[HN Gopher] US Government wants to make it easier for you to cli...
___________________________________________________________________
US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the
'unsubscribe' button
Author : speckx
Score : 416 points
Date : 2024-08-12 12:46 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| hypeatei wrote:
| Nice. I also wish deleting accounts was easier so that you don't
| have to read support FAQs and eventually find the email to send
| the deletion request to and wait days before being acknowledged
| and pestered for a "reason" you're leaving.
| noneeeed wrote:
| What gets me is that I'm way more likely to return to or
| recommend a service that I know I can easily cancel. Most of
| the streaming services are pretty good for this and I'm much
| happier returning to them because of that and will happily
| recommend them.
|
| 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.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I cancelled my Jetbrains subscription a while back because I
| wasn't using any of their products for my current work. They
| made the process so easy that I will consider going back to
| them in a heartbeat when I next have need of their offerings.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Similar experience after my second marriage ended with
| cancelling Netflix... I didn't even mind their once a
| quarter "we're still here" emails. Too many will spam you
| multiple times a week on top of being painful to cancel.
|
| 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.
| cchi_co wrote:
| This process can be really tedious too
| nickburns wrote:
| I understand TFA is about unsubscribing from paid services or
| subscriptions. But still relevant to this discussion--I don't
| even click marketing 'unsubscribe' links anymore unless it points
| to the entity's second level domain. And even then, 9/10 times
| the link is merely CNAME'ed to some third-party known data
| broker's 2LD. These links have basically turned into a form of
| data collection unto themselves. I.e., 'is anybody home?'
|
| 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.
| jwally wrote:
| Can't recommend privacy.com enough for literally this use case.
| If I have to spend more than five minutes trying to figure out
| how to cancel - I'm just turning off my card...
| dynm wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've had terrible experiences with
| privacy.com. Lots of dark patterns, and suddenly demanded a
| picture with photo ID while holding the account hostage.
| Strongly suggest avoiding.
| criddell wrote:
| I think most of the times that works and companies don't pursue
| the small amounts, but turning off the card doesn't actually
| end the agreement between you and the company. It could end up
| on your credit report.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _turning off the card doesn 't actually end the agreement
| between you and the company_
|
| 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| Can you detail a bit more? What funds? what do they do
| exactly?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what do they do exactly?_
|
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Makes (insane) financial sense.
|
| Essentially the same business model as medical junk debt
| and patent trolling.
| jwally wrote:
| Not a silver bullet solution for sure. Gyms especially. But
| for SAAS services, tv type subscriptions, etc - it works
| well. Ymmv.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I haven't used privacy.com but I recall some one saying you
| can put whatever name you want on the service, which sounded
| implausible to me. On the other hand, a prepaid debit card
| can do the same thing so maybe it was true. Obviously this
| wouldn't work for all services though.
| jmyeet wrote:
| This is what government is for. It's why I can't (and don't) take
| any libertarians seriously. You can't Yelp review your way into
| regulating society. It's just so naive and silly.
|
| 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-...
| pptr wrote:
| App stores solved this problem long ago without any help from
| the government.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| No they didn't. At all. I can't unsubscribe to a wide variety
| things in an App Store. Indeed, one reason apps want to have
| control over their own payment processing is so they don't
| have to follow App Store rules for stuff like this. Moreover,
| App Stores are a bit of a local monopoly that has the power
| to dictate terms to their hosted apps. So the only way to
| solve this problem seems to be edicts from a controlling
| authority.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Anecdotally:
|
| 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.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I've stopped unsubscribing to emails I didn't sign up for and
| just send to spam. It hurts their "reputation" score and wastes
| their money (however small amount). I encourage people to stop
| unsubscribing and just send it to spam.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I'm almost as severe. I look for an unsubscribe button in the
| email. I click it. If I am not immediately unsubscribed from
| everything, I mark the email as spam.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I won't do business with companies that spam me.
|
| 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.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| This is admirable and I agree in principle. Based on what
| I've seen, I'm surprised there are any companies you find
| suitable to do business online with. I would like to
| follow your path, but have been unable to without making
| significant compromises.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Ugh my student loans went to a new servicer who I swear
| to god is paid by the email sent to me. I get an email
| letting me know when the payment is coming out (hint:
| it's the same numeric day as last month, plus or minus a
| day to account for non-banking weekend days) and the
| amount (hint: it's the same amount it always is, because
| that's how payments work) and then I get an email from
| them after my payment completes and then I get an email
| from them every time someone changes a punctuation mark
| in the roughly 400 pages of horseshit that I signed when
| I was 18 years old to get an education, and of course the
| fucking MESSAGES.
