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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

I did think about this, but I don't really think I'm taking anything away from the actually deaf.

It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request.

I agree that it does feel a slight bit scummy, but after thinking about it I decided that I was OK with it. I can see how some others might think differently though.

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First of all, I agree.

Yet I think I have a stigma claiming illness or disability... don't know. So, next time I'm going to try this:

  I am a foreigner and have serious issues understanding 
  spoken English. Please avoid calling me and let us try to 
  resolve the issue over email.

Being foreign isn't protected, like being disabled, so I'd be surprised if that works.

Finally! It's nice to see an attempt at a level-headed response, and from the person it was actually directed to (and that you had actually put thought into this). Funny enough, though, no one's actually answered the question I actually asked, which I still have... which is whether this is legal?

I'm pretty sure that lying about a disability to a company you have bought a product from is not illegal. But I guess I don't know for sure.

I'm willing to take the risk.

No, it's not illegal. First, under the ADA they can't actually ask you to verify any disabilities: that's between you and your doctor. Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one. I've been to too many concerts over the years, and while no doctor has diagnosed me, I can truthfully say I have a hard time understanding people over bad phone connections.

> First, under the ADA they can't actually ask you to verify any disabilities: that's between you and your doctor.

Wow, that's interesting. They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)? How does that work for companies that give discounts (say) to the disabled? Can everybody lie to get them legally then? This doesn't sound right. (Note that it doesn't have to necessarily be the ADA outlawing this, so I wouldn't just rely on that.)

> Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one.

Do you mean to have one medically or legally? The former is obvious to me but the latter isn't.

> They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)?

That's correct, generally. I mean, if you show up at an airport with an oxygen take, be prepared to demonstrate that you medically require it. It's also different for employment, where your boss may ask you to provide evidence that you need a special accommodation to do your job.

The ADA also covers cases where there's a record of you having a disability - even if the record is wrong! - or where you have been perceived to have a disability. Not only cases where you really do.

Side note: If you look at the ADA language about service animals, it's all about what you as a business cannot do, without doing a good job of specifying what constitutes a service animal... So if abusing vaugely defined legislation aimed at protecting people with disabilities is your thing, $50 on Amazon and you can take your pets just about anywhere ;-)

The current ADA is actually quite clear: it must be a dog or miniature horse professionally trained to mitigate one or more specific disabilities.

What right do they have to know what your disability is?

The ADA has exemptions for when it would be unsafe or unreasonable to provide accommodation, and those are the only places where anyone can discriminate against someone for whatever their condition might be (eg the vision and prescription requirements for pilots). In fact the ADA explicitly disallows asking for any general information about disabilities - an employer can only ask yes/no questions about specific criteria.

I can’t imagine what their argument for not supporting someone cancelling their subscription would be.

Fun question: if you were to say you were cancelling for medical reasons would they be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if the call center asked what it was?

Why would it be illegal? Unless it's written in to a law as something you can't do, it's by-default legal; and why would someone write a law saying that you couldn't pretend to be deaf?

Generally speaking, it's unlawful to make false representations in the course of doing business. There doesn't necessarily need to be a specific law that says "you can't pretend to be deaf", because if you misrepresent such facts, you are very likely exposing a lot of legal attack surface.

IANAL.

> Generally speaking, it's unlawful to make false representations in the course of doing business

You basically described the whole field of advertising, if you make misrepresenting facts illegals, there's not a lot of businesses that would not be fined.

An unlikely best-case representation is not the same as a false one.

There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal. Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].

That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.

But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.

[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.

> There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal.

I agree, but at the same time you probably wouldn't be interested in saying most of these lies, so it's difficult to use that as a basis for assuming the legality of the ones we might be interested in.

> Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].

This is where I'm stuck. Fraud seems to have a wider scope than money (the obvious counterexample being if you're giving someone something other money, it can still result in fraud). What I'm unclear on is how wide the scope gets. Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages? I don't know what the answer is (which is why I asked), and it seems to me that it could go either way.

> Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages

IANAL, to be clear. But yes, fraud is generally defined legally as deception for "gain", which is usually, but not always, denominated in money.

Beyond that, like everything else in law, it gets complicated. Are you asking about civil or criminal fraud? Where?

Also, even if you have a case that is technically civil fraud (say, I tricked you out of a dollar) or criminal fraud (I overstated my income on a mortgage application by a dollar), for small-dollar amounts you'll find you have a lot of difficulty actually bringing a case/no DA will touch it, simply because it is too small to waste court time on.

Incidentally, that final point is why ATT and Comcast want to kill class actions. If the people they cheat can't band together, it is too much trouble for anyone to recover that $2.74 "Up Yours Because We Can ILEC Infrastructure Recovery Fee".

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