Comment by ivan_gammel
12 hours ago
I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related.
It is a very common problem with modern marketing teams, that have zero empathy for customers (even if they have one, they will never push back on whatever insane demands come from senior management). This is why any email subscription management interface now is as bloated as a dead whale. If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone.
It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one. Maybe it’s a curse of growing organization and middle management creep. The least we can do is push back as customers.
I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this *far* more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before.
This also tracks with every app and website injecting AI into every one of your interactions, with no way to disable it.
I think the article's point about non-consent is a very apt one, and expresses why I dislike this trend so much. I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail etc and I couldn't turn it off (only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left).
To be clear I am someone that uses AI basically every day, but the non-consent is still frustrating and dehumanising. Users–even paying users–are "considered" in design these days as much as a cow is "considered" in the design of a dairy farm.
I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.
> I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad (depending on your opinion) than anything else before
Isn't that because most of the other advancements/fads were not as widely applicable?
With earlier things there was usually only particular kinds of sites or products where they would be useful. You'd still get some people trying to put them in places they made no sense, but most of the places they made no sense stayed untouched.
With AI, if well done, it would be useful nearly everywhere. It might not be well done enough yet for some of the places people are putting it so ends up being annoying, but that's a problem of them being premature, not a problem of them wanting to put AI somewhere it makes no sense.
There have been previous advancements that were useful nearly everywhere, such as the internet or the microcomputer, but they started out with limited availability and took many years to become widely available so they were more like several smaller advancements/fads in series rather than one big one like AI.
The shift from "you just don't understand" to damage control would be funny if it wasn't so transparent.
> We have identified a bug in our system... we take communication consent very seriously
> There was a bug, and we fucked up... we take comms consent seriously
These two actors were clearly coached into the same narrative. I also absolutely don't believe them at all: some PM made the conscious decision to bypass user preferences to increase some KPI that pleases some AI-invested stakeholder.
To add to this, it's the same attitude that they used to create the AI in the first place by using content which they don't own, without permission. Regardless of how useful it may be, the companies creating it and including it have demonstrated time and again that they do not care about consent.
How can you get a machine to have values? Humans have values because of social dynamics and education (or lack of exposure to other types of education). Computers do not have social dynamics, and it is much harder to control what they are being educated on if the answer is "everything".
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> I left Google Workspace, as a paying customer for years, because they injected gemini into gmail
I wonder if this varies by territory. In UK, none of the Gmail accounts I use has received this pollution
> I am moving all of the software that I pay for to competitors who either do not integrate AI, or allow me to disable it if I wish.
The latter sounds safer. The former may add "AI" tomorrow.
I am in the UK. TBC this isn't a gmail.com email address, this is a paid "small business" workspace against a custom domain.
Eventually they backtracked and allowed (I think?) all paid customers to disable gemini, but I had already migrated to Fastmail so :shrug:
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Gmail <> Google Workspaces
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> only those on the most expensive enterprise plans could at the time I left.
lol. so the premium feature is the ability to turn off the AI? That's one way to monetise AI I suppose.
Hahaha. It's like a protection racket for the new age.
"Nice user experience you got there. Would be a real shame if AI got added to it."
Yeah this is not a new thing with AI, you can unsubscribe all you want, they are still gonna email you about "seminars" and other bullshit. AWS has so many of those and your email is permanently in their database, even if you delete your account. I also still get Oracle Cloud emails even though I told them to delete my account as well, so I can't even log in anymore to update preferences!
Fun fact, requiring login for unsubscribe is illegal per the canspam act. The most you can do is force a user to verify their email address to you.
Even WhatsApp has it in the search bar
>I disagree: in as much as I have noticed this far more with AI than any other advancement / fad
I agree with gp that new spam emails that override customers' email marketing preferences is not an "AI" issue.
The problem is that once companies have your email address, their irresistible compulsion to spam you is so great that they will deliberately not honor their own "Communication Preferences" that supposedly lets customers opt out of all marketing emails.
