US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button
apnews.com
apnews.com
This was always my opinion on this. "As easy to cancel as it is to sign up". It's simple, and completely shuts down this malicious behaviour without making it harder to operate for the honest companies (or worse for customers in any way I can think of). Usually these policies have downsides but I can't really think of any.
This kind of behaviour is common among banks as well, they use their dinosaur status when it comes to things that are bad for their business, but can be very progressive on the other end of things. For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents (here in Sweden at least) to be handed to the other bank. I had to first wait in the support, then ask politely to get these documents. They told me that they would snail mail them to me immediately, but after two weeks I called them again, then they said sorry and sent me a PDF instead proving that they could have done this immediately...
Hm, I would prefer two-step sign up to one-step unsubscribe.
But I suppose they know and don't care.
But far too many "business leaders" are focused on short term gains at any cost and so this doesn't compute for them. They don't care that you currently like the product and would resubscribe when you get back from the pole, because that's a year or more away, they care about next quarter, and if you aren't income next quarter you're irrelevant to them, fuck you.
† Amundsen-Scott is the name of the base at the South Pole of the planet. It's a cool place. But lots of services aren't available there or would make no sense. You can't live there permanently, so those people are coming back.
In my case I enjoy reading The Economist and do not mind paying for it, but some years back I had to cancel my subscription (I was cutting back on expenses) and honestly I found that experience so much against the business values they preach that it has made me not subscribe again, even if it means not reading their publication.
(Every few years I go to check if they have made it easier to unsubscribe, but last time I checked they still had the same practices)
Edit: I can also imagine that I’m a minority and so it really pays off to keep doing this.
I can't know if they're going to do this kind of crap until it is to late. Even if some one reviewed services for this they could change at any time for the worse. So I just assume it will happen and try to limit getting into that bad arrangement as much as possible.
In addition to being illegal, this was short sighted because they’re a national company. Comcast/Xfinity is one of three gigabit choices in my neighborhood and they periodically send offers with competitive pricing but each time I remember what dealing with them was like and toss it into the shredder. I’m sure the regional office would say they’re better run than the New England one, or that they have a better system, but I’m not going to find out, and there’s no way they skimped enough to save more than they could have made with over a decade of service in a new region.
Possibly you were very lucky, or they've buckled to the pressure caused by previous anti-consumer BS.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/dec/19/i-was-cut-off-...
> Unlike providers who use the rival Openreach cable network, Virgin Media does not allow its six million broadband customers to cancel expired contracts online. Thirty days’ notice is required before any switch, compared with the 14 days’ notice required to switch Openreach providers.
A link to the ongoing Ofcom investigation into their shabby tactics:
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/switching-prov...
I had procrastinated for months because I was sure I'd go through a real workout routine. I did have to call them but don't remember any particular pain getting through to someone and then it was just "Your new bill will be [about half the old one). Return your rented voice modem. Have a nice day." Maybe it was because it was during COVID.
For a company that has been hacked multiple times, I find this unacceptable.
How would this work? The lender may have paid for your loan (and may not have even gotten the right to service the loan). How do they make their money back? What about the mortgage-backed securities market?
It’s a good idea though, absolutely.
EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer nonsense.
German reference: https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/vertraege-reklamation/kue...
The federal proposal will likely be ineffective unless it has an individual cause of action. What that means is that the only way (IMO) such a law works is not if the government enforces it, but rather if any consumer can sue the company in small claims court for a reasonable judgment (eg $1000 or something). Now the company has to fix their ways or feel death from a million cuts, and the cost to defend likely exceeds the cost to pay.
The other things the law needs (it may have but the article wasn’t clear) are clarity and penalties for dark patterns.
For example, “as simple as it was to subscribe” needs to be WAY more detailed, eg “takes no more time for a reasonable person to unsubscribe than it did to subscribe” and “the user must be able to use the same communication channel or mechanism (eg web, mobile app, etc) used to subscribe, in order to unsubscribe”, and “at the time of subscription, unsubscribe instructions must be provided to the user via a persistent medium such as email”, and “the unsubscribe interface must be prominently discoverable on the web site or mobile application”, etc.
