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IANAL, but if the page is used to opt-out of marketing emails, then yes, Visa is in violation the US CAN-SPAM act, which requires promptly processing opt-out re

IANAL, but if the page is used to opt-out of marketing emails, then yes, Visa is in violation the US CAN-SPAM act, which requires promptly processing opt-out requests. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act... As long as the opt-out page is broken, they should not be sending out marketing emails and could be open to a class-action lawsuit from people they email with no ability to opt-out.

LukeShu 5y ago
> could be open to a class-action lawsuit from people they email with no ability to opt-out. CAN-SPAM does not grant standing to individuals. The only recourse individuals have under CAN-SPAM is to report the violation to the FTC and hope the FTC does something about it.
- manquer 5y ago
  Do individuals have standing against FTC if they don't action ? Lack of FTC action is causing you material harm , or is there immunity against FTC as well?
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    - drdaeman 5y ago
      A single one - barely any. Although you have to be a Superman to be able to entirely process it in 1ms. At scale, it might take up to a few minutes off your day and under certain circumstances (heavy spam) even start contributing to a mental fatigue. It's a minor nuisance but a nuisance nonetheless.
      - convolvatron 5y ago
        don't forget that that the presence of spam makes it quite a bit more difficult to manage your own email regardless, it introduces a non-zero chance that legitimate email might be misclassified it seems like everyone in the ad industry has this opinion - if you don't like it, just delete it and move on. but there are thousands of them, and somewhere in there is that job offer I really need.
    - georgebarnett 5y ago
      A single email will waste anywhere between 3-30 seconds of my life. On aggregate, junk email, enabled by disrespecting marketers and ongoing minimisation such as your comment, will waste months.
    - paskozdilar 5y ago
      So just because the harm "feels small" to you personally, that means it's not really harm?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        When you go to sue Visa to get them to pay for the harm they caused you I imagine a $0.01 of harm is not worth the trouble. Edit: I forgot the context. I should have said the FTC.
        tobyjsullivan 5y ago
        From the URL in the root comment: > Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $46,517
    - behringer 5y ago
      If you don't like it perhaps you can petition the government to get rid of the can spam act?
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Yes. My time is highly valuable. As is my ISP pipe and my thought processing. Spam steals that, and you'll find no quarter with most tech folks because this is the societal default.
      - paulcole 5y ago
        tomrod 5y ago
        Oh my. This is a lovely comment. Let us dissect. > Let’s not confuse being paid a lot of money at work with our time being valuable. Thanks. I haven't. But I'm glad you reminded people that time being valuable is disconnected from hourly rate. Perhaps unintentionally. It wouldn't matter if my job paid minimum wage or I fund my fifth yacht budget from my latest financial trade, my time is valuable. I get one life to enjoy. Others may value their time differently. My time, however, I value highly. > You comment quite a bit on a site that’s the content marketing project of a VC firm after all. I learn quite a bit from the site, as the weekend projects here become the valuable tech five to ten years down the line. ----- Spam emails are an unmitigated moral bad, and a tu quoque in their defense, however misplaced and invective, is ultimately meaningless.
        otterley 5y ago
        > Let’s not confuse being paid a lot of money at work with our time being valuable. On the contrary, that's exactly what "being paid a lot of money at work" implies.
        noizejoy 5y ago
        “My time being valuable” can legitimately be meant in a fully subjective way. In the sense of: I would like to cram a long list of activities (including thinking about certain things) into my remaining lifetime. If that list is a lot longer than my remaining life allows for, the value of my time is arguably pretty high for me - even if it isn’t for others.
    - sumedh 5y ago
      That is like saying if I steal a dollar from your pocket do you really care about that but I can steal a dollar from millions of people and get rich.
    - autoexec 5y ago
      The economic harm spam causes is in the billions every year. Plenty of articles and reports on the negative impacts of spam. It's no small thing.
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        We are talking about the "Lack of FTC action is causing you material harm." It's not causing you specifically billions of dollars.
    - na85 5y ago
      >How much harm does a marketing email even do. Waste 0.001 seconds of your time? I can't get myself into a frame of mind where I'd find myself defending spam. I'm genuinely fascinated. Why are you taking this angle?
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > Do individuals have standing against FTC if they don't action ? You can petition them, certainly. Individuals and business are not able to sue the FTC.
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      It's complicated, but under certain circumstances you can sue agencies for not doing something. It depends on the specific laws governing the specific agency and how you've been harmed by the inaction. Broadly speaking, the Administrative Procedures Act required agencies to have procedurally fair processes. If you're concretely harmed by an agency's inaction and you can show they didn't follow the correct processes, you can sometimes win.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      Why can't you sue the FTC?
      - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
        Anybody can sue anybody. Winning though...
        nerdponx 5y ago
        In general you can't sue the federal government.
        epgui 5y ago
        On the contrary, that's what judicial review is for. (And there may be other mechanisms as well.)
        otterley 5y ago
        The general rule of US and English common law is that the sovereign is immune from liability. The reason you can sue the U.S. Government is because Congress passed laws such as the Tucker Act, the Federal Tort Claims Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, and Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act allowing plaintiffs to do so. Judicial review doesn't generally let you sue the Government to obtain redress for injuries; it is for enforcing the people's Constitutional rights where the Government is stepping out of bounds. It doesn't let you, say, sue the FTC to get them to do their job. (This is second-year Constitutional Law, BTW.)
  - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    Anecdotal, but the FTC has teeth. I noticed I was getting billed by AT&T for South Carolina taxes when I'd been living in Oregon for 3 years. Literally hadn't left the state of Oregon since I'd arrived. I added up the fees in a spreadsheet and it came out to $51. I called AT&T and fought with their customer support who offered me "as a one time courtesy refund $25" and escalating to a manager wouldn't change that. I submitted a complaint to the FTC, and not long after I got multiple calls and voicemails from AT&T "Executive Customer Service" or something, and when I finally took the call they breathlessly offered me a full refund for the exact amount right up front with no haggling. It was remarkable. Can you believe they called ME to fix their fuckup? And then paid me? Could you imagine if that was the level of customer service you always got? So out of sheer loyalty I immediately switched to Ting and have saved thousands of dollars since.
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      I was once having problem with my Bank, and instead of going into the branch _again_, I used a form on the website to log a complaint. OMG, I've never seen such good customer service! My guess is the number of complaints resolved is tied to somebodies bonus.
      - ryanhuff 5y ago
        It may be that complaints submitted over the bank website are handled by a different (more responsive) team than complaints made at the branch.
        Meph504 5y ago
        A lot of times, when it comes to business like this, in person complaints go into the ether, but the online complaints are recorded and play a part in performance metrics, or hit corp response team rather than branch.
        andylynch 5y ago
        This is it. Online complaints will go into a system where they are monitored by (very) senior management and reported to regulators.
fay59 5y ago
CAN-SPAM does not create a private right of action. I have generally no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to legal stuff but I think this means only the government can sue them over it.
aidenn0 5y ago
IANAL as well; #6 says that no information other than an e-mail address is required to opt-out, but when I was presented with a login-page for an unsubscribe, my research indicated that it's not cut-and-dry that requiring a login is banned by CAN-SPAM.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
>if the page is used to opt-out of marketing emails Though I can't access it, I don't think that's what it's for. I believe it's for opting out of having your credit-card purchase history used for marketing purposes (i.e. sold to other companies, not for Visa itself to send you marketing emails). >U.S. cardholders may opt out of Visa using their card transaction data for VAS, a suite of aggregated data products in the US. (from the first result on https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=visa+marketing+report+opt+out https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=visa+marketing+re... , which points to the same subdomain on visa.com)
- JacobThreeThree 5y ago
  Yeah, this opt-out is clearly not related to the sending of marketing emails.
codingdave 5y ago
> with no ability to opt-out. That is the key. Does the web page being down mean that there is no way to opt out? Or is it just more difficult? The page you linked says: "Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you." Take note of the "or" in that statement. So as long as they check replies within 10 days, they seem to be OK. If they fail to do so, maybe there is a problem. FWIW, I'm in agreement that this link being down is not good. But there is not enough info to hazard even guessing whether this is a violation of law.
- playpause 5y ago
  Seems unlikely every marketing email Visa sent during this outage was sent from an actual, valid email address with an inbox. Isn’t that pretty unusual for marketing emails? They’re usually from something like no-spam@domain.
  - codingdave 5y ago
    Agreed. I'm not saying they are in the clear, I'm saying that neither do we have enough information to declare that they definitely broke laws - the law being cited contained both flexibility and ambiguity and it would take some legal research and knowledge to know more. (And now that I think of it, we aren't even citing the law, we are talking about a summary of the law that is posted online.)
dillondoyle 5y ago
I think the CA law might have more teeth to allow for individual action? e.g. if they don't respond to data deletion requests.