Even companies that are mostly good citizens about obeying customers' email marketing preferences still end up making exceptions. Examples:
Amazon has a profile page to opt out of all email marketing and it works... except ... it doesn't work to stop the new Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon Health marketing emails. Those emails do not have an "Unsubscribe" link and there is no extra setting in the customer profile to prevent them.
Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!"
Neither of those aggressive emails have anything to do with AI. Companies just like to make exceptions to their rules to spam you. The customer's email inbox is just too valuable a target for companies to ignore.
That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox. Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far. (Or promoting Gemini in Chrome and web apps is enough exposure for them.)
> That said, I have 3 gmail.com addresses and none of them have marketing spam emails from Google about Gemini AI showing up in the Primary inbox.
That's because they put their alerts in the gmail web interface :-/
"Try $FOO for business" "Use drive ... blah blah blah"
All of these can be dismissed, but new ones show up regularly.
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> Maybe it's commendable that Google is showing incredible restraint so far.
Or the Gmail spam filter is working.
> Apple doesn't send out marketing messages and obeys their customers' marketing email preferences ... except .. when you buy a new iPhone and then they send emails about "Your new iPhone lets you try Apple TV for 3 months free!" and then more emails about "You have Apple Music for 3 months free!"
That's "transactional" I'm sure. It makes sense that a company is legally allowed to send transactional emails, but they all abuse it to send marketing bullshit wherever they can blur the line.
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Imagine making this argument for other technologies. There is no opt-out button for machine learning, choosing the power source for their datacenters, the coding language in their software, etc. Conceptually there is a difference between opting out of an interaction with another party vs opting out of a specific part of their technology stack.
The three examples you listed are implementation details, so it's not clear if this is a serious post. Which datacenter they deploy code in is (other than territory for laws etc, which is something you may wish to know about and pick from) an implementation detail.
A better example would be: imagine every single operating system and app you use adds spellcheck. They only let you spell check in American[1]. You will get spell check prompts from your Operating System, your browser, and the webapp you're in. You can turn none of them off.
[1] in this example, you speak the Queen's English, so spell color colour etc
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I believe this is combined with something I call "asymmetry blindness". They may say "but we send an single e-mail per month, this can't be bad".
We the users get a barrage of e-mails everyday because every marketing team is thinking we only get their mail, and it makes our lonely and cold mailbox merrier.
No, users are in constant "Tsunami warning!" mode and these teams are not helping.
If they were sending just one per month I might actually read them occasionally. It's the three a day from the likes of aliexpress that get deleted without a second glance.
But yes, you're absolutely right - "no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood".
That marketing team only sends 1 email a month, but the 25 other marketing teams at the same company also only send 1 email a month.
Our subscription product costs less than expensive coffee. Unused RAM is wasted.
Again, no raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood: if you buy enough coffee-priced subscriptions, that's unaffordable. Usually people already have their coffee-priced budget allocated to something. Like coffee.
(Incidentally, this is why mobile gaming uses so many anti-patterns, to make people keep making "just one more" tiny purchase)
I guess the people you quote also missed that not all of us work in Silicon Valley and can afford those expensive coffees every day. I’d like an estimate of how many Nescafé powder coffee cups I’d have to skip per month to use their subscription.
Indeed. I received 28 unwanted emails of this kind in January so far (just counted), which is a bit more than once per day, despite quite avidly unsubscribing from this kind of emails. This month I had to unsubscribe from ChatGPT and GitHub emails of this kind too, although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently.
> although I don’t recall opting in to them in the first place and neither of them spammed me until recently
Dark pattern. They know you'd spot immediate abuse , so they delay until you are likely to have forgotten whether you opted in.
>unsubscribe from ChatGPT emails
Really? I've never got a spam from them. Hell, I just searched and I'm not really seeing anything from them after the point where I signed up.
I'm pretty sure some people have performance metrics attached to their "newsletter".
