The Consumers’ Foundation yesterday criticized an amendment to the Consumer Protection Act (消費者保護法) that is set to exclude certain merchandise, including smartphone apps, from a required seven-day trial and refund period.
The amendment, announced in mid-June, listed merchandise that has a short shelf life; is bought online or via a shopping channel; is custom made; newspapers, magazines or journals; unsealed audio, video or computer software; downloaded digital content; and unsealed sanitary products as being excluded from the trial and refund period.
Consumers’ Foundation vice chairman Yu Kai-hsiung (游開雄) said the foundation thinks the amended regulation is too inexplicit and difficult for consumers to understand.
For example, he said that if a consumer took out a one-year subscription to a magazine, but later found that the magazine’s content was not what they expected, then they should be allowed to cancel their subscription and get a refund within a trail period.
The foundation’s deputy secretary-general Hsu Tse-yu (徐則鈺) said people who purchase an app or game on Google Play are allowed to return it within two hours for a full refund, so the app companies should provide a trial period rather than the government opening a back door for them to waive the trial period.
The foundation said that the government should clarify the amended details so that they are not vague principles that companies can take advantage of and consumers’ rights can be better protected.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching