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 common among banks as well, they use their dinosaur status when it comes to things that are bad for their business, but can be very progressive on the other end of things.
For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents (here in Sweden at least) to be handed to the other bank. I had to first wait in the support, then ask politely to get these documents. They told me that they would snail mail them to me immediately, but after two weeks I called them again, then they said sorry and sent me a PDF instead proving that they could have done this immediately...
I have been trying to get my state legislators to implement such a consumer law for over a decade.
The federal proposal will likely be ineffective unless it has an individual cause of action. What that means is that the only way (IMO) such a law works is not if the government enforces it, but rather if any consumer can sue the company in small claims court for a reasonable judgment (eg $1000 or something). Now the company has to fix their ways or feel death from a million cuts, and the cost to defend likely exceeds the cost to pay.
The other things the law needs (it may have but the article wasn’t clear) are clarity and penalties for dark patterns.
For example, “as simple as it was to subscribe” needs to be WAY more detailed, eg “takes no more time for a reasonable person to unsubscribe than it did to subscribe” and “the user must be able to use the same communication channel or mechanism (eg web, mobile app, etc) used to subscribe, in order to unsubscribe”, and “at the time of subscription, unsubscribe instructions must be provided to the user via a persistent medium such as email”, and “the unsubscribe interface must be prominently discoverable on the web site or mobile application”, etc.
And any dark patterns or intentional violations need to make the recoverable amount subject to a multiplier.
I am happy that the government is tackling this but doing it through regulatory action is not likely to help much IMO; especially in light is the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Chevron deference, it’s likely not to last through legal challenges. (IANAL)
I agree with the bit about individual cause of action, as long as it includes attorney fees too, as that is the way to go from having to file yourself, to getting juicy lawyers lined up to make bank (from my experience litigating FOIA).
In fact, with FOIA in Illinois the only way to hurt a non-compliant public body is with the attorney fees[]. There is a civil penalty per violation, but it isn't paid to the litigant, but it is paid by the public body to the county. As one government lawyer said to me, "I don't care if I lose! I just write a check out to myself!"
[] some of the lawyers I know who do this work agree to split their fees with the litigant as an incentive for them to see it through, which I don't think is technically legal, but it let's people keep the government honest and make some change for their effort
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.
> Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon.
How would that even... work? Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area? And a customer who feels like a company a hard time could just put a notice in the paper and then collect money because the company obviously won't read every newspaper? Also, what about companies wanting to give customers a hard time by canceling their subscriptions - now customers have to read every newspaper too? I must be missing something...
"legal notice in a newspaper" is still very much a thing in common law jurisdictions, with a long history, see banns going way back https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns
There are many different types of legal ads, with different costs to advertise. The most common type of legal notice in New York is an LLC formation notice. The State of New York requires limited liability corporations to run an ad informing the public on the formation of the new corporation. There are also FCC, SLA liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe notices, name change notices, divorce notices (also known as dissolution of marriage notices), and probate notices.
I am well aware of that, but there is a very huge and crucial difference between putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one specific known private entity gets the information. The only case I can recall off the top of my head for the latter is for things like service of judicial papers, and even then as a last resort, only when direct attempts to reach the party have failed. I am not aware of a single case where a party that is already reasonably reachable has to monitor public media for private communication.
>there is a very huge and crucial difference between putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one specific known private entity gets the information
yes, and that huge and crucial difference in this case is that the entities in question have attorneys on staff, and those attorneys understand their responsibilities on behalf of the corporation
And yet, in the US, you can have process servers publish a notice in a very specific law newspaper that only lawyers ever read, then claim that you couldn't reach someone who would never in their life read such a newspaper for decades simply to see if they've been served.
If this sounds ridiculous, it's because it is, and yet somehow, we still do it. What Sweden does sounds no different, except it's companies with millions of dollars who could actually afford to check these things.
As I mentioned, AFAIK that's only as a last resort once you've been unreachable via other means, which doesn't sound ridiculous at all. Is that not the case?
> Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area?
In my US state, a lot of important legal notices get published in the newspaper, so companies should already be effectively doing this.
What most do (and what I've always done) is to subscribe to a clipping service that will scan the classifieds, nationwide if you want, for you and forward to you the types of items you want to be made aware of.
I prefer to unsubscribe by writing it on a post-it note and sticking it in a public bathroom under the sink. That way I can always sue for them not doing it!
Yes, that's true and it's good for those who know about it. It's not enough though, companies still have super easy sign ups and then refer to call customer service to unsubscribe (usually the case with cell phone plans for example). And many companies have no email or contact form, only a phone number available on their site.
So there's still lots of room for improvement.
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.
I was pretty sure we'd abandoned the "but it would hurt the business and they'd change their ways" fantasy years ago, because a) it doesn't, and be) they don't. How's Equifax doing these days? Oh yeah, totally fine.