|
| "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
| bbarnett wrote:
| This is what gets me. Are you going to take out _another_
| student loan, because of engagement? EG, spam, and their
| name on your mind.
|
| Of course not!
|
| Yet there's a marketing (eg, engagement) department
| thinking up this junk.
| ghaff wrote:
| With respect to the first part of your comment, I'd much
| prefer overcommunication of financial transactions about
| to happen and acknowledgement that they did rather than
| the other way about. And some communication about changes
| in Ts&Cs is often required. Those often come by physical
| mail. A lot of people here probably prefer _more_
| notifications about things like credit card transactions.
| I don 't personally but many do even if it means a lot
| more routine email.
| bbarnett wrote:
| This is all well and good, if it can be turned _off_ if
| set.
|
| 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.
| downut wrote:
| I get spam newsletters that I never signed up for from my
| alma mater, the GaTech ChE school. The tiny unsubscribe
| button 404s! Into the spam bucket it goes.
| mrWiz wrote:
| If I get more emails after unsubscribing I file a complaint
| with the FTC, then forward the response I get from the FTC
| to support@<spammer.com>. So far that has a 100% success
| rate.
| voytec wrote:
| I have different reasons for not doing it: unsubscribing
| usually requires opening a website riddled with tracking,
| thus running potentially dangerous code on your device.
| Secondly, it confirms that your address is active and that
| SPAM message was read. Unsubscribing from one garbage can
| result in being added on several other garbage spam lists.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Yes, I go a little further. If I get more emails than I
| consider acceptable (even if I signed up originally), I mark
| it as spam. call me mean, but this is my email address and if
| you're gonna send me endless spam emails which obviously no
| one actually wants, then you're spam.
| th3w3bmast3r wrote:
| Same - I've given up unsubscribing and sending it straight to
| spam. Especially if I never signed up for it in the first
| place.
|
| 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....
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Me too. I don't care if it's a "legit" business. Unsolicited
| bulk email is spam, period. If I wanted to receive junk mail,
| I would have signed up for that explicitly, which I most
| assuredly did not, no matter how many other products or
| services I might have purchased from that sender in the past.
| ghaff wrote:
| It can also lead to emails that other people did want getting
| routed to their spam folder which they never look at.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I make extra-sure to do this to political fundraising.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| B -> Yes, unless the unsubscribe link gets caught by your pi-
| hole or adguard blocklists :-(
| jfengel wrote:
| I get vastly less spam. Gmail just plain deletes most of it
| without even dumping it into the spam folder. It's down from
| thousands a month to dozens.
|
| 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.)
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| That's a temporary reprieve. Gmail started hard-requiring an
| x-unsubscribe header for anyone that sends more than a couple
| hundred emails to gmail. It isn't hard to put in, it's just
| that the lower effort mailers need to adjust and don't have
| visibility on their own spam rates.
| 42lux wrote:
| I get like 10 Uber mails over the weekend. It's infuriating.
|
| >> 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.
| thevillagechief wrote:
| I got an email from CrowdStrike Communications by George Kurtz
| about the root cause analysis for the Channel File 291 incident
| on my personal email. I was sure it was some scam but it looks
| absolutely legit with the Gmail blue check. I don't remember
| ever signing up for any CrowdStrike communication or product.
| Are they just sending these to everyone in the world?
| organsnyder wrote:
| I got the same email. Never been a CrowdStrike customer or
| even (that I remember) had any contact with a sales rep. They
| must've blasted that to every list they had.
| briffle wrote:
| those one click to unsubscribe buttons are broken in most I
| try, because my ad-blockers won't let me go to the marketing
| page.. Why Can't I reply back to the email to unsubscribe?
| pretty much anyone that sends me marketing texts allows me to
| reply back STOP to unsubscribe.. why Do I have to use a
| different tool/channel for email?
| wincy wrote:
| The most persistent emails I've gotten are from being Mormon at
| some point in my life, and familysearch.com has some special
| Mormons only mailing list that you'll get re added to no matter
| how many times you unsubscribe. It's kind of hilarious in a way
| to speculate why (Mormon church actually has a pretty good IT
| team in my experience, my guess is some automated system syncs
| over emails from Mormon church roles to the familysearch
| website which I think is owned by the church) but also
| irritating. I finally had to mark it as spam.
| foobarchu wrote:
| Yes another reason the LDS church is a business and should be
| taxed as such
| kotaKat wrote:
| Keep in mind the LDS used to have an internal wiki page about
| "Locating people"...