LukeShu 5y ago

> could be open to a class-action lawsuit from people they email with no ability to opt-out. CAN-SPAM does not grant standing to individuals. The only recourse individuals have under CAN-SPAM is to report the violation to the FTC and hope the FTC does something about it.

manquer 5y ago
Do individuals have standing against FTC if they don't action ? Lack of FTC action is causing you material harm , or is there immunity against FTC as well?
- charcircuit 5y ago
  - drdaeman 5y ago
    A single one - barely any. Although you have to be a Superman to be able to entirely process it in 1ms. At scale, it might take up to a few minutes off your day and under certain circumstances (heavy spam) even start contributing to a mental fatigue. It's a minor nuisance but a nuisance nonetheless.
    - convolvatron 5y ago
      don't forget that that the presence of spam makes it quite a bit more difficult to manage your own email regardless, it introduces a non-zero chance that legitimate email might be misclassified it seems like everyone in the ad industry has this opinion - if you don't like it, just delete it and move on. but there are thousands of them, and somewhere in there is that job offer I really need.
  - georgebarnett 5y ago
    A single email will waste anywhere between 3-30 seconds of my life. On aggregate, junk email, enabled by disrespecting marketers and ongoing minimisation such as your comment, will waste months.
  - paskozdilar 5y ago
    So just because the harm "feels small" to you personally, that means it's not really harm?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      When you go to sue Visa to get them to pay for the harm they caused you I imagine a $0.01 of harm is not worth the trouble. Edit: I forgot the context. I should have said the FTC.
      - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
        From the URL in the root comment: > Each separate email in violation of the law is subject to penalties of up to $46,517
  - behringer 5y ago
    If you don't like it perhaps you can petition the government to get rid of the can spam act?
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Yes. My time is highly valuable. As is my ISP pipe and my thought processing. Spam steals that, and you'll find no quarter with most tech folks because this is the societal default.
    - paulcole 5y ago
      - tomrod 5y ago
        Oh my. This is a lovely comment. Let us dissect. > Let’s not confuse being paid a lot of money at work with our time being valuable. Thanks. I haven't. But I'm glad you reminded people that time being valuable is disconnected from hourly rate. Perhaps unintentionally. It wouldn't matter if my job paid minimum wage or I fund my fifth yacht budget from my latest financial trade, my time is valuable. I get one life to enjoy. Others may value their time differently. My time, however, I value highly. > You comment quite a bit on a site that’s the content marketing project of a VC firm after all. I learn quite a bit from the site, as the weekend projects here become the valuable tech five to ten years down the line. ----- Spam emails are an unmitigated moral bad, and a tu quoque in their defense, however misplaced and invective, is ultimately meaningless.
      - otterley 5y ago
        > Let’s not confuse being paid a lot of money at work with our time being valuable. On the contrary, that's exactly what "being paid a lot of money at work" implies.
        noizejoy 5y ago
        “My time being valuable” can legitimately be meant in a fully subjective way. In the sense of: I would like to cram a long list of activities (including thinking about certain things) into my remaining lifetime. If that list is a lot longer than my remaining life allows for, the value of my time is arguably pretty high for me - even if it isn’t for others.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    That is like saying if I steal a dollar from your pocket do you really care about that but I can steal a dollar from millions of people and get rich.
  - autoexec 5y ago
    The economic harm spam causes is in the billions every year. Plenty of articles and reports on the negative impacts of spam. It's no small thing.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      We are talking about the "Lack of FTC action is causing you material harm." It's not causing you specifically billions of dollars.
  - na85 5y ago
    >How much harm does a marketing email even do. Waste 0.001 seconds of your time? I can't get myself into a frame of mind where I'd find myself defending spam. I'm genuinely fascinated. Why are you taking this angle?
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  > Do individuals have standing against FTC if they don't action ? You can petition them, certainly. Individuals and business are not able to sue the FTC.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    It's complicated, but under certain circumstances you can sue agencies for not doing something. It depends on the specific laws governing the specific agency and how you've been harmed by the inaction. Broadly speaking, the Administrative Procedures Act required agencies to have procedurally fair processes. If you're concretely harmed by an agency's inaction and you can show they didn't follow the correct processes, you can sometimes win.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Why can't you sue the FTC?
    - NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      Anybody can sue anybody. Winning though...
      - nerdponx 5y ago
        In general you can't sue the federal government.
        epgui 5y ago
        On the contrary, that's what judicial review is for. (And there may be other mechanisms as well.)
        otterley 5y ago
        The general rule of US and English common law is that the sovereign is immune from liability. The reason you can sue the U.S. Government is because Congress passed laws such as the Tucker Act, the Federal Tort Claims Act, the Administrative Procedures Act, and Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act allowing plaintiffs to do so. Judicial review doesn't generally let you sue the Government to obtain redress for injuries; it is for enforcing the people's Constitutional rights where the Government is stepping out of bounds. It doesn't let you, say, sue the FTC to get them to do their job. (This is second-year Constitutional Law, BTW.)
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  Anecdotal, but the FTC has teeth. I noticed I was getting billed by AT&T for South Carolina taxes when I'd been living in Oregon for 3 years. Literally hadn't left the state of Oregon since I'd arrived. I added up the fees in a spreadsheet and it came out to $51. I called AT&T and fought with their customer support who offered me "as a one time courtesy refund $25" and escalating to a manager wouldn't change that. I submitted a complaint to the FTC, and not long after I got multiple calls and voicemails from AT&T "Executive Customer Service" or something, and when I finally took the call they breathlessly offered me a full refund for the exact amount right up front with no haggling. It was remarkable. Can you believe they called ME to fix their fuckup? And then paid me? Could you imagine if that was the level of customer service you always got? So out of sheer loyalty I immediately switched to Ting and have saved thousands of dollars since.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    I was once having problem with my Bank, and instead of going into the branch _again_, I used a form on the website to log a complaint. OMG, I've never seen such good customer service! My guess is the number of complaints resolved is tied to somebodies bonus.
    - ryanhuff 5y ago
      It may be that complaints submitted over the bank website are handled by a different (more responsive) team than complaints made at the branch.
      - Meph504 5y ago
        A lot of times, when it comes to business like this, in person complaints go into the ether, but the online complaints are recorded and play a part in performance metrics, or hit corp response team rather than branch.
        andylynch 5y ago
        This is it. Online complaints will go into a system where they are monitored by (very) senior management and reported to regulators.

