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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: 0.202s | 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. wildzzz ◴[17 Oct 24 14:41 UTC] No.41870127[source]▶
The Unsubscribe links are so good now because all of those newsletters use the same handful of email marketing services. It's pretty much impossible to run your own email marketing campaign without them, you'll get sent right to everyone's Gmail spam box. Because those services are so big, they'll follow the CAN-SPAM act. What legitimate marketer wants to pay money for a service that's going to send your emails to spam boxes and potentially get you in trouble with the FTC? Despite Google making it difficult to run your own email server and doing a bunch of other fucked up shit, the centralization of email has produced a few good outcomes.

Now if we could only have the same level of control over the junk mail in our physical mail boxes.