Meanwhile banks are still in the dark ages.
It should have been possible to cancel right from your bank statement.
FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
551–560 of 793 posts
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#552I 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 can sign up for the gym online, then you need to be able to cancel online. That's how this rule is meant to work for all kinds of merchants. Gyms would still be free to pull their usual car-salesman shenanigans on cancellation if they're willing to only take new subscriptions on location and not online, too.
Planet Fitness makes it easy to sign up online but you will have to journey to the to the ends of the Earth to cancel your subscription.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#553When 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…
Why do unsubscribe-regulations work so well? What is the punishment for not complying and is enforcement particularly swift?
It's not just the regulation.
It's the knowledge that users will mark your messages as junk if there's no easy unsubscribe button.
With the re-centralization of email, reputation score in Outlook/Gmail is critical.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
What I have noticed companies do is resume emails after a year or so. They probably think people would forget about unsubscribing them after a year, and for the most part they are right. If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam". Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I f…
I go one step further and for the lists which I don't remember subscribing to, I never click "Unsubscribe" - it's "Spam" right away.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent. The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Ev…
The lists can be ridiculous sometimes. Many sites have an 'unsubscribe from all' option, that is basically just an unsubscribe from all CURRENT lists. Later they create another list and you end up subscribed to just that new one, even though the unsubscribe from all option is still selected. Edit: Another pet peeve is when you click the link to unsubscribe, and they want you to enter your email address. Bonus points…
Or they lie and say that the email address you provided isn't on their mailing lists. As if I hadn't just followed a link from an email they sent.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, as we all know, charging money for a blue checkmark totally solved the bot problem on Twitter.
You don't need to re-pay for the blue checkmark for everyone who reads your post. The key insight here was making it expensive for spammers, but cheap for everyone else.
The point I'm making is that is just a cost, so X is the money made from spam, and Y is how much it costs to send it, if X > Y, you're still getting spam. Companies pay MailChimp and every one in that whole ecosystem money. adding another cost is just adding another mouth to feed.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#557As a next step they should mandate that credit card companies make it easy to see and manage recurring payments.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to re-pay for the blue checkmark for everyone who reads your post. The key insight here was making it expensive for spammers, but cheap for everyone else.
The point I'm making is that is just a cost, so X is the money made from spam, and Y is how much it costs to send it, if X > Y, you're still getting spam. Companies pay MailChimp and every one in that whole ecosystem money. adding another cost is just adding another mouth to feed.
Yes. And the worst spam all meets the criteria of massive distributions of low-value email.
Consequently, where X < Y.
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the first time, you're just patronizing the news outlets that tell you when the Republicans do something untoward but not when the Democrats do instead of the ones that do the opposite. Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.
No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.
Gerrymandering is entirely bipartisan:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma...
https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman...
There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one:
Re: FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions
#560Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm downvoting this comment chain because you're just throwing low effort critiques without addressing any of the big points. 1) why is tens of millions of people in a state enforcing the will of the majority on the others fine but hundreds of millions of people in the country enforcing the will of the majority on others "not caring about the consent of the governed" and "the reason democracies fail"? 2) why is it ok…
>why is tens of millions of people in a state enforcing the will of the majority on the others fine but hundreds of millions of people in the country enforcing the will of the majority on others "not caring about the consent of the governed" and "the reason democracies fail"?- Because we aren't a unitary democracy, we are a federal republic that was built upon the idea of a limited federal government designed to addr…
>There needs to be an exceedingly pressing and relevant reason that any law, let alone one made by unelected bureaucrats, should overrule any of a state's laws.
Are you saying this because you believe it, or because the Constitution says so?
I think rote but beneficial consumer protections in the digital age is something that fits well at a national level. We don't need a 50-state laboratory on how to handle SiriusXM.
Oh, and making it artificially difficult for laypeople to get out of subscription contracts is absolutely predatory.