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Proton spam and the AI consent problem

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Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#311
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not just empathy. It is also ethics. The fine distinction between opting out of A and opting out of B described in the post served to justify ignoring the opt out request. That's lazy ethically. The entire US business sector's customer relations are completely compromised ethically. It's taken to extremes in tech contexts.

In large organizations motivated reasoning trumps ethics. Behavior starts working along incentive gradients like an ant heap. Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer. I think maintaining ethics in large organizations is one of the main challenges of our time, now that mega corps dominate our time and attention.

"Corporation are people, folks" said Mitt Romney (as a result of the Citizen United case). The whole thing is so cringe on so many levels.

What Romney did not say is that these particular "people" tend strongly towards sociopathic behavior.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#312

I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related. It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many…

The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI is being shoved down our throats, and it seems very likely that when he went to complain about the AI spam it was an an AI chatbot which gave him the useless answers until it finally "checked with the team" (presumably a human) who lied to him about what counted as AI spam. It seems like this is very much about AI even though it's ultimatel…

>The spam was advertising AI, the point of the article was how aggressively AI [...] It seems like this is very much about AI

Yes, the gp you responded to already said the same thing that the particular email was about AI (Lumos) when he wrote : >", even if the product in question is AI-related."

To go beyond that, the gp highlighted that the bad behavior is rooted in companies ignoring customers' email preferences instead of the AI. The article is misdiagnosing the unwanted email issue as "AI Consent Problem" when it's actually fundamentally about "Email Consent Problem". The author deliberately opted out of email marketing and Proton ignored it (by "mistake") and this is a common misbehavior companies did before AI. It's worth separating those 2 factors out.

We get unwanted spam about "Amazon Pharmacy" and "Apple TV" that overrides our profile settings to opt-out of those emails but that doesn't mean we misdiagnose it as "Pharmacy Consent Problem" and "Video Streaming Consent Problem". Instead, the generalization is still fundamentally an "email consent" problem. Always has been. The repeated abuse of the customer's email address (with or without AI in the picture) is what the gp was emphasizing.

Likewise, if a future hot technology household such as residential robots causes email marketing campaigns that blasts unwanted spam about Tesla house robots... the issue of that unwanted spam "Tesla robots 10% off!" ... is still about ignoring customers' email preferences. The unwanted robots themselves would be a separate issue. Companies will continue to make "mistakes" to send out new marketing email spam with in the subject field that will infuriate customers. And the future root cause of that problem still won't be but instead about companies ignoring customers email preferences because the incentives and greed are too great.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It proved not fine for me on an occasion of missing a service email and losing an account as a result.

I would say the base problem is that said organization sent you spam and then disconnected you, rather than the spam filter.

The disconnection was the fault only of the spam filter hiding the service mail.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#314

I only use Proton for the spam or temporary low value (and free) email accounts. Proton also tries to do everything, which I don't like. If I did I'd use Google. The thing I pay for is Tuta. The cheapest tier is way more generous than Proton and the product is simpler.

I have the exact opposite opinion. I use proton business together with their email, vpn, calendar, drive (on macOS), password manager etc. and switched specifically because of their encryption, data protection and fulls-size feature bundle. Plus, I migrated vom Office365 and it became a shitshow to manage and was full of bugs. And I had a separate bitwarden subscription, and a separate VPN subscription. Now it is one…

I understand the convenience side of this, but it's also risky. What happens if they suspend your account for some reason?

"Never put all your eggs in one basket."

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#315
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spam button risks false positives.

It's not a false positive to classify a company as a bad actor and move their emails to the spam folder if they refuse to respect user choices. If anything, I wish it would happen more often and at a massive scale, because then maybe companies would have an incentive to stop being so hostile around this.

Agreed, but the false positive I am referring to is the cathching of the non-spam message from the source of the previous spam message.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.

The difference is OneDrive is moderately useful.

the comparison is pretty good actually

"AI" agents randomly delete your files

and so does OneDrive

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#317
post #281
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before Isn't that because most of the other advancements/fads were not as widely applicable? With earlier things there was usually only particular kinds of sites or products where they would be useful. You'd still get some people trying to put them in places they made no sen…

> With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere. I fundamentally disagree with this. I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans. I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified. Not now, not ever.

Keep in mine I said "if well done". That was not meant to imply that I think the current AI offerings are well done. I'd take "well done" to mean that it performs the tasks it is meant for as well as human assistants perform those tasks.

> I never, now or in the future, want to use AI to generate or alter communication or expression primarily between me and other humans. [...] I do not want emails or articles summarised, I do not emails or documents written for me, I do not want my photos altered yassified.

That's fine, but generally the tools involved in doing those things are designed to be general purpose.

A word processor isn't just going to be used by people writing personal things for example. It will also be used by people writing documentation and reports for work. Without AI it is common for those people to ask subordinates, if they are high enough in their organization to have them, to write sections of the report or to read source material and summarize it for them.

An AI tool, if good enough to do those tasks, would be useful to those users, and so it makes sense for such tools to be added by the word processor developer.

Again, I'm not saying that the AI tools currently being added to basically everything are good enough.

The point is that

(1) a large variety of tools and products have enough users that would find built-in AI useful (even if some users won't) that it makes a lot of sense for them to include those tools (when they become good enough), and

(2) AI may be unique compared to prior advances/fads in how wide a range of things this applies to and the speed it has reached a point that companies think it has become good enough (again, not saying they have made the right judgement about whether it is good enough).

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the exact opposite opinion. I use proton business together with their email, vpn, calendar, drive (on macOS), password manager etc. and switched specifically because of their encryption, data protection and fulls-size feature bundle. Plus, I migrated vom Office365 and it became a shitshow to manage and was full of bugs. And I had a separate bitwarden subscription, and a separate VPN subscription. Now it is one…

I understand the convenience side of this, but it's also risky. What happens if they suspend your account for some reason? "Never put all your eggs in one basket."

That happened to my google workspace account in 2023, when I switched to Office365. Account was not blocked blocked per se, but they stopped the free workspace versions.

It was not a big problem as I use my own domains that I host separately. Get a new provider, adjust some MX and TXT dns records and you are live again. Backup emails by running thunderbird locally.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get their point that you can't provide a "No" in the reminder. But there should be an option (maybe even hidden under "advanced settings - here be dragons!") for this.

>I get their point that you can't provide a "No" in the reminder. Yes you can. All reminders should have an option "Do not remind me again."

Problem is (and that was their argument) people press this button all the time without reading the dialogue at all, and then won't know how to turn it back on. A messenger app has to deal with very technical illiterate people. But there should be an option in settings for the tech savvy user.

Re: Proton spam and the AI consent problem

#320
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. We must change laws that the above field is not considered as given consent. And while we are at it, we must change "silence is agreement" to "silence is disagreement". This applies to change of ToS, price increases etc. That means if I don't click a link with a button "I agree", the ToS change is not accepted - that means they have to cancel/delete my account.

Just move to Germany, we have all you asked for.

No we don't. Banks yes, but outside of banking no one respects this.
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