Dark pattern abuse at its finest. You find this on all third party webstores that have decided to affiliate themselves with Shop. This has been spreading like the plague and infected a lot of webstores I used to use. If you don’t notice or forget to click on the “not now” at the bottom of the page they will create a Shop account that contains your email, phone number and credit card information without further warning. Whoever hacks into their database is going to hit a goldmine. You might have a Shop account without even realizing it right now.
And of course there is a 30 day delay for account deletion for purely made up reasons.
Is passive agreement (i.e. by not declining) even legally binding in your jusrisdiction?
Definitely not. But who has the time and money to file a lawsuit over this? What kind of payout can you even expect for the tort of creating an account you didn’t ask for? That’s why they keep getting away with crap like that.
I have always silently rejected the whole “if you do x then it means you agree to y”. No idea if either would stand up in court but I don’t see some text label on a website or program as legally binding. Hell, I’d say that a lot of user agreement fine print doesn’t even meet the informed consent requirement for a legal agreement. Or that would be the case if the legal system cared about justice rather than being more of an orphan crushing machine for corporate interests in many cases.