| al_borland wrote:
| My biggest issue is they no longer ask, or they do ask and
| don't respect the user's choice. I always uncheck the
| email/signup checkbox. Yet I still get the emails. Some simply
| sign the user up by default and then taking the position that
| the user can unsubscribe if they don't want them.
|
| 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.
| pembrook wrote:
| This legislation is about making it easier to cancel
| subscription payment services, not emails.
|
| 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.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Regular T&C spam? Mark it as spam. If enough people do this,
| that company will have problems getting e-mails through at all.
| meroes wrote:
| Safeway told me it takes 10 days to stop receiving marketing
| emails. WTF is that. Also it's been more than 10 days. Blocked
| and reported spam. But I have a feeling Gmail is completely in
| bed with big advertisers so reporting through it does nothing
| to their scores.
| AShyFig wrote:
| It's funny you mention PitViper, because they are by far the
| worst offender in my inbox. I've unsubscribed multiple times,
| I've marked as spam multiple times, yet somehow I still get the
| occasional marketing message in my Gmail inbox.
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| driverdan wrote:
| It's because the CAN-SPAM act is rarely enforced. All of those
| promotional emails are illegal but the government and service
| providers don't anything about it.
| jfengel wrote:
| Ah, not just unsubscribe from a mailing list, but cancel a
| recurring payment.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's the bigger deal and the target of these TBA proposed
| rules. Legit (and even not so legit) retailers and mailing
| lists tend to be pretty easy to unsubscribe from and Gmail
| files the majority of retailer, etc. mailings in the Promotions
| tab anyway that I just glance at from time to time unless
| there's something interesting. (I used to use a separate email
| account when I ordered things but that became more trouble than
| it was worth.)
|
| 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.
| Spoom wrote:
| That would be great, and if enforced well will make gyms in
| particular wake up and take notice.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I would like to see this taken one step further. Anything you can
| opt in to should be legally required to be at least as easy to
| opt out of, whether that's a gym membership, tracking cookies,
| online subscriptions, you name it. If I can join in a click, but
| have to send a physical letter to a hidden department in the
| basement of a now defunct military base then none of that should
| ever fly.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Unsubscribe is one of the best working privacy rules we have.
|
| It's small, but when you click on it it works.
| jwally wrote:
| I find it extra ironic that experian is now pimping a service to
| aggregate and cancel your subscriptions - but if I want to freeze
| my children's credit reports I have to have a notarized original
| of their birth certificate and bring it to committee before they
| will approve. I'm exaggerating obviously, but not by much.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/requesting-a-sec...
|
| >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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Have you tried to do it? There's a lot of "We found an
| unspecified discrepancy in your submitted documentation and
| are unable to service your request. Please resubmit after
| fixing the unspecified problem" dark responses from credit
| bureaus.
|
| 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).
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have done it for two kids at all 3 bureaus with no
| issues. Probably spent 15min filling out the forms and
| mailing the envelopes.
|
| > 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I could see this being the first big challenge to executive
| branch regulations after Chevron was overturned.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > In June, the Justice Department, referred by the FTC, filed a
| lawsuit against software maker Adobe and two of its executives
|
| :
|
| > 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.
| hk__2 wrote:
| > Thanks internet, for giving us this shitty opt-out world we
| live in now.
|
| Membership programs and magazine subscriptions already existed
| well before Internet.
| nytesky wrote:
| What is the shopping cart service that follows me around the web,
| where if I put something in a cart, then walk away I get email
| about it. Without even signing in, often it's a new to me
| retailer, but they use one of those cart nagging checkout
| services? Can I turn that off?
| cromulent wrote:
| At least one of them is LeadFeeder - they aggregate information
| from many sites and then can match your IP etc with an existing
| email.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Can I turn that off?
|
| Clear cookies when you're done browsing.
| litenboll wrote:
| Disclosure: I only read up until it was revealed what the policy
| was.
|
| 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...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "As easy to cancel as it is to sign up"
|
| Hm, I would prefer two-step sign up to one-step unsubscribe.
| litenboll wrote:
| Sure, but it's a minimum. Also, the incentive here is aligned
| with what's best for the customer, i.e. they probably want to
| make their two step subscription process to become one step
| which automatically gives the user an easier process to
| unsubscribe.
| pbasista wrote:
| Why the asymmetry? And what do you have in mind when you
| refer to "two-step sign up"?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| For my convenience; and by two-step sign up I mean "enter
| my e-mail into a form, then receive a confirmation e-mail
| and click on a confirmation link to be actually
| subscribed".
| fckgw wrote:
| Are you confusing this with email newsletter
| subscriptions? This is talking about paid membership
| services, the kind of thing where you need an account and
| often payment methods.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes :) Sorry.
