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

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 link) I’m either immediately unsubscribed from the person who sent me the email, or I’m taken to a page which seemingly MUST have a “remove me from all emails” option.

The level of compliance (and they can’t even do malicious compliance!) with this is absurd. If these new rules work anything like that, they’ll be awesome. Clearly regulating behavior like this is indeed possible.

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 "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.

They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.

I've also found unsubscribe links that don't do anything. Like the unsubscribe link simply fails to work; nothing happens when you click on it.

I got on a mailing list for something from IBM. The unsubscribe link took me to a page that always said it was "temporarily" unavailable I should try again later. The first time I gave them the benefit of the doubt. After a few tries over the course of months, I decided that it was permanently unavailable, and if it really was broken, they didn't have any motivation to fix it. So I set up a filter to automatically delete everything from that domain.