I apologize for the confusion. You’re absolutely right.

Google did me dirty this week and I’m salty, so let me tell you. The other day I received an email informing me that my YouTube Premium subscription had been renewed, which surprised me because I canceled it about 6 months ago, and I haven’t missed it ever since (thanks, yt-dlp!). I first thought it was my daughter’s shenanigans, but after a closer look I had only “paused” the subscription instead of canceling it, and Google conveniently failed to inform me it was going to be restarted… No advance email like “your subscription will restart in a few days,” just “whoops, we restarted your subscription and you’ve been charged 13 euros, teehee.”

Alright, it’s my bad for not canceling outright and just pausing the subscription, right? Why did I not cancel in the first place, actually? Well… now my memory comes back. The reason I didn’t cancel was I didn’t manage to the first time I tried. Let’s give it another try… can you find the cancel confirmation button?

Did you see it? Yes, that’s right, it’s the dark blue button on the very bottom of the screen, just under the navigation button. So you cannot click it*. Given we’re talking about a company that A/B tests shades of blue, there is no way putting a dark blue button on a black background, hidden under the Android navigation keys, was a mistake.

So as a retaliation measure against a $2.3 trillion company stealing my 13 euros, I decided to step up my de-Googling efforts this week. I’ve changed my default search engine to DuckDuckGo and canceled my €30 Google One subscription. That’ll teach them.

I’m already using Firefox with uBlock Origin, so if I get serious about it, the hard next steps will be to switch from Android to GrapheneOS (though I might just get an iPhone next time), and get a new email address (but single sign-on with Gmail is just so convenient…).

*If you have the same issue, put your phone in landscape mode and scroll down; that should do the trick.