In my case I enjoy reading The Economist and do not mind paying for it, but some years back I had to cancel my subscription (I was cutting back on expenses) and honestly I found that experience so much against the business values they preach that it has made me not subscribe again, even if it means not reading their publication.
(Every few years I go to check if they have made it easier to unsubscribe, but last time I checked they still had the same practices)
Edit: I can also imagine that I’m a minority and so it really pays off to keep doing this.
I avoid subscription services like the plague because of this (and other reasons).
I can't know if they're going to do this kind of crap until it is to late. Even if some one reviewed services for this they could change at any time for the worse. So I just assume it will happen and try to limit getting into that bad arrangement as much as possible.
I have a good example of this dynamic using Comcast: when we left New Haven, I had to spend a couple hours in line at a dingy, poorly staffed office terminating my account (the dude working there was fine, he needed coworkers) and then a couple months of “accidentally” still billing me. They could afford to be sloppy on billing and cancellation where I’d lived because in 2008 the competition was (I am not making this up) 128kpbs ISDN and 768-1Mbps DSL since the phone company had badly neglected its wiring.
In addition to being illegal, this was short sighted because they’re a national company. Comcast/Xfinity is one of three gigabit choices in my neighborhood and they periodically send offers with competitive pricing but each time I remember what dealing with them was like and toss it into the shredder. I’m sure the regional office would say they’re better run than the New England one, or that they have a better system, but I’m not going to find out, and there’s no way they skimped enough to save more than they could have made with over a decade of service in a new region.
I tried to delete a Sony account (I had 2). Their site said to talk to support to get this done. I waited for 45 minutes, finally got to someone and they said I can’t. When I tried to mention the support site, they disconnected me, throwing me back in a 45 minute line if I felt like being hung up on again.
For a company that has been hacked multiple times, I find this unacceptable.
It's similar here in Sweden. Usually they require a call to support, officially. However, I think there is a law/policy that require them to accept unsubscriptions by mail/message, regardless of what they say on their website. I recently did this and it worked! Maybe there's something similar in the UK?
Yes that’s right. You can unsubscribe by any which way you want. Mail, phone call, pigeon. Any message sent to any employee or office in anyway is deemed acceptable for giving notice for any service or contract.
Counter-anecdote: cancelling my Virgin Media plan was very simple. I've clicked through their online cancellation process, then they've sent me a prepaid return box for the modem, and that was it.
> Unlike providers who use the rival Openreach cable network, Virgin Media does not allow its six million broadband customers to cancel expired contracts online. Thirty days’ notice is required before any switch, compared with the 14 days’ notice required to switch Openreach providers.
A link to the ongoing Ofcom investigation into their shabby tactics:
I was shocked when I canceled cable TV and the landline on my Comcast triple-play plan--still have internet.
I had procrastinated for months because I was sure I'd go through a real workout routine. I did have to call them but don't remember any particular pain getting through to someone and then it was just "Your new bill will be [about half the old one). Return your rented voice modem. Have a nice day." Maybe it was because it was during COVID.
I had an internet service that could be signed up for on the internet, but required a phone call to cancel. During covid they could not staff their phone service properly so it was effectively broken (20 minute holds, getting booted from the queue, etc.), so I just closed the card and told them to pound sand.
My only concern about this is the signup processes that already take multiple pages anyways.
Take cell phones or internet, I don't have an exact number but I feel like with those given all of the information I have to put in, various agreements, etc etc once my service is in my cart I generally have 3, 4, maybe more pages of stuff to go through.
Is the "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up" showing me the same number of pages trying to convince me to stay?
Sure at least in that case it is still online, but it leaves plenty of room for dark patterns.
Could something that states something as simple as that, just lead to a slightly worse signup process in the hopes that they can then convince customers to stay longer with those dark patterns. It would be a gamble on the companys part, but could pay off.
I realize no law will be perfect, but I worry that something that simple could be abused when it would likely just be better to make a law about unsubscribing in the first place that applies across the board.
Edit:
I was thinking about this more. But what exactly is "as easy to cancel as it is to sign up"? When I sign up for a service I am paying for at a minimum I had to create a username, a password, and put in my credit card. Maybe I had to validate my email and/or phone. Maybe I had to put in my address, validate I was a student, etc etc.
Signing up is not a one click thing, so just stating that neither would canceling.
I get the spirit of saying something like that, but with simplicity I feel like also opens up room for interpretation and it doing nothing to really help except for some extreme cases (like needing to call).
But I also look at my gym membership, I could not sign up until I physically went in or at the very least talked to someone on the phone. That gives them the power to do the exact same thing when I want to cancel.
I think this counts as over thinking. Unsubscribing is MILES harder in many countries. The unsubscribe link is buried in some unknown sub menu, customer support dumps you, or the like.