| misstuned wrote:
| The same goes for all services. I was able to sign up for an
| ISP service (in the UK) online very easily, with a few clicks
| and entries onto a form to enter my details, choose my
| installation date, choose my speed, etc. Fast forward a few
| years, I'm leaving that house and need to cancel the internet -
| snail mail letter needed.
| litenboll wrote:
| It's similar here in Sweden. Usually they require a call to
| support, officially. However, I think there is a law/policy
| that require them to accept unsubscriptions by mail/message,
| regardless of what they say on their website. I recently did
| this and it worked! Maybe there's something similar in the
| UK?
| eckesicle wrote:
| Yes that's right. You can unsubscribe by any which way you
| want. Mail, phone call, pigeon. Any message sent to any
| employee or office in anyway is deemed acceptable for
| giving notice for any service or contract.
| nanoservices wrote:
| There is zero incentive for a company to invest in tooling
| and tech to make processes that lose them customers more
| efficient. This is something that has to be regulated and
| enforced. I just don't see a c-suit clamoring to spend money
| on making it easier to leave.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| The harder they make leaving, the less % chance that I'm
| ever coming back.
|
| But I suppose they know and don't care.
| tialaramex wrote:
| There _is_ a reason to invest in this, the rationale goes
| as follows: Some of my customers will legitimately need to
| cancel, unsubscribe, stop using, or whatever, but they
| _like_ the product. If I piss these customers off, they may
| recommend against using it, and refuse to ever use it again
| so I should accept that they 're leaving with grace and
| maybe they'll return later. You can offer to "pause" a
| subscription for example, "Posted to Amundsen-Scott+ for
| six months? Alas Swim Fun Inc don't have a pool there, but
| when you get back just hit resume and you can keep the same
| pricing, meanwhile we won't charge you".
|
| 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.
| usrbinnooo wrote:
| I was pretty sure we'd abandoned the "but it would hurt
| the business and they'd change their ways" fantasy years
| ago, because a) it doesn't, and be) they don't. How's
| Equifax doing these days? Oh yeah, totally fine.
| mau013 wrote:
| This.
|
| 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.
| reginald78 wrote:
| I avoid subscription services like the plague because of
| this (and other reasons).
|
| 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.
| intended wrote:
| I am also very surprised that this is the case in the UK.
| From my experience, it was very easy to cancel internet in
| the UK. As in nearly dead simple.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Counter-anecdote: cancelling my Virgin Media plan was very
| simple. I've clicked through their online cancellation
| process, then they've sent me a prepaid return box for the
| modem, and that was it.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I spent literally hours over several days on hold to cancel
| and when googling it this was widespread and hated.
|
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| I was shocked when I canceled cable TV and the landline
| on my Comcast triple-play plan--still have internet.
|
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| Nah they famously still do this thing where you have to
| give them 30 days notice and they will call you 2-3 times
| to get you to stay.
| al_borland wrote:
| I tried to delete a Sony account (I had 2). Their site said
| to talk to support to get this done. I waited for 45 minutes,
| finally got to someone and they said I can't. When I tried to
| mention the support site, they disconnected me, throwing me
| back in a 45 minute line if I felt like being hung up on
| again.
|
| For a company that has been hacked multiple times, I find
| this unacceptable.
| tengbretson wrote:
| I had an internet service that could be signed up for on the
| internet, but required a phone call to cancel. During covid
| they could not staff their phone service properly so it was
| effectively broken (20 minute holds, getting booted from the
| queue, etc.), so I just closed the card and told them to
| pound sand.
| echelon wrote:
| > For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need
| some documents
|
| 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?
| litenboll wrote:
| Maybe I described it in a bad way. I'm talking about
| renegotiating the interest rate with another bank. So the
| original bank loan is not moved in practice, it's just paid
| back in full. It's law here in Sweden that the mortgage plan
| can't be changed (I.e. number of years etc) if you change
| bank, so the documents are related to this.
| Spivak wrote:
| Ahh, this is called "refinancing" in the US.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| So... EU laws?