And any dark patterns or intentional violations need to make the recoverable amount subject to a multiplier.
I am happy that the government is tackling this but doing it through regulatory action is not likely to help much IMO; especially in light is the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Chevron deference, it’s likely not to last through legal challenges. (IANAL)
In fact, with FOIA in Illinois the only way to hurt a non-compliant public body is with the attorney fees[]. There is a civil penalty per violation, but it isn't paid to the litigant, but it is paid by the public body to the county. As one government lawyer said to me, "I don't care if I lose! I just write a check out to myself!"
[] some of the lawyers I know who do this work agree to split their fees with the litigant as an incentive for them to see it through, which I don't think is technically legal, but it let's people keep the government honest and make some change for their effort
It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.
How would that even... work? Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area? And a customer who feels like a company a hard time could just put a notice in the paper and then collect money because the company obviously won't read every newspaper? Also, what about companies wanting to give customers a hard time by canceling their subscriptions - now customers have to read every newspaper too? I must be missing something...
Essentially when a reasonable third party can be said to have received.
In English legal systems attached terms and conditions work the same way, with regard to receiving them.
if you change your name you need to put it in the newspaper, and https://futureofnewspapers.net/how-to-place-a-legal-notice-i...
There are many different types of legal ads, with different costs to advertise. The most common type of legal notice in New York is an LLC formation notice. The State of New York requires limited liability corporations to run an ad informing the public on the formation of the new corporation. There are also FCC, SLA liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe notices, name change notices, divorce notices (also known as dissolution of marriage notices), and probate notices.
If this sounds ridiculous, it's because it is, and yet somehow, we still do it. What Sweden does sounds no different, except it's companies with millions of dollars who could actually afford to check these things.
It doesn't describe any legal process I'm familiar with.
yes, and that huge and crucial difference in this case is that the entities in question have attorneys on staff, and those attorneys understand their responsibilities on behalf of the corporation
In my US state, a lot of important legal notices get published in the newspaper, so companies should already be effectively doing this.
What most do (and what I've always done) is to subscribe to a clipping service that will scan the classifieds, nationwide if you want, for you and forward to you the types of items you want to be made aware of.
I prefer to unsubscribe by writing it on a post-it note and sticking it in a public bathroom under the sink. That way I can always sue for them not doing it!
Take cell phones or internet, I don't have an exact number but I feel like with those given all of the information I have to put in, various agreements, etc etc once my service is in my cart I generally have 3, 4, maybe more pages of stuff to go through.
Is the "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up" showing me the same number of pages trying to convince me to stay?
Sure at least in that case it is still online, but it leaves plenty of room for dark patterns.
Could something that states something as simple as that, just lead to a slightly worse signup process in the hopes that they can then convince customers to stay longer with those dark patterns. It would be a gamble on the companys part, but could pay off.
I realize no law will be perfect, but I worry that something that simple could be abused when it would likely just be better to make a law about unsubscribing in the first place that applies across the board.
Edit:
I was thinking about this more. But what exactly is "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up"? When I sign up for a service I am paying for at a minimum I had to create a username, a password, and put in my credit card. Maybe I had to validate my email and/or phone. Maybe I had to put in my address, validate I was a student, etc etc.
Signing up is not a one click thing, so just stating that neither would canceling.
I get the spirit of saying something like that, but with simplicity I feel like also opens up room for interpretation and it doing nothing to really help except for some extreme cases (like needing to call).
But I also look at my gym membership, I could not sign up until I physically went in or at the very least talked to someone on the phone. That gives them the power to do the exact same thing when I want to cancel.
Trying to fatigue someone out of subscribing is a bad business model. If people want to leave, it should be dead simple to do so.
After that experience that news source is on my and many of my colleagues black lists. And we are the core demographic they would probably like to target.
Yeah.
I think that’s not enough in some cases. Signing up requires inputting a bunch of data; unsubscribing should be 2 clicks at most, no logins.
Oh, sorry, that's not the card you signed up with... what do you mean you don't have the card that expired last year that rolled over when you signed up?