Trying to fatigue someone out of subscribing is a bad business model. If people want to leave, it should be dead simple to do so.
Yeah I agree with this, it's a very good point.
Of course a real law needs more narrow wording. The spirit of it should be more about not allowing companies to have different means for subscribing and unsubscribing. Then there can be additional rules that prevent them from convoluting the process more than necessary.
Sure, but it's a minimum. Also, the incentive here is aligned with what's best for the customer, i.e. they probably want to make their two step subscription process to become one step which automatically gives the user an easier process to unsubscribe.
For my convenience; and by two-step sign up I mean "enter my e-mail into a form, then receive a confirmation e-mail and click on a confirmation link to be actually subscribed".
Are you confusing this with email newsletter subscriptions? This is talking about paid membership services, the kind of thing where you need an account and often payment methods.
I still recall a big reputable newspaper that was approaching students with free sample subscriptions to their newspaper. The sign up was super simple, to end the subscription you had to do the telephone equivalent of getting through a maze blindfolded while sacrificing your first born when the stars aligned right.
After that experience that news source is on my and many of my colleagues black lists. And we are the core demographic they would probably like to target.
> For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents
How would this work? The lender may have paid for your loan (and may not have even gotten the right to service the loan). How do they make their money back? What about the mortgage-backed securities market?
Maybe I described it in a bad way. I'm talking about renegotiating the interest rate with another bank. So the original bank loan is not moved in practice, it's just paid back in full.
It's law here in Sweden that the mortgage plan can't be changed (I.e. number of years etc) if you change bank, so the documents are related to this.
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.
There is a law that requires that subscriptions can be cancelled online within "the click of a button" with automatic confirmation. (since 2022)
If no such option to cancel is implemented by the provider the minimum contract duration is void and you can cancel immediately.
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).
I believe the EU law sets the minimum required conditions for contracts (fair, not abusing the customer), but the individual EU-countries can implement more consumer friendly rules.
It's horrendus in Germany trying to cancel a mobile phone subscription, internet service, gym membership or the likes. You have to jump through hoops like sending a registered physical letter, 3 months before the end of the service period for it to be considered a valid cancellation ("Kündigung"). Without this, you're forced into paying for another year.
EU regulation is badly needed to cut out this anti-consumer nonsense.
This is no longer true, it is limited to a one month period (after a possible 2 year minimum contract to offer "special discounts") in advance and every contract can be cancelled online.
Until they require you to dig out your CC and input the number and the cvv code to cancel, which shouldn't be needed, but hey, it's "as easy" as signing up. ;-)
Oh, sorry, that's not the card you signed up with... what do you mean you don't have the card that expired last year that rolled over when you signed up?
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 altered. Pray I don't alter them further loophole, where you will still get emails after unsubbing.
There's only one company I tolerate marketing emails from (Pitviper sunglasses), and it's because the emails are funny.
I've stopped unsubscribing to emails I didn't sign up for and just send to spam. It hurts their "reputation" score and wastes their money (however small amount). I encourage people to stop unsubscribing and just send it to spam.
I'm almost as severe. I look for an unsubscribe button in the email. I click it. If I am not immediately unsubscribed from everything, I mark the email as spam.
If I get more emails after unsubscribing I file a complaint with the FTC, then forward the response I get from the FTC to support@<spammer.com>. So far that has a 100% success rate.
Here I am, already giving you money, and you want to spam me?! Even after I clicked unsubscribe?
The worst are the BS claims of "account status emails", which are just spam.
I moved my entire portfolio to another bank, filed a complaint, then filed complaints as I closed each account/card. The goal to have plenty of record as to why.
This is admirable and I agree in principle. Based on what I've seen, I'm surprised there are any companies you find suitable to do business online with. I would like to follow your path, but have been unable to without making significant compromises.
Ugh my student loans went to a new servicer who I swear to god is paid by the email sent to me. I get an email letting me know when the payment is coming out (hint: it's the same numeric day as last month, plus or minus a day to account for non-banking weekend days) and the amount (hint: it's the same amount it always is, because that's how payments work) and then I get an email from them after my payment completes and then I get an email from them every time someone changes a punctuation mark in the roughly 400 pages of horseshit that I signed when I was 18 years old to get an education, and of course the fucking MESSAGES.
"There's an important message in your inbox, please log in to check"
And then you go look and it's like "the white house wants to alleviate student debt, if you don't want your debt discharged fill out this form" And it's like...
a) who in their right mind wouldn't want that
b) there's no way in hell I'm getting my debt discharged, I make WAY too much fucking money
c) this is a matter of public policy and developing news, why the fuck was this sent as a secure message
With respect to the first part of your comment, I'd much prefer overcommunication of financial transactions about to happen and acknowledgement that they did rather than the other way about. And some communication about changes in Ts&Cs is often required. Those often come by physical mail. A lot of people here probably prefer more notifications about things like credit card transactions. I don't personally but many do even if it means a lot more routine email.
