Comment by pton_xd
6 days ago
This is what seemingly every app does. They add 15 different categories for notifications / emails / whatever, and then make you turn off each one individually. Then they periodically remove / add new categories, enabled by default. Completely abusive behavior.
Want to unsubscribe from this email? Ok, you can do it in one click, but we have 16 categories of emails we send you, so you'll still get the other 15! It's a dark pattern for sure.
And by unsubscribing, you just gave us a signal that you are active.
They’re sad they can’t point that particular marketing hose at you, anymore, but appreciate confirming your validity as a lead they’ll sell to data brokers.
1.3076744e+12 -1 is a lot of categories to click.
1,307,674,368,000
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e+ is such an unintuitive decimal representation system. going in blindly, it's completely non-obvious what "e" stands for, surely "d" would make far more sense. also, the namespace for e is plenty filled up as is, and, most of all, +12 implies 12 additional digits, not digits after the point
Google's choice to use it for calculation results despite having essentially no restriction on text space always annoyed me. I think this is the first time I've seen a human using it
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And if you just add them to your spam filter, it won't even work easily, because they deliberately shift around the domains and subdomains they send from every so often.
I just use a unique address for each service. Any email that gets leaked or is getting unsubscribe resistant spam is added to /etc/postfix/denied_recipients :)
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Luckly they don't seem to shift the addresses they send to, so if you own the domain you use for email you can make dedicated addresses for each service you sign up for. Then filter based on the `to:` field.
this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.
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Thanks again for unsubscribing! This is your weekly reminder that you are still unsubscribed. As usual, we've included a little bonus for you to enjoy at the end of this unsubscribe-reminder e-mail: a complementary full edition of this week's newsletter!
Yep. Had that happen with the United app a few weeks ago. Unsolicited spam sent via push notification to my phone. Turns out that they added a bunch of notification settings - of course all default to on.
Turned them all off except for trip updates that day.
Best part is- yesterday I received yet another unsolicited spam push message. With all the settings turned off.
So these companies will effective require you to use their app to use their service, then refuse to respect their own settings for privacy.
I've taken to "Archiving" apps like this on my Android phone. When I need it, I can un-archive it to use it. Keeps the list of things trying to get my attention a little bit smaller.
I just hellban every app from sending any notifications, except for a select few. Apps get like a one strike policy on notification spam. If they send a single notification I didn't want, I disable their ability to send notifications at all.
Also all notifications/etc are silent, except for alarms, pages, phone calls, and specific named people's texts.
Everything else... no. YouTube was the worst offender before for me.
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Sending ad notifications is a recent trend, normally Apple guidelines don’t allow it, but they know that Apple cannot much fuss about with all the regulatory pressure.
It’s the enshitification of the notification system, the apps are already filled with ads and now they’re making you open the app or splash things on your face.
Why do you even need the United app? They have a website.
This is why whenever you try to do anything significant on a web site with a phone, they tell you to "Download our app". Detection is very good now. Slack can see right through desktop mode, cheater, and will redirect you to the app regardless.
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Boarding pass. For the airline apps, it probably is a good assumption that most people want to get a notification that their flight is delayed, or started boarding, etc..
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When I get email like that, I mark it as spam. That trains the spam filters to remove their marketing email from everyone's inbox. I see it as a community service.
That behavior is what finally got me off Facebook awhile back.
Edit: And something similar with Windows now that I think about it; there was a privacy setting which would appear to work till you re-entered that menu. Saving the setting didn't actually persist it, and the default was not consumer-friendly.
LinkedIn does the same thing re emails, notifications, etc that they send. I think I turned off notifications that connections had achieved new high scores in games they play on LinkedIn. Absurd.
[flagged]
LinkedIn is one the most useless app ever. I have trashed it countless times, but I do use it now and ten to keep up with companies and respond to a few solicitations. There is almost never anything of value in my feed, between the fake jobs and the low value self-promotion AI-written posts. Who even reads this? Not even mentioning the political, and pseudo-activist posts. And this happens despite systematically marking all of these posts irrelevant or “inappropriate for LinkedIn”. This app is beyond repair. Uninstalling.
“House Project Managers”
I especially like how they add it to the bottom of a widget with hidden scrollbars, just to make it totally missable that they added them at all!