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| What EU-wide law requires it to be as easy to cancel as to
| sign up? I'm sitting in Germany right now and I'm unaware of
| any such law - though it might very well be recent and not
| fully transposed into German law, or might be situational or
| not widely complied with.
|
| It's a good idea though, absolutely.
| mtmail wrote:
| We have the regulation in Germany, but afaik it's not EU-
| wide. The "Gesetz uber faire Verbrauchervertrage" basically
| says that if something can be subscribed to easily online,
| then the company also has to provide an easy unsubscribe.
| It goes into detail how such a button should look like, how
| labelled, what data the confirmation page has to list and
| how fast the confirmation has to be (immediate).
| tomschwiha wrote:
| I believe the EU law sets the minimum required conditions
| for contracts (fair, not abusing the customer), but the
| individual EU-countries can implement more consumer
| friendly rules.
| patrickk wrote:
| It's horrendus in Germany trying to cancel a mobile phone
| subscription, internet service, gym membership or the
| likes. You have to jump through hoops like sending a
| registered physical letter, 3 months before the end of the
| service period for it to be considered a valid cancellation
| ("Kundigung"). Without this, you're forced into paying for
| another year.
|
| EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer
| nonsense.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| This is no longer true, it is limited to a one month
| period (after a possible 2 year minimum contract to offer
| "special discounts") in advance and every contract can be
| cancelled online.
| tomschwiha wrote:
| There is a law that requires that subscriptions can be
| cancelled online within "the click of a button" with
| automatic confirmation. (since 2022) If no such option to
| cancel is implemented by the provider the minimum contract
| duration is void and you can cancel immediately.
|
| German reference:
| https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/vertraege-
| reklamation/kue...
| efitz wrote:
| I have been trying to get my state legislators to implement
| such a consumer law for over a decade.
|
| 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)
| qingcharles wrote:
| I agree with the bit about individual cause of action, as
| long as it includes attorney fees too, as that is the way to
| go from having to file yourself, to getting juicy lawyers
| lined up to make bank (from my experience litigating FOIA).
|
| 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
| eckesicle wrote:
| Swedish legislation has it right here. You can unsubscribe by
| any means you prefer. Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your
| local newspaper, carrier pigeon. The choice is completely with
| the party who wishes to terminate the agreement.
|
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper,
| carrier pigeon.
|
| 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...
| BartjeD wrote:
| Just what you receive, i'd assume. Where reception is a
| legal definition.
|
| 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.
| fsckboy wrote:
| "legal notice in a newspaper" is still very much a thing in
| common law jurisdictions, with a long history, see banns
| going way back https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns
|
| 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._
| dataflow wrote:
| I am well aware of that, but there is a _very_ huge and
| crucial difference between putting something in the
| newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for
| the sake of making sure _one_ specific known private
| entity gets the information. The only case I can recall
| off the top of my head for the latter is for things like
| service of judicial papers, and even then as a last
| resort, only when direct attempts to reach the party have
| failed. I am not aware of a single case where a party
| that is already reasonably reachable has to monitor
| public media for private communication.
| usrbinnooo wrote:
| And yet, in the US, you can have process servers publish
| a notice in a very specific law newspaper that only
| lawyers ever read, then claim that you couldn't reach
| someone who would never in their life read such a
| newspaper for decades simply to see if they've been
| served.
|
| 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| As I mentioned, AFAIK that's only as a last resort once
| you've been unreachable via other means, which doesn't
| sound ridiculous at all. Is that not the case?
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _there is a very huge and crucial difference between
| putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public
| dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one
| specific known private entity gets the information_
|
| 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
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local
| newspaper in every customer's area?
|
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| > by any means you prefer
|
| 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!
| litenboll wrote:
| Yes, that's true and it's good for those who know about it.
| It's not enough though, companies still have super easy sign
| ups and then refer to call customer service to unsubscribe
| (usually the case with cell phone plans for example). And
| many companies have no email or contact form, only a phone
| number available on their site. So there's still lots of room
| for improvement.
| kwanbix wrote:
| This is how it works in Argentina. For at least 15 years IIRC.
| nerdjon wrote:
| My only concern about this is the signup processes that already
| take multiple pages anyways.
|
| 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.
| litenboll wrote:
| Yeah I agree with this, it's a very good point. Of course a
| real law needs more narrow wording. The spirit of it should
| be more about not allowing companies to have different means
| for subscribing and unsubscribing. Then there can be
| additional rules that prevent them from convoluting the
| process more than necessary.
| intended wrote:
| I think this counts as over thinking. Unsubscribing is MILES
| harder in many countries. The unsubscribe link is buried in
| some unknown sub menu, customer support dumps you, or the
| like.
|
| 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.
| lttlrck wrote:
| Why more than one-click? We already have plenty of examples of
| this working, everyone else needs to get on board.
| atoav wrote:
| I still recall a big reputable newspaper that was approaching
| students with free sample subscriptions to their newspaper. The
| sign up was super simple, to end the subscription you had to do
| the telephone equivalent of getting through a maze blindfolded
| while sacrificing your first born when the stars aligned right.
|
| 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.
| sureIy wrote:
| > As easy to cancel as it is to sign up
|
| 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.