This is all well and good, if it can be turned off if set.
People used to find out about financial transactions monthly with their bill in the mail. It's fine to have more info, but that doesn't mean it must be forced upon us.
And the transactions described are not really out of the blue financial transactions. The first message is about transactions that happen every. single. month. There's no need to say "we're going to do what you want us to do". That's silly. An agreement was already signed to that effect. The person knows it's going to happen. It's just 100% wasted, useless info.
And while I know you're responding to the 'first part' of the post, the communication I'm describing in my (GP) post, is about just random emails with no actual value.
I get spam newsletters that I never signed up for from my alma mater, the GaTech ChE school. The tiny unsubscribe button 404s! Into the spam bucket it goes.
I have different reasons for not doing it: unsubscribing usually requires opening a website riddled with tracking, thus running potentially dangerous code on your device. Secondly, it confirms that your address is active and that SPAM message was read. Unsubscribing from one garbage can result in being added on several other garbage spam lists.
Me too. I don't care if it's a "legit" business. Unsolicited bulk email is spam, period. If I wanted to receive junk mail, I would have signed up for that explicitly, which I most assuredly did not, no matter how many other products or services I might have purchased from that sender in the past.
Yes, I go a little further. If I get more emails than I consider acceptable (even if I signed up originally), I mark it as spam. call me mean, but this is my email address and if you're gonna send me endless spam emails which obviously no one actually wants, then you're spam.
The most persistent emails I’ve gotten are from being Mormon at some point in my life, and familysearch.com has some special Mormons only mailing list that you’ll get re added to no matter how many times you unsubscribe. It’s kind of hilarious in a way to speculate why (Mormon church actually has a pretty good IT team in my experience, my guess is some automated system syncs over emails from Mormon church roles to the familysearch website which I think is owned by the church) but also irritating. I finally had to mark it as spam.
My biggest issue is they no longer ask, or they do ask and don’t respect the user’s choice. I always uncheck the email/signup checkbox. Yet I still get the emails. Some simply sign the user up by default and then taking the position that the user can unsubscribe if they don’t want them.
If I notice a company doing this, I stop doing business with them. If they can’t respect my inbox and be trusted, then they shouldn’t get a dime of my money.
Spamming me is never a good way to create a positive brand image. When unsubscribing I always say it’s spam when there is a survey on why I’m unsubscribing. I hope it gets them banned from their email marketing service.
I got an email from CrowdStrike Communications by George Kurtz about the root cause analysis for the Channel File 291 incident on my personal email. I was sure it was some scam but it looks absolutely legit with the Gmail blue check. I don't remember ever signing up for any CrowdStrike communication or product. Are they just sending these to everyone in the world?
I got the same email. Never been a CrowdStrike customer or even (that I remember) had any contact with a sales rep. They must've blasted that to every list they had.
I get vastly less spam. Gmail just plain deletes most of it without even dumping it into the spam folder. It's down from thousands a month to dozens.
Companies do subscribe me to mailing lists pretty easily but I really don't mind if they honor the unsubscribe link. And most seem to. (The exception was the Red Cross who I eventually had to mark as spam.)
That's a temporary reprieve. Gmail started hard-requiring an x-unsubscribe header for anyone that sends more than a couple hundred emails to gmail. It isn't hard to put in, it's just that the lower effort mailers need to adjust and don't have visibility on their own spam rates.
This legislation is about making it easier to cancel subscription payment services, not emails.
But, in my experience, after Gmail forced unsubscribe headers earlier this year in marketing emails (1-click unsubscribe is now built into gmail), it's become infinitely easier to clean up my inbox.
So that problem is already solved IMO. Pretty much all the big inbox providers are now forcing 1-click unsubscribe into their inbox UI.
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.
It's funny you mention PitViper, because they are by far the worst offender in my inbox. I've unsubscribed multiple times, I've marked as spam multiple times, yet somehow I still get the occasional marketing message in my Gmail inbox.
> One annoyance I find is the Our terms have been altered. Pray I don't alter them further loophole, where you will still get emails after unsubbing.
I recently ordered pants from The Gap. I am reasonably sure that I didn't sign up for anything, but I started getting spam emails anyway. I unsubscribed immediately, and the unsubscribe page says it "takes up to 10 days to process". I received 1-2 emails from them per day for the next 5 days until I blocked the sender on the 5th day. I reported all the emails as spam but I don't know if that helps.
those one click to unsubscribe buttons are broken in most I try, because my ad-blockers won't let me go to the marketing page.. Why Can't I reply back to the email to unsubscribe? pretty much anyone that sends me marketing texts allows me to reply back STOP to unsubscribe.. why Do I have to use a different tool/channel for email?
