Deceptive (Premium)

Now that we're in year two of the enshittification era, Big Tech is expanding its efforts to coerce or force customers down paths that benefit it more than us. This is a quick story describing one of the more common and subtle examples of this coercion, via the use of purposefully misleading language.

This may seem like a small issue, but believing so says a lot about the scope of enshittification: We live in a world where deceiving customers can somehow be brushed off as table stakes. But deceptive language, like deceptive user interfaces, is just the most obvious type of dark pattern, a practice the U.S. government says, "will not be tolerated."

As if.

Microsoft users tolerate this behavior on an almost daily basis. Consider the Microsoft Edge on-boarding process I document in the Set Up Microsoft Edge Correctly … Whether You Use It Or Not chapter of the Windows 11 Field Guide. This simple, four page initial setup includes a "Help us make Microsoft experiences more useful to you" step, pre-selected for you, that pretends to offer a superior configuration for you, the user, but is designed solely to advance Microsoft's strategies by exposing you to more online tracking, data harvesting, and Microsoft advertising.

That one is a classic. But here's another example of the same behavior.

I pay for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, the most expensive tier of Microsoft's gaming subscriptions. This subscription costs $16.99 per month, is difficult to prepay over multiple months (which will/should save you money over the long term), and, among other things, it provides members with access to the Xbox console, PC, and Xbox Cloud Gaming (streaming) libraries.

Many new PCs offer buyers three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for free as a perk: This, like the pre-bundled Microsoft 365 apps, is one of many ways in which Microsoft's partnerships with PC makers surfaces, and it's difficult to argue with this attempted upsell. After all, Microsoft and the PC makers are all trying to make a buck here, or, more correctly, trying to earn more per user per month/year. This is one of the least offensive attempts, in my opinion.

As noted, I already pay for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. So it's reasonable to assume that this offer doesn't apply to me. As it turns out, however, it does: Existing members can step through the process of accepting this offer and add three months to their subscription. And so this morning, I saw this offer and decided to go for it.

There's just one gotcha: During the process, Microsoft informs you that agreeing to the offer will enable recurring billing so that the subscription will auto-renew each month after the current period expires. My Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription was paid up through May 2025 at the time I accepted this offer, and I had disabled recurring billing. No problem, I actually paid attention while I accepted the offer, as many do not, and so I immediately opened my web browser and navigated to the...