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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

There's no way to flag spam / marketing. Uber for example occasionally sends marketing. But you can't really disable notifications. Instead, they (large companies) should just pay x cent per notification to Apple (not the user, because that would be seen as credit, eliminating the purpose)

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So long as spam legislation applies to these notifications¹, you don’t need to: in theory you just report it to the relevant enforcement body, and they get fined heavily until they do something about it (which, under most sets of spam legislation, will start by requiring that these sorts of messages be opt-in only).

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¹ I vaguely recall hearing that EU spam legislation would apply to notifications, but I may be wrong or misremembering. For my home jurisdiction of Australia, the Spam Act 2003 may or may not cover them; it depends on whether these things count as “electronic messages”, a term which is defined in the Act as “a message sent: (a) using: (i) an internet carriage service; or (ii) any other listed carriage service; and (b) to an electronic address in connection with: (i) an email account; or (ii) an instant messaging account; or (iii) a telephone account; or (iv) a similar account.” As a technologist, I would expect push notifications—that is, notifications sent by the app provider’s server via Apple/whoever servers to your device—to meet this classification; but that it would be less clear-cut with notifications generated directly by the app, as there’s not so obviously an electronic address involved.

Ho man. Works so well for email and phone calls huh?

Maybe (maybe!) large players will pay attention as they have a lot to lose and aren’t able to ‘dodge’ well. But there are millions of fly by night scam operations that come and go.

Only real solution here is, like email, user side filtering and infrastructure level black holeing of offenders.

I think I average around one illegal spam email or phone call from Australian companies per year. I will always respond to them, though I don’t think I’ve ever actually got any to acknowledge the bald illegality of their action, and normally I will report them to ACMA.

As far as email is concerned, a part of the problem that leads to moderately generic spam is that addresses are often readily available, and there are then no technical means to stop the sending of the message (… though filtering can block receiving the message). The difference with push notifications is that each provider gets a unique address to send to, and you have to at least install an app or accept push notifications (on the web) before they get that address, which guards against the completely casual you-don’t-want-any-notifications crew.

Can you please explain why it would be preferable to have large companies paying x cents per notification to Apple, and not to users?

I don't understand the credit part? Wouldn't some kind of "set your rate" option for the user, allow more individual flexibility? As opposed to a flat fee per notif, sent to Apple?

I only install Uber when I want to catch an Uber. Helps with notifications, tracking, and avoids impulse usage.

Yeah this. I uninstall it when I'm done or it starts bugging the fuck out of me.

Sometimes I think "should I install it" before getting one and get public transport or get on my bike instead.

That might work but what if the value of the spam notification is greater than Apples fee? Then it will carry on.

Flag more notifications as spam, which would increase the fee for that app.

As long as they get flagged, they’d need to pay more and more.

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