Your forgetting is a revenue line

Two days ago we wrote about an agent that hunts your forgotten subscriptions. Here is what it is hunting. Economists at the American Economic Review measured it on a payment-card network across ten services: in their inattention model, "inertia increases seller revenues by 87 percent on average, with increases that range from 14 percent to more than 200 percent depending on the service."

• The mechanism is measurable, not folklore: cancellations spike in the months when a card is replaced and renewal has to be active. Requiring an active choice every six months "would reduce the excess revenue from inattention by 45 percent".
• An agent that cancels for you attacks a real leak, and the creator who tried it reports about $5,350 found and $1,285 cancelled a year. His figures, not ours.

• The price of that help is scope. Meta's own safety post says credentials "go straight to secure storage" and are not visible to the main agent, that the secure environment "does not prevent Meta from accessing data when necessary to support, secure or operate the service", and that "prompt injection remains an open problem in the industry".
• Reuters reported human contractors placed some of the agent's calls, enabled for half of Meta's employees with opt-out, never offered publicly; an executive called the missing disclosure "a miss" and the feature was rolled back. Separately, Amazon blocked the agent, saying it did not identify itself as an agent.

Source: Einav, Klopack & Mahoney, «Selling Subscriptions», American Economic Review 115(5), Μάιος 2025