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US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

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Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#101

Post by meroes »

the__alchemist wrote: post #7

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 alte…

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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#102

Post by unsupp0rted »

nanoservices wrote: post #62
misstuned wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

The harder they make leaving, the less % chance that I'm ever coming back.

But I suppose they know and don't care.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#103

Post by theptip »

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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#104

Post by karaterobot »

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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#105

Post by eckesicle »

litenboll wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#106

Post by didaway »

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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#107

Post by h4ckerle »

layer8 wrote: post #40

This sounds similar to the law that was enacted in Germany two years ago: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two-click...

This works very well here. Just visit the website of thing you want canceled, scroll to the footer, click vertrag kündigen 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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#108

Post by tialaramex »

nanoservices wrote: post #62
misstuned wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

#109

Post by mtmail »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #70
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... EU laws?

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.

We have the regulation in Germany, but afaik it's not EU-wide. The "Gesetz über faire Verbraucherverträge" 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).
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