A: I get more spam than ever. What is especially annoying is that the majority of reputable companies do this. Order something? Sign up for an account? Set up an LLC? File a trademark? Boom: Spam emails UFN.
B: It's easier to unsubscribe than ever: Often one-click at the bottom of the email, or let Gmail/Fastmail etc do it for you. Generally effective.
One annoyance I find is the Our terms have been altered. Pray I don't alter them further loophole, where you will still get emails after unsubbing.
There's only one company I tolerate marketing emails from (Pitviper sunglasses), and it's because the emails are funny.
Here I am, already giving you money, and you want to spam me?! Even after I clicked unsubscribe?
The worst are the BS claims of "account status emails", which are just spam.
I moved my entire portfolio to another bank, filed a complaint, then filed complaints as I closed each account/card. The goal to have plenty of record as to why.
Screw that.
"There's an important message in your inbox, please log in to check"
And then you go look and it's like "the white house wants to alleviate student debt, if you don't want your debt discharged fill out this form" And it's like...
a) who in their right mind wouldn't want that
b) there's no way in hell I'm getting my debt discharged, I make WAY too much fucking money
c) this is a matter of public policy and developing news, why the fuck was this sent as a secure message
Of course not!
Yet there's a marketing (eg, engagement) department thinking up this junk.
People used to find out about financial transactions monthly with their bill in the mail. It's fine to have more info, but that doesn't mean it must be forced upon us.
And the transactions described are not really out of the blue financial transactions. The first message is about transactions that happen every. single. month. There's no need to say "we're going to do what you want us to do". That's silly. An agreement was already signed to that effect. The person knows it's going to happen. It's just 100% wasted, useless info.
And while I know you're responding to the 'first part' of the post, the communication I'm describing in my (GP) post, is about just random emails with no actual value.
I just wouldn't be able to do business.
If I did sign up for it, I do the polite thing and unsubscribe if they make it easy.
But yeah - spam is getting aggravating. I am getting spam text messages now....
Companies do subscribe me to mailing lists pretty easily but I really don't mind if they honor the unsubscribe link. And most seem to. (The exception was the Red Cross who I eventually had to mark as spam.)
>> Don't you want to go to the airport again this weekend?
>> Do you remember that night out in Austin 3 weeks ago? The same driver is available again.
Sure how about he picks me up 1300 miles from Austin.
>> How about something to eat? You ordered 4 weeks ago from place XYZ.
I gave that place a 2 star rating.
If I notice a company doing this, I stop doing business with them. If they can’t respect my inbox and be trusted, then they shouldn’t get a dime of my money.
Spamming me is never a good way to create a positive brand image. When unsubscribing I always say it’s spam when there is a survey on why I’m unsubscribing. I hope it gets them banned from their email marketing service.
But, in my experience, after Gmail forced unsubscribe headers earlier this year in marketing emails (1-click unsubscribe is now built into gmail), it's become infinitely easier to clean up my inbox.
So that problem is already solved IMO. Pretty much all the big inbox providers are now forcing 1-click unsubscribe into their inbox UI.
I recently ordered pants from The Gap. I am reasonably sure that I didn't sign up for anything, but I started getting spam emails anyway. I unsubscribed immediately, and the unsubscribe page says it "takes up to 10 days to process". I received 1-2 emails from them per day for the next 5 days until I blocked the sender on the 5th day. I reported all the emails as spam but I don't know if that helps.
It would be difficult for national brands (or even local brands) to do any marketing or advertising that includes prices, because they would either have to put a range on their ads, or possibly eat all their profit in some areas if they have the same price everywhere.
With the advent of computers this should be more doable, but the brands also have strong lobbies to keep tax payments seperate.
Imagine you have customers in California (high taxes) and Wyoming (low taxes). You have one price, but the taxes in the former nets you zero profit. But, that's also where 98%+ of your customers are. That isn't going to work, needless to say.
You'd still get that benefit in the us by having one price for an entire state but I don't think anyone is eager to lose profits and try that.
It's quite ridiculous.