| fckgw wrote:
| How would you unsubscribe from a subscription service without
| logging in and confirming your account?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Until they require you to dig out your CC and input the number
| and the cvv code to cancel, which shouldn't be needed, but hey,
| it's "as easy" as signing up. ;-)
|
| 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?
| jpalawaga wrote:
| The US government needs actual anti spam laws.
|
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| TFA is not about unsubscribing from email newsletters, it's
| about cancelling paid subscriptions.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I'd bet good money that any new rule will not apply to political-
| related spam. Unsubscribing from a political party's various
| fundraising schemes will no doubt remain next to impossible. We
| can complain about "dark money" all day, but how many of the
| superpac schemes we setup simply to avoid the inevitable
| spam/marketing associated with political donations?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| It's nice when the government improves the quality of life for
| regular people at the expense of businesses who are using dark
| patterns. I'll be sure to remember this in November.
|
| Here's more info on the initiative:
| https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
| TimedToasts wrote:
| Call me when it's more than wishful thinking and promises
| Spivak wrote:
| This isn't some would-be candidate saying something on the
| campaign trail, this is the FCC and FTC taking the first
| steps toward rulemaking.
|
| You should consider this rule to be as at least as real as a
| bill going through congress with broad bipartisan support.
| bredren wrote:
| The timing of this and other announcements is not by accident
| though.
|
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Personally, I don't care _when_ the government does something
| generally favorable. If you think this is _just_ a vote grab,
| I would invite you to consider similar consumer protection
| action by this administration, most recently around junk
| fees, whose timing was not really around a general election.
|
| 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.
| sizzle wrote:
| Long overdue reforms. Godspeed to the government to push it
| through.
| layer8 wrote:
| This sounds similar to the law that was enacted in Germany two
| years ago: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-
| two-click...
| h4ckerle wrote:
| This works very well here. Just visit the website of thing you
| want canceled, scroll to the footer, click vertrag kundigen and
| you get a form to cancel, I have done it a few times now and
| it's 1000x better than searching in some customer portal or
| even worse calling. Good for the US.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Okay, but now do political emails. They're not subject to
| CANSPAM.
|
| 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.
| mtmail wrote:
| The article is not about emails or phone calls, it's about
| cancelling paid subscriptions.
| fnbr wrote:
| I hate how every company that I place an order with treats that
| as permission to send a constant drip of marketing emails. I send
| them straight to spam.
| mtmail wrote:
| The article is not about emails, it's about cancelling paid
| subscriptions.
| bencagri wrote:
| Nice improvement! The U.S. government's move to make the
| 'unsubscribe' button more accessible is a step in the right
| direction, bringing it closer to what Turkey has already
| implemented. In Turkey, regulations ensure that users can easily
| opt out of unwanted emails with a straightforward click,
| minimizing the hassle of digging through convoluted unsubscribe
| processes. This user-friendly approach has been effective in
| giving Turkish users more control over their digital lives, and
| it's encouraging to see the U.S. catching up. For web users like
| me, this means a cleaner, more manageable inbox and a better
| overall online experience.
| layer8 wrote:
| TFA is not about unwanted emails, it's about cancelling paid
| subscriptions.
| bencagri wrote:
| still i get emails from the services i never subscribed. this
| also should prevent "selling lists" aka selling consent.
| layer8 wrote:
| Sure, but that's not the topic of this HN submission.
| 23B1 wrote:
| It took me six months to cancel and erase my data for Oura Ring.
| I was absolutely infuriated and ended up spamming the executive
| team until I got an answer.
|
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| Better than doing a policy fix is to regulate credit card
| companies to offer you to show your subscriptions and cancel
| them, without asking the service offeror.
| solfox wrote:
| "As easy to cancel as it is to sign up"
|
| Frankly the US Govt could apply this to marriage too...
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| While I completely agree with the legislation, why isn't this
| going through congress? Update the CAN-SPAM act to be more
| substantial.
| fckgw wrote:
| This isn't about emails.