It's because the CAN-SPAM act is rarely enforced. All of those promotional emails are illegal but the government and service providers don't anything about it.
Re: hidden fees, I still do not understand why most US purchases treat tax as if it does not exist until you're at the cashier. You have to sort of know what the state tax is (I'm not a US resident, so I do not have that information at hand), and then do the calculation mentally. I think this is quite disfavourable to consumers.
That's exactly why it's done that way. Because the tax is different in every state, county, city, and sometimes an even smaller region. There is something like 2,500 different tax jurisdictions in the USA.
It would be difficult for national brands (or even local brands) to do any marketing or advertising that includes prices, because they would either have to put a range on their ads, or possibly eat all their profit in some areas if they have the same price everywhere.
With the advent of computers this should be more doable, but the brands also have strong lobbies to keep tax payments seperate.
Many other countries have all-inclusive prices. Most of Europe from my experience. I wonder, how do they handle it? One solution could be to price things such that any amount of tax is included in the margin so the price is standard but profitability varies in minute ways between locations (which it does anyway due to labor, transportation, advertising density, etc.).
> One solution could be to price things such that any amount of tax is included in the margin so the price is standard but profitability varies in minute ways between locations
Imagine you have customers in California (high taxes) and Wyoming (low taxes). You have one price, but the taxes in the former nets you zero profit. But, that's also where 98%+ of your customers are. That isn't going to work, needless to say.
The highest sales tax in California that I can find is 10.750% (lowest 7.50%). The highest in Wyoming is 6% (lowest 5%). That's not a wide spread. On many MANY items the existing profit margin is north of 30%, but even leaving that aside. Adding %10 to your base price to have a single price just means that in lower tax markets you're making more money. There's no obvious situation where you make less unless you intentionally under price your products and it eats into your margin.
But they probably have a standard price across all of, let's say, The Netherlands. How many companies advertise across country lines? Is that a big problem? This feels very much like one of those "it's only a problem in the US" things where other countries have figured it out but Americans keep playing dumb about it.
> That's exactly why it's done that way. Because the tax is different in every state, county, city, and sometimes an even smaller region. There is something like 2,500 different tax jurisdictions in the USA.
It's quite ridiculous.
I played around once with the tax rate and boundary files [1] provided by the ~23 states that are in the Streamlined Sales Tax system. I remember finding several cases where a tax boundary ran through an office complex so the tax rate would be different between 123 Fake Street, Suite 100 and 123 Fake Street, Suite 200.
This is very annoying because it means to compute the tax you need a full address. For online sales of downloadable digital goods tax is often the only thing you need a full address for. For the actual sale all you need is a credit card number, the card security code, the billing zip code, and an email address to send a receipt to. And actually you usually don't even need the security code and billing zip but not providing them may lead to higher fees due to increased fraud risk.
Looking up tax by full address is annoying because the address people think they are at often doesn't quite match the official address for that location. They might use the wrong directional prefix or suffix, or put them on the wrong end, or give the local nickname people use for a street instead of the actual name, to give a few examples.
I found a way that worked surprisingly well, despite that. I'd take the address as supplied by the user and find the zip code and the building number. I'd then select from the boundary database all locations that matched the zip and building number.
So say the address is 123 NW Fake ST, Mycity, Mystate, 12345. I'd find all boundary file entries with zip 12345 and an address range that included 123. Note this just looks at number and zip, so would not include Fake ST but also any other street in that zip that includes house number 123.
For each of those I'd make the full address from the boundary file: building number, then any direction prefixes, then street name, then any type suffixes ("St", "Ave", etc), then any direction suffixes, then city, then state, then zip.
I'd then compute the Levenshtein distance between each of those and the address given by the user and take the one with the smallest distance.
Anyone know how the companies that provide tax lookup services handle this? I assume they do something way more sophisticated than my hack described above.
By ignoring it until checkout it lets vendors put lower prices on the shelf which encourages more spending. It is intentionally disfavorable to consumers.
One could argue that including the taxes in the price makes it less obvious how much tax the government is collecting - which is disadvantageous to taxpayers.
Tax rates are still published and could still be included in line items on the receipt. Like in Europe. the price on the rack is so the consumer understands their out-of-pocket costs. The price on the receipt gives a breakdown between the product and the VAT.
Interstate mail order used to be untaxed. That was the benefit that offset the extra cost of shipping. You order from the Montgomery Ward warehouse in Illinois and ship it to your state tax free. Some states expected voluntary reporting despite federal law clearly indicating they don't have a valid claim on interstate trade. Nobody actually did that. The rise of Amazon led to capitulation and the federal courts have made bad decisions ignoring federal law such that online vendors are expected to collect tax even when the business has no nexus in the destination state.
It's nice when the government improves the quality of life for regular people at the expense of businesses who are using dark patterns. I'll be sure to remember this in November.
