.” It appears that neither event happened so there is no contract. Their specific terms have overridden the common law rules on offer and acceptance (as they are allowed to do) and the offer has not been accepted until you receive their invoice. Specifically, it cannot be accepted by performance (dispatching the goods) and the requirement for the invoice to be supplied overrides the postal rule. Note that, in this case, you got lucky. 99 times out of 100 there would have been a valid contract and you would have breached it. In future, cancel orders specifically, don’t make assumptions.