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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

#621

Post by DrillShopper »

macinjosh wrote: post #44
llamaimperative wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course Republican commissioners are going to vote "no" if the FTC is handing out popular rulings like candy just before the election. What? Why is that defensible? Make life worse/keep life bad for Americans so we have a better chance in an election? Do you hear yourself?

Why is it defensible for an administration to wait until the last days of their term, right around election time, to do their job?

Damn we better pull Amy Coney Barrett off the Supreme Court then

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

#622

Post by james_marks »

malfist wrote: post #486
thayne wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they interpret any kind of interaction after a while of inactivity as "yes please sign me up for all your newsletters, even though I previously explicitly told you to unsubscribe me"

The worst for this is Shopify. If you've ever given your email to shopify, they will absolutely share it to a page you visit, even if you don't check out. Throw something in the cart at a random website? Now you're on their mailing list and get reminders to finish checking out. Doesn't matter that you never consented. I don't know how this isn't a violate of the CAN-SPAM act

I’ve looked into this a bit- I believe it’s related to the checkout page loading with a default of “Agrees to Marketing”.

What happens- at scale and I have to believe deliberately- is the “checkout created” event with that flag set to true is considered as “opted-in” by the marketing automation platforms everyone uses, like Klayvio.

Even if you immediately un-check it, un-checking doesn’t trigger an unsubscribe event, since you never submitted the form in the first place.

And because your Shopify session is now shared across stores, your email address gets opted-into marketing just visiting a checkout page.

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

#623

Post by greycol »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #609
greycol wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately political parties have more of a free pass on this as Republicans sued providers for their emails getting caught up in spam filters around 2022 (Who would've thought continuosly emailing people who click unsubscribe on your emails who then start reporting as spam would get you put on spam lists). Now political parties (and some bulk providers) have special tools to bypass rejection with some providers a…

This is incorrect to my knowledge. The free pass to spam political email was an explicit carve out in the can spam act, which lets them not comply with the same regulations everyone else has to. What you’re talking about is something much more recent, about what Google does on the receiving side of email with their spam filters. That was about Google’s compliance with an order from the federal election commission bec…

I don't think anything I said is in conflict with what you've said, I'm pointing out one of the reasons the poster might still be getting spam from a mail he's reported as spam. The can spam act was more about senders requirements than email platform providers requirements for recieving (i.e. spam filtering). Yes the republicans were more affected by the spam filters but both researchers and internal communication indicated it wasn't because of any deliberate bias (just that republican emails were more likely to be like spam as far as an algorithmic interpratation goes (pure uncharitable conjecture: perhaps because one party was more likely to include a unsubscribe button even if it wasn't required by the can spam act and thus weren't reported as spam as much). Because of this they sued and google reportedly made more tools available or atleast publicised existing tools to both republicans and democrats to exclude their email campaigns from getting caught in the spam filters (tools that have also been made available to some of the larger more legitimate bulk email providers).

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

#624

Post by brrrrrm »

lars_francke wrote: post #534
asdfk-12 wrote: post #530

The New York Times can suck a lemon, 40 minutes of my life, multiple calls and transfers to cancel a subscription. Hopefully this will be meaningfully enforced.

As absurd as it sounds: I probably would have a NYT subscription right now if it were easier to cancel. I sometimes subscribe to these organizations for a few months, then cancel to try something new, come back for a bit etc. But NYT has forever lost me with their cancellation nightmare.

I don't think this is absurd at all, I'm in the exact same boat.

In fact, I suspect most people have far more sophisticated relationships with digital companies these days than ever before. Grievances like cancellation pain are an oversight of antiquated businesses that don't realize it, imo

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

#625

Post by efreak »

inetknght wrote: post #601
efreak wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Set up a filter from substack to the spam folder. I filter a number of domains directly to trash.

> Set up a filter from substack to the spam folder. Can you walk me through the steps? Gmail doesn't let you create a filter which sends to the spam box. There used to be, but it was taken away. I know because I used it a lot . Even if the feature was still there, it was still received instead of rejected, and it only moves the offending mail to the spam box instead of deleting it.

I know the spam folder is a special folder, but I assumed you could filter to it. Apparently not. A quick search tells me that you can set up a Google script to do this[0]. I personally use the secondary spam tag method, since I don't want such messages being deleted automatically (I filter a number of marketing and other messages to my secondary spam tag, and only check those messages when I need something; in these cases I don't actually want them being deleted automatically)

``` var threads = GmailApp.search("[your search criteria] -is:spam"); for (var iThread = 0; iThread [0]: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/120534

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

#627

Post by _gabe_ »

hnburnsy wrote: post #358
Uehreka wrote: post #190

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…

>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... The loophole is that companies now claim that the email is 'service' related as part of your 'account relationship' so you cannot unsubscribe at all, even though it clearly is for marketing and promotion.

Yep. The company that my 401K is managed through began sending me these stupid emails about “Tips to manage your wealth”, and it was marked as an email that could not be unsubscribed from because it was pertinent to my account. It took an angry note left on their feedback form with a threat to report them to get those emails to finally stop showing up. It’s disgusting. I literally can’t even tell which emails I need to pay attention to that are about my 401K because they mingle spam in there.

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

#628

Post by tumblrinaowned »

Uehreka wrote: post #190

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…

Why don't you blame YC for this? They fund and repeatedly promote this AI email slop. There is a startup called AI SDR that send random emails who have no context.

Same with Resend. Start at home before blaming others or screaming at the sky.

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

#629

Post by mcronce »

fragmede wrote: post #556
ethbr1 wrote: post #488

Earlier 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.

...which changes the economics of sending the spam email. Surely some of them will be "valuable" enough to send even with the added cost; however, a measure doesn't need to be 100% effective to be useful.

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

#630

Post by photonthug »

theamk wrote: post #554
ksd482 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Works great except for the gas company, electric and water company, phone company, airlines, cloud provider, os provider, and everyone else that mixes the 5% of legit business that you can’t afford to ignore or miss with the 95% of marketing content that you want to get rid of.

Since it’s usually opaque how “mark as spam” and “block” actually works, and since the origin of the mailing lists can be reconfigured any time.. I still feel like I’m endlessly spammed by all the assholes I have to do business with, or else I’m going to miss a bill or a flight.

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