The idea that the marketing team has the ability to really push back against senior management doesn't align with the reality I have seen. The best they can do is say that this will do brand damage -- but they don't have the ability to really call the shots. Most organizations marketing is not in a real seat of power - more like an advisory position.
I'm not trying to unfair to marketing - they do have an important role - I have hardly seen a company give marketing real power at an org. So the idea that this is because marketing don't push back on senior management -- is because they know they don't have the power to do this.
The problem is not just empathy. It is also ethics. The fine distinction between opting out of A and opting out of B described in the post served to justify ignoring the opt out request. That's lazy ethically. The entire US business sector's customer relations are completely compromised ethically. It's taken to extremes in tech contexts.
In large organizations motivated reasoning trumps ethics. Behavior starts working along incentive gradients like an ant heap. Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer.
I think maintaining ethics in large organizations is one of the main challenges of our time, now that mega corps dominate our time and attention.
> Spend enough time in an environment like that and you learn to frame every selfish decision as good for the customer.
This reminds me of "in order to save the environment, we are going to delete all of your recordings older than 2 years, in 2 weeks. You can't download them."
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all
There are clear AI-specific reasons why it's being crammed down everybody's necks.
Namely: someone in management has bet the entire strategy on it. The strategy is not working and they need to juice the numbers desperately.
It's not really AI itself though, it's just whatever the current hype cycle is - it was crypto and cloud before this.
Cloud is probably the better comparison, since crypto never had the sort of mainstream management buy-in that the other two got. Microsoft's handling of OneDrive in particular foreshadows how AI is being pushed out.
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I have never received a Crypto spam email from any place where I opted out from it. Same for cloud. It feels different. With crypto it was everyone wanting to ride the hype train. With AI they spent a bunch of money up front and are desperate to see ROI.
> If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone.
I always "report spam" ("!" key in GMail) before unsubscribing.
Still happy that Tuta Mail is anti AI, and does not push ads on you via email.
I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.
* I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.*
But people subscribe to Proton because they want to move away from big tech. What’s the point of paying them if they get as bad.
Though for now I’ll assume that it’s a genuine mistake with things not properly escalated by customer support.
Does??
> I wonder who told Proton that it’s a good idea to copy big tech tactics.
The lure of big tech profits.
Not :)
Genuinely: What profits!?! The only company profiting from AI has been nVidia. Every indicator we've received for this entire alleged industry is companies buying hundreds of millions of dollars in graphics cards that then either sit in warehouses depreciating in value or, worse, are plugged in and immediately start losing money.
The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with as many bubbles as actual industries that sprang up. All the good ideas are done now. All the products anyone actually needs exist, are enshittified, and are selling user data to anyone who will pay, including products that exist solely to remove your data from everyone who bought it and probably then sell it to some other people.
This shit is stupid at this point. All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices and sustainable models of generating revenue that in most other industries would be fantastic, and they're absolutely apoplectic about this. They are so addicted to the easy, cheap services that upended entire other industries and made them rich beyond imagining that they will literally say, out loud, with their human mouths, that it is a bad, undesirable thing to simply have a business that makes some money.
The people at the top of this industry are literally fucking deranged and should be interred at a psychiatric facility for awhile for their and everyone else's good.
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> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all
Yeah, many companies do that. I unsusbcribed from newline, they still keep spamming me. Funny thing is, they realised they had made a mistake and promised to remove unsubs. One week later, the spam started.
The correct solution is the spam button. Always
> The correct solution is the spam button. Always
The correct solution is filing complaints with your country's relevant authority
In theory. In practice-- I would spend all my time just filing complaints, because today, in 2026, I get more spam from "legitimate" companies than "Nigerian scammer" types
I wish I could without going through a long process involving tons of personal info
The spam button risks false positives.
I feel more and more like. That email should be like DMs.
Do you want to accept emails from xxx?
Yes
No
On client side...