I played around once with the tax rate and boundary files [1] provided by the ~23 states that are in the Streamlined Sales Tax system. I remember finding several cases where a tax boundary ran through an office complex so the tax rate would be different between 123 Fake Street, Suite 100 and 123 Fake Street, Suite 200.
This is very annoying because it means to compute the tax you need a full address. For online sales of downloadable digital goods tax is often the only thing you need a full address for. For the actual sale all you need is a credit card number, the card security code, the billing zip code, and an email address to send a receipt to. And actually you usually don't even need the security code and billing zip but not providing them may lead to higher fees due to increased fraud risk.
Looking up tax by full address is annoying because the address people think they are at often doesn't quite match the official address for that location. They might use the wrong directional prefix or suffix, or put them on the wrong end, or give the local nickname people use for a street instead of the actual name, to give a few examples.
I found a way that worked surprisingly well, despite that. I'd take the address as supplied by the user and find the zip code and the building number. I'd then select from the boundary database all locations that matched the zip and building number.
So say the address is 123 NW Fake ST, Mycity, Mystate, 12345. I'd find all boundary file entries with zip 12345 and an address range that included 123. Note this just looks at number and zip, so would not include Fake ST but also any other street in that zip that includes house number 123.
For each of those I'd make the full address from the boundary file: building number, then any direction prefixes, then street name, then any type suffixes ("St", "Ave", etc), then any direction suffixes, then city, then state, then zip.
I'd then compute the Levenshtein distance between each of those and the address given by the user and take the one with the smallest distance.
Anyone know how the companies that provide tax lookup services handle this? I assume they do something way more sophisticated than my hack described above.
[1] https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/Shared-Pages/rate-and-bo...
Here's more info on the initiative: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
You should consider this rule to be as at least as real as a bill going through congress with broad bipartisan support.
Expect a handful of populist announcements leading up to some "October" surprise that has been in the works for some time. It will be most obvious when it is generally favorable and can proceed without the need for two-party agreement.
Of course, these really aren't big enough needle movers to be so cynical about & I trust this as another small and steady step in the same direction this administration was already going in. I mean, if this was something related to cancelling student debt or using the bully pulpit to pressure congress into rescheduling marijuana, I'd take your point. But when a certain political party is doing a few things here and a few things there that are good for consumers, that's actively earning votes as opposed to simply trying to not be the lesser of two evils.
Biden’s last ditch attempt to hold on was discussing actual action on SCOTUS.
That campaign death rattle alone seems to have been enough evidence to me that push come to shove these folks will force something that results in more support, especially if it means keeping their job.
In fact, a great workaround for anyone else in the USA is to set their home address to California, and then they get the magic unsubscribe button that was otherwise hidden from them.
It is nice to see the administration doing things to help regular people.
>1. Gather Necessary Documentation
>You'll need copies of:
Seems pretty reasonable to require proof of identity and proof of parent/guardian before freezing someone’s credit.
Which is what this rule making initiative seems to be about -- you shouldn't have an advertised process that actually leads to black holes (because it's in the company's financial interest for them to).
> you shouldn't have an advertised process that actually leads to black holes (because it's in the company's financial interest for them to).
Of course, but not providing appropriate levels of service to the small percentage of people because they are inconsequential to big businesses is pervasive across the economy.
NB: Configure you email clients not to automatically download HTML unless you prefer to let senders know you're actively maintaining your inbox. I love receiving 'if you're still reading please click here, otherwise you'll soon be automatically removed from our ML.' I consider that the real unsubscribe non-button in 2024.
In Canada, it’s not legal to start sending someone emails because you happened across their email, purchased a list, or someone bought something from your square store. Marketing emails must have express consent, and the consent is not transferable.
I remember signing up to Which? (a bit like Consumer Reports but in the UK), and cancelling my account was so f-ing hard that I will never sign up again, ever, and I will warn people away from them.
I'd never again do XM/Serious without a single-use credit card. Took 5 phone calls (oops, disconnected) and 3+ hours on hold to cancel. I only wanted to cancel the one car I no longer had, after that experience I cancelled them all.
If you mandate a button, then each site will put it in a different place.
It’s frustrating to see the lack of technical competence cause us to land on sub-optimal decisions.
