US Government wants to make it easier for you to click the 'unsubscribe' button

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...

Anecdotally:

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.

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.

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.

Here's more info on the initiative: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

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.

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.

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.

The US government needs actual anti spam laws.

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.

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.

Ah, not just unsubscribe from a mailing list, but cancel a recurring payment.

I'm curious to hear from a lawyer whether the undoing of Chevron Deference will undermine these efforts.

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 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.

I could see this being the first big challenge to executive branch regulations after Chevron was overturned.

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].

[1]: https://www.consumerprotectionreview.com/2021/11/california-...

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?

Cable and mobile plans first and foremost. Those are the worst offenders by far.

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.

While I completely agree with the legislation, why isn't this going through congress? Update the CAN-SPAM act to be more substantial.

This sounds similar to the law that was enacted in Germany two years ago: https://www.mofo.com/resources/insights/211006-new-two-click...

Unsubscribe is one of the best working privacy rules we have.

It’s small, but when you click on it it works.

Okay, but now do political emails. They're not subject to CANSPAM.

I don't want to receive calls and emails for the rest of my life just because I donated to a candidate once.

I should have to proactively choose to opt in, before I receive any marketing emails.

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.

Unsubscribe is not the issue anymore. It is algorithmic tracking of you as a person, and also any AI based services Ok top of that.

Mail spam? That's so 1998-2010s.

Just use privacy.com virtual cards as an interface to a real card. When you want to unsubscribe just close the virtual card to said service.

It is very easy to set up filters to make emails coming from some sender to automatically skip the inbox.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579?hl=en

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/manage-email-mess...

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.

Apply the same to political candidates, campaigns, and PACs and I'll consider taking it seriously.

Start with the New York Times, I like their paper, but not their subscriber retention policies.

Can we also make it so if you can sign-up to a gym membership online, you can cancel online?

There needs to be some kind of DNS records so I can cancel emails based on sender domains.

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 can't wait to see this law enacted by 2040.

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.

This is great. Never forget the scumbag companies that have been making it frustrating to unsubscribe without this regulation (NY Times, WSJ)

Organizations seem to create new lists faster than I can unsubscribe.

"As easy to cancel as it is to sign up"

Frankly the US Govt could apply this to marriage too…

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?