I think that would lead to this:
Do you want to accept emails from "For a limited time, save up to 35% on orders from Fluppsi! Click Yes for this amazing opportunity!"
Very dangerous, when the same From address may be used for "Log in inside 14 days or your dormant account will be deleted".
> It’s a shame that Proton marketing team is just like every other one.
Having gone through the Proton hiring process was an eye opener for me: despite its stated mission, the company isn't special when it comes to its management, it's as bad as any other.
The problem with tech is that there's absolutely zero accountability.
Marketing is, to some extent at least, regulated. There's so little consumer protection in the tech industry, it's a joke. We've got GDPR (in Europe) and I'm really struggling to think what else. Imagine if other forms of engineering had the same level of control.
There's this absolutely fallacious notion that in a free market, customers can just vote with their feet.
From big players with vendor lock-in and network effects, to specialists (I know of few decent competitors to Proton), the average consumer is not sufficiently protected from malpractice.
We may say, "oh, it's just a marketing email", but TFA perfectly encapsulates the relationship we have with our suppliers.
Now that we're at it, let's talk about Google ads. I reported a Google ad because I deem it political, and in Europe you must make it clear that a political ad is a political ad and not just an ad (and it failed to do so, it should be corrected or eliminated).
Google refused to comply and act in any way, because they "don't moderate 3rd party content". Except that EU says you _must_ comply if you're publishing a political ad. I'm bringing this forward with an appeal and then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act.
The laws are there. It's just that big tech think they can ignore them freely and even if down the road there's a fine it's going to be much less than what they gained by spreading ads.
>then I'm going to escalate to the national authority if they still refuse to act.
You are actually doing this wrong...
Report to the national authority first...
Then report to Google.
Fuck them, it is not in your interest to report to them first, make them react for their bullshit. Over here in the states this is how I ended up dealing with telecom in the ISP industry. "Hello, I have put in an FTC/FCC complaint on $issue, and would like to see about getting it resolved".
It didn't matter that's not the order you're supposed to go in, at the telecom side they send it off to a team that actually gets shit solved before it becomes a regulatory problem.
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Enforcement in UK is pathetic e.g. HelloFresh's recent spam campaign cost it <0.2p per message in fines. A bargain.
To name and shame two: LinkedIn and MyHeritage. If you ever made an account with either of them, they will never stop spamming you. They have configuration options to select which mail to receive, but they appear to consider them temporary suggestions.
A special dishonourable mention goes to Wal-mart. I never interacted with them in any way whatsoever, as well I wouldn't since they don't exist on my continent as far as I know, yet they still send me spam. DKIM signed and all!
LinkedIn once seemed to somehow go through my (GMail?) contacts and ask if I should invite my, late, grandfather to the platform in the subject of a marketing message.
Left a bitter taste.
> I think we must make it clear that this is not related to AI at all, even if the product in question is AI-related.
It is not specific to "AI" but it is very much related to it.
> If too many users unsubscribe, they just add one more category and “accidentally” opt-in everyone
... and "forget" to add its opt-out to the list.
It is an error to believe this is only happening in/with marketing. In general, "empathy" and "capitalism" are mutually exclusive. If profit is your goal, you don't care about individuals.
It is entirely related, because AI marketing is an amped up version of traditional dark-pattern marketing. And since every tech company is on the AI hype train, then they all fall into the same willingness to justify the worst behavior because of their desperate need to get on the forefront of what they’ve convinced themselves is the only path to growth. But as consumers, since we are confronted with all tech companies all following the same dark patterns, we feel the impact suddenly much stronger than with past one-at-a-time panicky company over-marketing efforts.
There’s probably a bigger association with it. I don’t like ai and see it everywhere, in every app I use, every service I purchase, my goddamn start bar.
So, when they start emailing unwanted emails, it feels like a spam problem, when really it’s insidious on multiple fronts.
I can’t wait for the enshittification phase. When the products royally fuck their fan base.