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

(www.ftc.gov)
1737 points pseudolus | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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Uehreka ◴[16 Oct 24 15:57 UTC] No.41860626[source]▶
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.

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1. mattmaroon ◴[17 Oct 24 01:35 UTC] No.41865616[source]▶
Well, the workaround to unsubscribe is just spam. It’s hard to argue that I get effectively fewer emails as a result of those regulations, even though I like them. I just get effectively infinite emails. There’s no effective difference between 10,000 spam emails a day and 11,000. The fact that Banana Republic actually stops sending me email when I tell them to is nice (for me and them really) but not practically meaningful.

To the extent that I see anything other than spam email it’s just because of spam filters not anything regulatory. If you don’t believe me just run an email server with no spam filter.

This regulation might actually be better though because it applies to only services users have given a credit card to. Those services are thus 100% dependent on access to the federal banking system, which can easily be revoked.