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| I'm curious to hear from a lawyer whether the undoing of Chevron
| Deference will undermine these efforts.
| exabrial wrote:
| Rather than adding additional regulation (which rarely works,
| just look at Apple vs EU), the only change needed is to allow
| individuals to sue under the CANSPAM act. Fairly certain you'd
| see an immediate change in behavior. Right now, only State AGs
| can sue.
|
| 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).
| christina97 wrote:
| It's not abuse of the USPS. It's literally a product they sell:
| to spam everyone in an area with analytics and all.
| theptip wrote:
| The correct policy here is not mandating a "button" or even "the
| same number of steps to unsubscribe as to subscribe", rather the
| government should just mandate adherence to a simple protocol.
| Then we can just unsubscribe in our mail clients (gmail already
| tries to do this).
|
| 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.
| fckgw wrote:
| This isn't about emails.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The obvious solution is to make it illegal to automatically
| subscribe people to non-transactional emails just by signing up
| to use a service. 99% of the things I have to unsubscribe to are
| lists I got signed up for without ever knowing about them,
| usually just by making an account on a website. The idea that
| it's my responsibility to unsubscribe to something I never
| actually subscribed to is the problem.
|
| 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.
| didaway wrote:
| This is a great policy but I think we have seen that the actual
| implementations of privacy preserving sentiments seldom play out
| in the favor of the public.
|
| 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.
| mtmail wrote:
| There's no privacy aspect. The article is about unsubscribing
| from (paid) services, not communication. Usually when somebody
| subscribes to a service the user gives the company their full
| address and payment information.
| unixhero wrote:
| Unsubscribe is not the issue anymore. It is algorithmic tracking
| of you as a person, and also any AI based services Ok top of
| that.
|
| Mail spam? That's so 1998-2010s.
| kingnothing wrote:
| How about legislation that makes it so I have to explicitly
| subscribe in the first place? I do not want your sales emails
| just because I bought one thing from your store one time.
| fckgw wrote:
| This is not about emails
| est wrote:
| There needs to be some kind of DNS records so I can cancel emails
| based on sender domains.
| tpjwm wrote:
| Can we also make it so if you can sign-up to a gym membership
| online, you can cancel online?
| artursapek wrote:
| This is great. Never forget the scumbag companies that have been
| making it frustrating to unsubscribe without this regulation (NY
| Times, WSJ)
| ciroduran wrote:
| Re: hidden fees, I still do not understand why most US purchases
| treat tax as if it does not exist until you're at the cashier.
| You have to sort of know what the state tax is (I'm not a US
| resident, so I do not have that information at hand), and then do
| the calculation mentally. I think this is quite disfavourable to
| consumers.
| jedberg wrote:
| That's exactly why it's done that way. Because the tax is
| different in every state, county, city, and sometimes an even
| smaller region. There is something like 2,500 different tax
| jurisdictions in the USA.
|
| 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.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Many other countries have all-inclusive prices. Most of
| Europe from my experience. I wonder, how do they handle it?
| One solution could be to price things such that any amount of
| tax is included in the margin so the price is standard but
| profitability varies in minute ways between locations (which
| it does anyway due to labor, transportation, advertising
| density, etc.).
| Veuxdo wrote:
| > One solution could be to price things such that any
| amount of tax is included in the margin so the price is
| standard but profitability varies in minute ways between
| locations
|
| 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.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| The highest sales tax in California that I can find is
| 10.750% (lowest 7.50%). The highest in Wyoming is 6%
| (lowest 5%). That's not a wide spread. On many MANY items
| the existing profit margin is north of 30%, but even
| leaving that aside. Adding %10 to your base price to have
| a single price just means that in lower tax markets
| you're making more money. There's no obvious situation
| where you make less unless you intentionally under price
| your products and it eats into your margin.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I imagine companies don't have a standard price across all
| of Europe, so smaller differences within a country are
| handled more smoothly.
|
| 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.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| But they probably have a standard price across all of,
| let's say, The Netherlands. How many companies advertise
| across country lines? Is that a big problem? This feels
| very much like one of those "it's only a problem in the
| US" things where other countries have figured it out but
| Americans keep playing dumb about it.
| tzs wrote:
| > That's exactly why it's done that way. Because the tax is
| different in every state, county, city, and sometimes an even
| smaller region. There is something like 2,500 different tax
| jurisdictions in the USA.
|
| 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...
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| By ignoring it until checkout it lets vendors put lower prices
| on the shelf which encourages more spending. It is
| intentionally disfavorable to consumers.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| One could argue that including the taxes in the price makes
| it less obvious how much tax the government is collecting -
| which is disadvantageous to taxpayers.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| Tax rates are still published and could still be included
| in line items on the receipt. Like in Europe. the price on
| the rack is so the consumer understands their out-of-pocket
| costs. The price on the receipt gives a breakdown between
| the product and the VAT.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Interstate mail order used to be untaxed. That was the benefit
| that offset the extra cost of shipping. You order from the
| Montgomery Ward warehouse in Illinois and ship it to your state
| tax free. Some states expected voluntary reporting despite
| federal law clearly indicating they don't have a valid claim on
| interstate trade. Nobody actually did that. The rise of Amazon
| led to capitulation and the federal courts have made bad
| decisions ignoring federal law such that online vendors are
| expected to collect tax even when the business has no nexus in
| the destination state.
| jedberg wrote:
| We've had this in California for a couple of years now. It's
| great! Cancelling subscriptions has been a breeze since it
| passed.
|
| 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.
| bcherny wrote:
| Unless you're an iPhone user and it's a promotional email from
| Apple, in which case there is no way to unsubscribe ("3 free
| months of Apple Arcade!")..
