I was given some legal advice at one point which basically goes like this (paraphrasing):
You should of course read everything before you sign. But that’s not always possible or convenient and you may at times for various reasons end up signing something on-the-fly without reading it first. You should always make sure you get a copy of what you sign so that in the very least you can later review whatever you are on the hook for.
I adhere to the /keep a copy/ advice to a much greater extent than the /read before you sign/ advice. It’s about knowing your rights and responsibilities. So a bank once demanded that I sign something in order to keep using their service. It was long and in a language I did not know. They basically said I had to sign on the spot and I could not go home with it and bring it back later. I said, okay, but will you make a copy of this for me? Answer (paraphrasing): no, you do not get a copy. That is not our process. He also acted like I was weird for expecting a copy.
So I signed but pulled out phone and started to digitally image it. The banker snatched it away from me faster than I could get it in focus.
My mistake was not photographing first, then signing, then rephotographing with the sig if possible.
That actually happened pre-GDPR. The GDPR possibly accidentally solves this problem because your signature is personal data. OTOH, a clever bank could technically respond to an access request with just the signature portion of the doc and not the rest of the doc because the rest of the doc is not personal data – correct?
I don’t know if I will encounter this again but I would like to know if there any laws that prevent the bank’s non-transparent practice of blocking people from knowing what they agreed to. Banks often want on-the-spot signatures but I guess I should try to insist on bringing such docs home and returning later.
It’s quite inconvenient though because you can no longer just show up at a bank and get service. Banks have very narrow open hours on just 1-2 days out of the week. Lines to talk to someone are quite long, which makes appointments popular. So popular, that appointments are schedule a month out. So things are organised to exert pressure on people to quickly sign and bounce.
It was Ing, who I no longer use.
I’ve seen similar behaviour from telecoms. A major carrier told falsely told me in a pre-sales support discussion that they do not block anything. After signing up it was clear that they were blocking some ports. There is some obligation that suppliers honor their written word, so I asked for a copy of the support ticket (I don’t recall why I did not have records of that already – it may have been noted records of a verbal discussion or some chat mechanism that did not yield a transcript). It’s not exactly the same as asking for an agreement that I have signed but it was still similar: documentation that had legal effect for which I was a party. They refused to give me a copy. They said I can /look/ at a printout of the texts but I could not walk out with it. So again I pulled out my camera, and just like with Ing they snatched the docs away faster than I could snap a pic off. I really need to get a faster trigger finger. But there is a pattern here of companies blocking transparency that is normal in other parts of the world.
But indeed I take my business elsewhere when I encounter these issues. Still when there is a mess, I would like to know my rights. Because just walking fails to correct the problem for others. If I simply change suppliers, it does nothing to correct companies resisting their transparency obligations. Losing one customer is a drop in the ocean that they can shrug off while continuing that sort of behaviour.
Feel free to file a complain to https://www.test-achats.be/
When writing my complaint I like to cite laws, since (as you know) mediators lack legal background to identify infringements themselves. That’s why I asked about law. But it’s merely curiousity at the moment. The cases I experienced are too old and stale to bother with.
I’ve never used test achats because I believe it’s not gratis to Belgian residents. That service is gratis for EU residents outside of Belgium (to satisfy EU law). But when I last checked, inside Belgium consumers must subscribe to test achats, which comes with a magazine subscription in french or dutch. Now I just tried to visit that link to see if that’s still the case. Test achats is now an access-restricted Cloudflare site! Yikes. That’s a new problem. I don’t see how that complies with EU law. If CF arbitrarily blocks EU people from that website, can they still get test achats service?
(update) I suspect Test Achats use of Cloudflare violates Article 8(a) of the EU’s 2013 ADR law which states:
Cloudflare does not allow just anyone to access the page.
Good luck with that