The timing of this and other announcements is not by accident though.
Expect a handful of populist announcements leading up to some "October" surprise that has been in the works for some time. It will be most obvious when it is generally favorable and can proceed without the need for two-party agreement.
Personally, I don't care when the government does something generally favorable. If you think this is just a vote grab, I would invite you to consider similar consumer protection action by this administration, most recently around junk fees, whose timing was not really around a general election.
Of course, these really aren't big enough needle movers to be so cynical about & I trust this as another small and steady step in the same direction this administration was already going in. I mean, if this was something related to cancelling student debt or using the bully pulpit to pressure congress into rescheduling marijuana, I'd take your point. But when a certain political party is doing a few things here and a few things there that are good for consumers, that's actively earning votes as opposed to simply trying to not be the lesser of two evils.
I’m aware of the junk fee work and that is a fair point. And I agree it was somewhat weak, particularly if held up to what some other countries do to protect their people from businesses.
Biden’s last ditch attempt to hold on was discussing actual action on SCOTUS.
That campaign death rattle alone seems to have been enough evidence to me that push come to shove these folks will force something that results in more support, especially if it means keeping their job.
We've had this in California for a couple of years now. It's great! Cancelling subscriptions has been a breeze since it passed.
In fact, a great workaround for anyone else in the USA is to set their home address to California, and then they get the magic unsubscribe button that was otherwise hidden from them.
It is nice to see the administration doing things to help regular people.
This is a consumer protection law that California has simply nailed. A simply copy/paste of the CA law to a Federal level would be a serious win. The experience of trying to cancel subscriptions/servies in say New York is outrageous by comparison.
Unless you’re an iPhone user and it’s a promotional email from Apple, in which case there is no way to unsubscribe (“3 free months of Apple Arcade!”)..
I find it extra ironic that experian is now pimping a service to aggregate and cancel your subscriptions - but if I want to freeze my children's credit reports I have to have a notarized original of their birth certificate and bring it to committee before they will approve. I'm exaggerating obviously, but not by much.
Have you tried to do it? There's a lot of "We found an unspecified discrepancy in your submitted documentation and are unable to service your request. Please resubmit after fixing the unspecified problem" dark responses from credit bureaus.
Which is what this rule making initiative seems to be about -- you shouldn't have an advertised process that actually leads to black holes (because it's in the company's financial interest for them to).
I have done it for two kids at all 3 bureaus with no issues. Probably spent 15min filling out the forms and mailing the envelopes.
> you shouldn't have an advertised process that actually leads to black holes (because it's in the company's financial interest for them to).
Of course, but not providing appropriate levels of service to the small percentage of people because they are inconsequential to big businesses is pervasive across the economy.
I understand TFA is about unsubscribing from paid services or subscriptions. But still relevant to this discussion—I don't even click marketing 'unsubscribe' links anymore unless it points to the entity's second level domain. And even then, 9/10 times the link is merely CNAME'ed to some third-party known data broker's 2LD. These links have basically turned into a form of data collection unto themselves. I.e., 'is anybody home?'
NB: Configure you email clients not to automatically download HTML unless you prefer to let senders know you're actively maintaining your inbox. I love receiving 'if you're still reading please click here, otherwise you'll soon be automatically removed from our ML.' I consider that the real unsubscribe non-button in 2024.
In Canada, it’s not legal to start sending someone emails because you happened across their email, purchased a list, or someone bought something from your square store. Marketing emails must have express consent, and the consent is not transferable.
Nice. I also wish deleting accounts was easier so that you don't have to read support FAQs and eventually find the email to send the deletion request to and wait days before being acknowledged and pestered for a "reason" you're leaving.
What gets me is that I'm way more likely to return to or recommend a service that I know I can easily cancel. Most of the streaming services are pretty good for this and I'm much happier returning to them because of that and will happily recommend them.
I remember signing up to Which? (a bit like Consumer Reports but in the UK), and cancelling my account was so f-ing hard that I will never sign up again, ever, and I will warn people away from them.
I cancelled my Jetbrains subscription a while back because I wasn't using any of their products for my current work. They made the process so easy that I will consider going back to them in a heartbeat when I next have need of their offerings.
Similar experience after my second marriage ended with cancelling Netflix... I didn't even mind their once a quarter "we're still here" emails. Too many will spam you multiple times a week on top of being painful to cancel.
I'd never again do XM/Serious without a single-use credit card. Took 5 phone calls (oops, disconnected) and 3+ hours on hold to cancel. I only wanted to cancel the one car I no longer had, after that experience I cancelled them all.
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.
This “government stupid, me smart” stuff is pretty tedious. You’re not even talking about the right concept – this is about unwanted recurring bills – but wanted to race to solving the simple part so quickly that you didn’t read the first paragraph.