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| That's not a subscription you're cancelling though? Isn't
| this law about cancelling a subscription, not about
| ads/"promotional email"?
| bcherny wrote:
| That's fair -- Apple might be in violation of CAN-SPAM, but
| not the proposed law.
| jedberg wrote:
| This is about unsubscribing from services. And in California,
| it's super easy to cancel Apple Arcade.
| blululu wrote:
| This is a consumer protection law that California has simply
| nailed. A simply copy/paste of the CA law to a Federal level
| would be a serious win. The experience of trying to cancel
| subscriptions/servies in say New York is outrageous by
| comparison.
| eBombzor wrote:
| Cable and mobile plans first and foremost. Those are the worst
| offenders by far.
| cik wrote:
| I've long since given up on this. I write email filters. I sign
| up for things under my Fake Name. Unsubscribing is an amazing
| crapshoot, especially when years later something you know you've
| unsubscribed from, because you have the email confirmation
| happens to send an "oops" email. Filtering email is the only
| thing that works, and ever since I adopted this approach I'm down
| to an average of zero marketing mails a week. I'll stay here.
| fckgw wrote:
| This isn't about emails.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I wish I could unsubscribe from the political SMS messages that I
| never subscribed to in the first place (they all address someone
| with a different name than mine). No amount of "STOP" or
| reporting as spam will stem the tide. I get 2-3 of these a day
| minimum, they just hop to a new number when I block one of the
| numbers. I'd love to find who is providing this sending
| infrastructure and sue them but I done have the time/energy.
|
| That coupled with the BS I've had to deal with sending SMS's the
| fully respect "STOP"'s is infuriating.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Start with the New York Times, I like their paper, but not their
| subscriber retention policies.
| o32845o234j wrote:
| One time, like a decade ago, I went through my inbox and clicked
| all the unsubscribe buttons from the previous month. The quantity
| of junk mail I got over the subsequent month exploded. I'm pretty
| sure the majority of the time you click an "unsubscribe" button,
| the person you're unsubscribing from sells your info to other
| companies with the "this is a real living person, they clicked on
| our button" label. I just put everything in spam now. I don't
| trust anyone.
| cchi_co wrote:
| That sounds frustrating.
| cchi_co wrote:
| I just don't understand. If I want to unsubscribe from a list or
| subscription service, I'll do it anyway. Does such a system
| really work, and are there people who don't unsubscribe?
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Unrelated: but can we also force websites to have SIMPLE settings
| pages? has anyone tried to change ANYTHING at all from a facebook
| page via settings? how is that legal?
| toss1 wrote:
| Let's be clear about this; credit where due: this is NOT simply
| "The US Government".
|
| 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.
| jmugan wrote:
| Organizations seem to create new lists faster than I can
| unsubscribe.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| It is very easy to set up filters to make emails coming from some
| sender to automatically skip the inbox.
|
| https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-email-mess...
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Apply the same to political candidates, campaigns, and PACs and
| I'll consider taking it seriously.
| sushid wrote:
| I can't wait to see this law enacted by 2040.
| dkga wrote:
| This would be awesome. Another thing on my wish list is a
| requirement to simply reject all cookies, a la lynx. I absolutely
| hate having to deselect some cookies while feeling like I am
| treated as an idiot for accepting "absolutely essential" cookies
| that are of course not essential at all.
| butz wrote:
| How about making it harder to subscribe with email address that
| you do not own? Some silly sausage is using my email address
| while shopping and I am receiving their clothing receipts. I am
| still convinced, that clicking "unsubscribe" only provides
| information that email address is used and that leads to even
| more spam from even more unusual places. E.g. fake dating
| websites, where new one is created almost each month just to be
| replaced by another. And they keep sending a lot of spam.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| I think it should've been worded as "easier than signing up" not
| as easy as. Companies will now make you go through 5 different
| simple pages so that they can make the account deletion harder.
|
| 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.
| beryilma wrote:
| It is my policy these days to investigate how easy it is to
| cancel/delete a service or subscription before I register for it,
| which is incidentally why I will never ever be a Comcast
| customer.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-12 23:02 UTC)