The Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) has published two interesting news reports this month. 
First, on Jan 14 it has reported on potentially unfair commercial practices of Amazon, which make it difficult for consumers to cancel their Amazon Prime subscription (You can log out, but you can never leave). The Norwegian Consumer Council identified many of these practices as Amazon using dark patterns to manipulate consumers online, hindering them in making informed choices, trying to nudge them away from actually cancelling the subscription (by misdirection, visual interferences, confirmshaming). This may be achieved through making consumers go through many pages, asking them to confirm their choices in a manner that causes confusion with consumers, etc. Generally, the Norwegian survey looked into practices of digital service providers, where consumers would take out a subscription for services. Such subscriptions involve automatic payments, content is delivered online, and thus if consumers stop using a service they may forget about it, it becomes invisible to them. Therefore, it may be especially important to facilitate consumers' termination of such services. And yet, the survey found that 25% of respondents have experienced problems with cancelling such subscriptions due to a difficult process having been set up.
Today, it has reported that another Norwegian authority - Norwegian Data Protection Authority (Datatilsynet) - issued a fine of over 9.5 million Euro to the dating app Grindr (10% of their global annual revenue), following on the Norwegian Consumer Council's complaint from a year ago about infringements of privacy by this app (Historic victory for privacy as dating app receives gigantic fine). The breach of GDPR occurred due to the app collecting and sharing personal data without sufficiently informed and explicit users' permission to such practices (more in the report 'Out of control', on Grindr specifically as of p. 72).
