Subscribing to online services is typically a straightforward process, but cancelling them can be arduous and confusing — causing many to resign and continue paying for services they no longer use. Making the cancellation process intentionally difficult is recognized as a dark pattern called Roach Motel. This paper characterizes the subscription and cancellation flows of popular news websites from four different countries, and discusses them in the context of recent regulatory changes. We study the design features that make it difficult to cancel a subscription and find several cancellation flows that feature intentional barriers, such as forcing users to call a representative or type in a phrase. Further, we find many subscription flows that do not adequately inform users about recurring charges. Our results point to a growing need for effective regulation of designs that trick, coerce, or manipulate users into paying for subscriptions they do not want.

Metacognitive awareness enables people to make conscious decisions about their own cognitions, and adapt to meet task performance goals. Despite the role of metacognition in task performance, technologies that effectively augment metacognition are scarce. We explore a novel approach to augment metacognition based on making the eye's pupil dilations, which associate with a variety of cognitions, audible via sonification in real-time. In this exploratory study, we investigated whether pupil dilation sonification can elicit metacognitive awareness. Our findings suggest that correlations between a variety of cognitions, e.g., attentional focus and depth of thinking, and sounds generated by the sonification can emerge spontaneously and by instruction. This justifies further research into the use of pupil dilation sonification as a means to augment metacognitive abilities.