The cookie consent law proposal similarly isn’t that simple. Nobody made their site worse because the EU forced them to, they did it because they’re trying to build opposition to privacy regulation. If you used a header not much would change because you’d have businesses arguing that the header could be set by accident or that the standard names didn’t represent their situation exactly. There’s a social problem here which can’t be solved with an IETF draft.
That's the bigger deal and the target of these TBA proposed rules. Legit (and even not so legit) retailers and mailing lists tend to be pretty easy to unsubscribe from and Gmail files the majority of retailer, etc. mailings in the Promotions tab anyway that I just glance at from time to time unless there's something interesting. (I used to use a separate email account when I ordered things but that became more trouble than it was worth.)
The other thing that used to deluge my work account was mailings as a result of tradeshows which I attended a lot of. I get far fewer on my personal email although that will probably pick up as I use it now for a small consulting business.
Can't recommend privacy.com enough for literally this use case. If I have to spend more than five minutes trying to figure out how to cancel - I'm just turning off my card...
I think most of the times that works and companies don't pursue the small amounts, but turning off the card doesn't actually end the agreement between you and the company. It could end up on your credit report.
I haven't used privacy.com but I recall some one saying you can put whatever name you want on the service, which sounded implausible to me. On the other hand, a prepaid debit card can do the same thing so maybe it was true. Obviously this wouldn't work for all services though.
> turning off the card doesn't actually end the agreement between you and the company
I know of two hedge funds who buy these claims at a discount and pursue them. If you aren’t concerned with your credit score it probably isn’t a problem; I doubt either sues.
Businesses have customers whose cards have been declining, e.g. someone who used Privacy.com to rotate the card number but never actually cancelled their contract. The fund buys those claims for unpaid bills for pennies on the dollar. They then send collection notices to collect those bills. If you don’t pay, it goes to collections, which is reportable to the credit reporting agencies.
Came up in a personal discussion where I admitted I sometimes do this with my Apple Card.
For what it's worth, I've had terrible experiences with privacy.com. Lots of dark patterns, and suddenly demanded a picture with photo ID while holding the account hostage. Strongly suggest avoiding.
I would like to see this taken one step further. Anything you can opt in to should be legally required to be at least as easy to opt out of, whether that's a gym membership, tracking cookies, online subscriptions, you name it. If I can join in a click, but have to send a physical letter to a hidden department in the basement of a now defunct military base then none of that should ever fly.
How about legislation that makes it so I have to explicitly subscribe in the first place? I do not want your sales emails just because I bought one thing from your store one time.
One time, like a decade ago, I went through my inbox and clicked all the unsubscribe buttons from the previous month. The quantity of junk mail I got over the subsequent month exploded. I'm pretty sure the majority of the time you click an "unsubscribe" button, the person you're unsubscribing from sells your info to other companies with the "this is a real living person, they clicked on our button" label. I just put everything in spam now. I don't trust anyone.
Rather than adding additional regulation (which rarely works, just look at Apple vs EU), the only change needed is to allow individuals to sue under the CANSPAM act. Fairly certain you'd see an immediate change in behavior. Right now, only State AGs can sue.
While we're at it, extend CANSPAM to physical mail as well so we can clean up the massive environmental burden of companies abusing the US Postal Service for marketing.
(Note, I edited the language on my physical spam rant).
This is what government is for. It's why I can't (and don't) take any libertarians seriously. You can't Yelp review your way into regulating society. It's just so naive and silly.
I was reminded of this recenntly when I saw a "hack" on how to cancel your Planet Fitness membership. As many would know, these gyms make it incredibly hard to cancel a subscription. It's their entire business model. Anyway, the "hack" is to set your address to somewhere in California, set your local gym to one near there and then you can use a hidden URL to cancel online without having to speak to anyone.
Why? Because CA passed a law that says that if you can sign up online, you have to be able to cancel online [1].
No they didn't. At all. I can't unsubscribe to a wide variety things in an App Store. Indeed, one reason apps want to have control over their own payment processing is so they don't have to follow App Store rules for stuff like this. Moreover, App Stores are a bit of a local monopoly that has the power to dictate terms to their hosted apps. So the only way to solve this problem seems to be edicts from a controlling authority.
What is the shopping cart service that follows me around the web, where if I put something in a cart, then walk away I get email about it. Without even signing in, often it’s a new to me retailer, but they use one of those cart nagging checkout services? Can I turn that off?
How about making it harder to subscribe with email address that you do not own? Some silly sausage is using my email address while shopping and I am receiving their clothing receipts. I am still convinced, that clicking "unsubscribe" only provides information that email address is used and that leads to even more spam from even more unusual places. E.g. fake dating websites, where new one is created almost each month just to be replaced by another. And they keep sending a lot of spam.
I think it should’ve been worded as “easier than signing up” not as easy as. Companies will now make you go through 5 different simple pages so that they can make the account deletion harder.
