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FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

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Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#411
post #404

When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…

The best part about requiring them to use the word “unsubscribe” is I can do this email rule: If an email says “unsubscribe” in it, move it to “says-unsubscribe” folder. I look at that email once a week for the false positives. Huge QoL increase.

This is brilliant. You can shunt all the brand email into a single folder.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#412

I want this "click-to-cancel" rule for any form of subscription. Everybody tries to bill you into oblivion. You must be insane if you don't use virtual credit card numbers today. I am apartment hunting right now. Most apartments don't exist and some Nigerian scammers try to make you request a "credit report" that is basically a subscription service and really difficult to cancel.

> You must be insane if you don't use virtual credit card numbers today. Virtual numbers protect against people stealing your number. They don't really do much against subscriptions. If you sign up for a service and stop paying, it gets sent to collections, and then impacts your credit score because of unpaid debt. Whether you used a virtual number or not is irrelevant. So it's not "insane" not to use virtual credit…

^ all of this is completely correct. I'll also add that many virtual credit cards that have "limits" or that let you "turn them off" work by not allowing transactions to auth, but merchants can almost always force an authorization that cannot be blocked. If you don't want to pay someone for a service you signed up for, you really do have to cancel your agreement with them, you can't just stop paying them.

I'm very excited about the new click-to-cancel rule for this reason — hopefully doing the "right" thing will be really easy and actually work.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I remember when Amazon Prime first started, I signed up for the free trial to get free shipping on something. Of course, I forgot about it and didn’t cancel, but then I got an email from Amazon saying, “hey, you didn’t cancel your prime subscription but you also haven’t used it at all, so we are going to not charge you and cancel it for now. Here is how you easily restart your subscription if you end up needing…

Early Amazon was pro-customer in a way that I think most people have forgotten. Maybe that was always the strategy? They were losing money for years, and maybe that was investing in the company, or maybe it was allowing really large losses to keep customers happy, planning all along to eventually clamp down when people were addicted. And here we are. Their return rate is still pretty terrible, IIRC. I bet they are tr…

I think it's more a matter of companies just having different focuses. If you're wondering how to grow your userbase, you're thinking fundamentally differently than if you have an established one and are wondering how to monetize them.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#414

When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…

The big difference here is that this was created by an act of Congress, not the result of a regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit. That makes it much more likely to survive administration changes or court challenges.

Even now the CAN-SPAM act feels outdated -- I do like the unsubscribe button, but I would like to see email verification made explicitly required. That in order to start emailing you, you need to send an initial engagement email saying that the organization wants to start emailing you, and requiring you to actively opt-in to emails rather than just start sending them.

This would both cut down on marketing spam as well as mistaken email addresses. Most reputable websites do email verification where you have to enter a code or click on a link, but I have a surprising number of emails that get sent to me even though I am not the person the emails were aimed at.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these sorts of contracts should be illegal. I think a lot of things around them should be, like gyms requiring you to go in-person to cancel, or offering a terrible phone service to cancel, or marketing it deceptively such that you were unaware it was a contract. But getting a discount in exchange for a longer-term commitment is often a benefit to consumers. I just paid Visible for a year of cellular se…

There are contracts that are basically impossible to terminate and offer basically no benefit to anyone, timeshares is a key example of it. A problem with our contract law is that if you get anything out of a contract it becomes really hard to terminate if the terms don't allow for it (a peppercorn). With contracts now being written in dense legalese with multiple pages of terms and conditions, it's not really feasib…

A timeshare is purchasing fractional ownership. That's different than purchasing a service.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#416

When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…

I agree for the most part, but I've still had lots of problems with them. I've found unsubscribe links that go to domains that don't resolve, or to pages that 500 or 404. I've hit unsubscribe pages where tapping the unsubscribe button doesn't actually do anything. I run into one of these once every few weeks or so.

Despite the requirement for a link in the email, of course they're going to put it at the bottom, using a smaller font, often with a font color that's closer to the background color. This is garbage. Instead we should have a standard for an email header that specifies how to unsubscribe, so that email clients can present their own unsubscribe button in a conspicuous place, and then unsubscribe the recipient without any extra interaction required. And if these links fail to work too many times, the email provider can use this as a signal to stop accepting mail from that sender entirely. (And we do have this standard header! It's called List-Unsubscribe-Post.)

But this still doesn't really go far enough. I want a full ban on sending me unsolicited marketing emails. Signing up for an account somewhere should not mean they're allowed to send me marketing emails, and any checkboxes authorizing that along the way should be initially unchecked. And they shouldn't be able to dark-pattern me into checking them by making it look like a required consent type checkbox.

Absent that, any entity that wants to market to me should have to send me an initial email confirming that I indeed want to receive their marketing emails. If I do not reply, that's considered lack of consent, and then they should not be able to try again, at all, forever.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#417

I wonder how this would work for gyms? They should clean up their act anyway. If other customers are like me I’ve been putting off joining for over a year because they’re so scammy and I don’t want to get locked in. I even went to sign up and walked out because the price ended up being double what they advertised with weird fees and the base plan not being useable once they explain it.

If you setup a "payment agreement" between yourself, the gym (or any similar service), and your credit card, you should be able to cancel that agreement and the subsequent services that agreement entailed through your credit card . The byzantine and manipulative things that gyms do are, in part, because we basically let them control the cancellation process.

It may be different now, but Planet Fitness used to ONLY allow you to set up ACH payments (e.g. bank routing and account number) and then only allow you to cancel in person. You can't dispute because it's ACH.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with the spam button is 1) they never ever go into my inbox again if they do keep sending, and 2) as someone who has had emails marked as spam (from people who actively clicked the sign up to my newsletter button) your ability to send email gets neutered pretty quickly. What is your experience?

> What is your experience? Reporting spam does not block the email from being received by my client -- it only blocks the mail from being seen in the inbox, but it still shows up in the spam box. I don't send mail that gets reported as spam in the first place. Or, if it does, then I haven't been meaningfully affected because I can still send and receive the email I want to.

I’m not sure what you expect to happen?

> I don't send mail that gets reported as spam in the first place.

I ran a newsletter where people had to opt in to receiving it. It was announce news for a video game. You only ended up on this list if you entered your email, clicked join list, and then clicked the link in the email we sent to you to confirm subscription. We had a big unsubscribe button at the very top of the email. We still regularly got people who hit report spam on us, presumably as a way of saying g they didn’t want the email anymore.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Minnesota law which provides exactly this goes into effect in 2025. https://www.allaboutadvertisinglaw.com/2024/06/minnesota-joi...

Wanted to see if it finally included taxes on price tags… but instead this law explicitly excludes taxes. So close.

The government needs to provide a service if we ever want taxes to be included. Taxes vary by city and can even depend on where you live, so sellers wouldn't be able to give you a price until you say where you are and where you're from for some sales.

That's why you basically need a third party if you run an ecommerce website, unless you have a team to track down every time a county or city changes their taxes.

Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

#420

When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are. There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the…

This really points to California being the capital of the United States. Everything happens here first and the rest of the nation then follows. Amazing.
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