Another clear example was the cookie consent law; clearly this should have been an HTTP header or similar protocol so that user agents could proxy the user’s intent without breaking the browsing experience for every page.
The cookie consent law proposal similarly isn’t that simple. Nobody made their site worse because the EU forced them to, they did it because they’re trying to build opposition to privacy regulation. If you used a header not much would change because you’d have businesses arguing that the header could be set by accident or that the standard names didn’t represent their situation exactly. There’s a social problem here which can’t be solved with an IETF draft.
The other thing that used to deluge my work account was mailings as a result of tradeshows which I attended a lot of. I get far fewer on my personal email although that will probably pick up as I use it now for a small consulting business.
I know of two hedge funds who buy these claims at a discount and pursue them. If you aren’t concerned with your credit score it probably isn’t a problem; I doubt either sues.
Businesses have customers whose cards have been declining, e.g. someone who used Privacy.com to rotate the card number but never actually cancelled their contract. The fund buys those claims for unpaid bills for pennies on the dollar. They then send collection notices to collect those bills. If you don’t pay, it goes to collections, which is reportable to the credit reporting agencies.
Came up in a personal discussion where I admitted I sometimes do this with my Apple Card.
Essentially the same business model as medical junk debt and patent trolling.
While we're at it, extend CANSPAM to physical mail as well so we can clean up the massive environmental burden of companies abusing the US Postal Service for marketing.
(Note, I edited the language on my physical spam rant).
I was reminded of this recenntly when I saw a "hack" on how to cancel your Planet Fitness membership. As many would know, these gyms make it incredibly hard to cancel a subscription. It's their entire business model. Anyway, the "hack" is to set your address to somewhere in California, set your local gym to one near there and then you can use a hidden URL to cancel online without having to speak to anyone.
Why? Because CA passed a law that says that if you can sign up online, you have to be able to cancel online [1].
[1]: https://www.consumerprotectionreview.com/2021/11/california-...
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I think the easier solution is to let individuals sue these companies for their time. You sent me X spam emails or made me spend Y hours to cancel, so pay me Z thousand dollars for inconvenience. Once the financial incentive of putting people into black design patterns is removed, the practice will quickly disappear.
I think it's a better pattern to normalize decentralized identifiers (DID), wherein the process of unsubscribing is actually just the user revoking the unique identifier/alias that a company uses to communicate with them.
Lots of other cool use cases and benefits to this technology as well.
It’s small, but when you click on it it works.
I don't want to receive calls and emails for the rest of my life just because I donated to a candidate once.
I should have to proactively choose to opt in, before I receive any marketing emails.
Mail spam? That's so 1998-2010s.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-email-mess...
This is a Biden administration initiative; the latest step in consistent hard work to free US residents from corporate "heads we win, tails you lose" dark patterns.
Turns out, they hadn't really had anyone ask to delete their data before, and didn't really know what to do or even who inside their own company was responsible.
It's not just about regulatory (stick) incentives, there needs to be a shift marketing-wise towards privacy (carrot). It can be a differentiator and marketers specifically – who trade in the false religion of targeted advertising – should adjust their brand marketing strategy towards the growing awareness amongst consumers about how their data is used, especially now that so much of it is being used to line the pockets of companies who've slapped "now with AI" stickers on their boxes.
While they're at it, the FCC needs to much more clearly define the rules around what can be included in a transactional email. I'm getting a lot of supposedly transactional emails that are mostly advertisements. Perhaps they've defined this already, and it's an enforcement issue. Whatever; fix it please.
:
> Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, said in an emailed statement that Adobe disagrees with the lawsuit’s characterization of its business and “we will refute the FTC’s claims in court.”
Gross.
But back to topic of the headline — make it easier to click 'unsubscribe'? Why not instead make it harder to click 'subscribe' in the first place?
Thanks internet, for giving us this shitty opt-out world we live in now.
Membership programs and magazine subscriptions already existed well before Internet.
That coupled with the BS I’ve had to deal with sending SMS’s the fully respect “STOP”’s is infuriating.
Frankly the US Govt could apply this to marriage too…