I think the easier solution is to let individuals sue these companies for their time. You sent me X spam emails or made me spend Y hours to cancel, so pay me Z thousand dollars for inconvenience. Once the financial incentive of putting people into black design patterns is removed, the practice will quickly disappear.
Better than doing a policy fix is to regulate credit card companies to offer you to show your subscriptions and cancel them, without asking the service offeror.
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.
There's no privacy aspect. The article is about unsubscribing from (paid) services, not communication. Usually when somebody subscribes to a service the user gives the company their full address and payment information.
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.
It is my policy these days to investigate how easy it is to cancel/delete a service or subscription before I register for it, which is incidentally why I will never ever be a Comcast customer.
Nice improvement! The U.S. government's move to make the 'unsubscribe' button more accessible is a step in the right direction, bringing it closer to what Turkey has already implemented. In Turkey, regulations ensure that users can easily opt out of unwanted emails with a straightforward click, minimizing the hassle of digging through convoluted unsubscribe processes. This user-friendly approach has been effective in giving Turkish users more control over their digital lives, and it's encouraging to see the U.S. catching up. For web users like me, this means a cleaner, more manageable inbox and a better overall online experience.
Unrelated: but can we also force websites to have SIMPLE settings pages? has anyone tried to change ANYTHING at all from a facebook page via settings? how is that legal?
I hate how every company that I place an order with treats that as permission to send a constant drip of marketing emails. I send them straight to spam.
I've long since given up on this. I write email filters. I sign up for things under my Fake Name. Unsubscribing is an amazing crapshoot, especially when years later something you know you've unsubscribed from, because you have the email confirmation happens to send an "oops" email. Filtering email is the only thing that works, and ever since I adopted this approach I'm down to an average of zero marketing mails a week. I'll stay here.
To quote other posters: this isn't about email. But, this provision doesn't include the usual exemptions for politicians/campaigns, so if you ever set up recurring donations to a campaign, this might require that they behave with decency.
This would be awesome. Another thing on my wish list is a requirement to simply reject all cookies, a la lynx. I absolutely hate having to deselect some cookies while feeling like I am treated as an idiot for accepting “absolutely essential” cookies that are of course not essential at all.
Let's be clear about this; credit where due: this is NOT simply "The US Government".
This is a Biden administration initiative; the latest step in consistent hard work to free US residents from corporate "heads we win, tails you lose" dark patterns.
I just don't understand. If I want to unsubscribe from a list or subscription service, I'll do it anyway. Does such a system really work, and are there people who don't unsubscribe?
It took me six months to cancel and erase my data for Oura Ring. I was absolutely infuriated and ended up spamming the executive team until I got an answer.
Turns out, they hadn't really had anyone ask to delete their data before, and didn't really know what to do or even who inside their own company was responsible.
It's not just about regulatory (stick) incentives, there needs to be a shift marketing-wise towards privacy (carrot). It can be a differentiator and marketers specifically – who trade in the false religion of targeted advertising – should adjust their brand marketing strategy towards the growing awareness amongst consumers about how their data is used, especially now that so much of it is being used to line the pockets of companies who've slapped "now with AI" stickers on their boxes.
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.
> In June, the Justice Department, referred by the FTC, filed a lawsuit against software maker Adobe and two of its executives
:
> Dana Rao, Adobe’s general counsel, said in an emailed statement that Adobe disagrees with the lawsuit’s characterization of its business and “we will refute the FTC’s claims in court.”
Gross.
But back to topic of the headline — make it easier to click 'unsubscribe'? Why not instead make it harder to click 'subscribe' in the first place?
Thanks internet, for giving us this shitty opt-out world we live in now.
I wish I could unsubscribe from the political SMS messages that I never subscribed to in the first place (they all address someone with a different name than mine). No amount of “STOP” or reporting as spam will stem the tide. I get 2-3 of these a day minimum, they just hop to a new number when I block one of the numbers. I’d love to find who is providing this sending infrastructure and sue them but I done have the time/energy.
That coupled with the BS I’ve had to deal with sending SMS’s the fully respect “STOP”’s is infuriating.
I'd bet good money that any new rule will not apply to political-related spam. Unsubscribing from a political party's various fundraising schemes will no doubt remain next to impossible. We can complain about "dark money" all day, but how many of the superpac schemes we setup simply to avoid the inevitable spam/marketing associated with political donations?
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 common among banks as well, they use their dinosaur status when it comes to things that are bad for their business, but can be very progressive on the other end of things. For example, to move loans from one bank to another you need some documents (here in Sweden at least) to be handed to the other bank. I had to first wait in the support, then ask politely to get these documents. They told me that they would snail mail them to me immediately, but after two weeks I called them again, then they said sorry and sent me a PDF instead proving that they could have done this immediately...