Swedish legislation has it right here. You can unsubscribe by any means you prefer. Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. The choice is completely with the party who wishes to terminate the agreement.
It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.
> Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon.
How would that even... work? Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area? And a customer who feels like a company a hard time could just put a notice in the paper and then collect money because the company obviously won't read every newspaper? Also, what about companies wanting to give customers a hard time by canceling their subscriptions - now customers have to read every newspaper too? I must be missing something...
"legal notice in a newspaper" is still very much a thing in common law jurisdictions, with a long history, see banns going way back https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns
There are many different types of legal ads, with different costs to advertise. The most common type of legal notice in New York is an LLC formation notice. The State of New York requires limited liability corporations to run an ad informing the public on the formation of the new corporation. There are also FCC, SLA liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe notices, name change notices, divorce notices (also known as dissolution of marriage notices), and probate notices.
I am well aware of that, but there is a very huge and crucial difference between putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one specific known private entity gets the information. The only case I can recall off the top of my head for the latter is for things like service of judicial papers, and even then as a last resort, only when direct attempts to reach the party have failed. I am not aware of a single case where a party that is already reasonably reachable has to monitor public media for private communication.
>there is a very huge and crucial difference between putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one specific known private entity gets the information
yes, and that huge and crucial difference in this case is that the entities in question have attorneys on staff, and those attorneys understand their responsibilities on behalf of the corporation
And yet, in the US, you can have process servers publish a notice in a very specific law newspaper that only lawyers ever read, then claim that you couldn't reach someone who would never in their life read such a newspaper for decades simply to see if they've been served.
If this sounds ridiculous, it's because it is, and yet somehow, we still do it. What Sweden does sounds no different, except it's companies with millions of dollars who could actually afford to check these things.
As I mentioned, AFAIK that's only as a last resort once you've been unreachable via other means, which doesn't sound ridiculous at all. Is that not the case?
> Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area?
In my US state, a lot of important legal notices get published in the newspaper, so companies should already be effectively doing this.
What most do (and what I've always done) is to subscribe to a clipping service that will scan the classifieds, nationwide if you want, for you and forward to you the types of items you want to be made aware of.
I prefer to unsubscribe by writing it on a post-it note and sticking it in a public bathroom under the sink. That way I can always sue for them not doing it!
Yes, that's true and it's good for those who know about it. It's not enough though, companies still have super easy sign ups and then refer to call customer service to unsubscribe (usually the case with cell phone plans for example). And many companies have no email or contact form, only a phone number available on their site.
So there's still lots of room for improvement.
It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.