fay59 5y ago

CAN-SPAM does not create a private right of action. I have generally no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to legal stuff but I think this means only the government can sue them over it.

aidenn0 5y ago

IANAL as well; #6 says that no information other than an e-mail address is required to opt-out, but when I was presented with a login-page for an unsubscribe, my research indicated that it's not cut-and-dry that requiring a login is banned by CAN-SPAM.

hoppyhoppy2 5y ago

>if the page is used to opt-out of marketing emails Though I can't access it, I don't think that's what it's for. I believe it's for opting out of having your credit-card purchase history used for marketing purposes (i.e. sold to other companies, not for Visa itself to send you marketing emails). >U.S. cardholders may opt out of Visa using their card transaction data for VAS, a suite of aggregated data products in the US. (from the first result on https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=visa+marketing+report+opt+out https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&q=visa+marketing+re... , which points to the same subdomain on visa.com)

JacobThreeThree 5y ago
Yeah, this opt-out is clearly not related to the sending of marketing emails.

codingdave 5y ago

> with no ability to opt-out. That is the key. Does the web page being down mean that there is no way to opt out? Or is it just more difficult? The page you linked says: "Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you." Take note of the "or" in that statement. So as long as they check replies within 10 days, they seem to be OK. If they fail to do so, maybe there is a problem. FWIW, I'm in agreement that this link being down is not good. But there is not enough info to hazard even guessing whether this is a violation of law.

playpause 5y ago
Seems unlikely every marketing email Visa sent during this outage was sent from an actual, valid email address with an inbox. Isn’t that pretty unusual for marketing emails? They’re usually from something like no-spam@domain.
- codingdave 5y ago
  Agreed. I'm not saying they are in the clear, I'm saying that neither do we have enough information to declare that they definitely broke laws - the law being cited contained both flexibility and ambiguity and it would take some legal research and knowledge to know more. (And now that I think of it, we aren't even citing the law, we are talking about a summary of the law that is posted online.)

dillondoyle 5y ago

I think the CA law might have more teeth to allow for individual action? e.g. if they don't respond to data deletion requests.