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Comment by Ansil849 | Hacker News Reader

> You can decide what types of mail you do and don’t want from marketers. Register at the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) consumer website DMAchoice.org, and choose what catalogs, magazine offers, and other mail you want to get. You’ll have to pay a $2 processing fee, and your registration will last for 10 years.

Is it just me, or is it insanely fucked up that in order to reduce the amount of junk mail you have to 1) first provide your information to yet another third-party site, and 2) pay money.

This is beyond backwards.

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us public: ubm is making us miserable

FTC: pay this company no one but us know about $2 and it will fix the problem for 10 years in no legally binding way and with no government oversight penalty or enforcement.

Given the USPS is the one doing this, it feels like running a state or national campaign on just regulating an opt out feels extremely doable.

Hell, maybe you hate the post office? Great way to punish it!

You are already paying a lot more than that for the USPS. $2 extra to save myself hours of sorting through mail for the next 10 years is worth it.

That's placing an awful lot of faith in this third-party website doing what it is intended to do, as opposed to other possibilities such as it not doing much of anything at all, or worse yet, exposing your data at some point.

Instead, my approach whenever I receive junkmail is:

1) I write to the sender to request that all of my information be removed from their databases and that I did not consent to receiving any information from them.

2) I file a report with the Better Business Bureau: https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint

3) If they have a public-facing presence on a site like Google Reviews, Yelp, and so on, I leave a review detailing that this company sends out spam.

4) And most importantly, I keep a spreadsheet of companies that have sent me spam, and try to avoid ever giving them any of my money or labor.

First, thank you. I’m free riding in the positive pressure you’ve exerted.

Does it work for you? Do they stop, and is it worth the time?

Also, do you go through all four steps at the “first offense”? Rightly or not it’s considered business as usual to blanket a geographical area on occasion, so there are only a few places which are constant enough I’d actually consider myself vengeful instead of annoyed.

> Does it work for you? Do they stop, and is it worth the time?

Actually, surprisingly yes! After doing the above for several years, I now get virtually zero junk mail (according to my spreadsheet, I've only received three pieces of junk mail so far this year).

And yes, I do it on the 'first offense' to nip it in the bud as soon as it starts.

The BBB is a protection racket. You're wasting your time on them.

To clarify: I treat the BBB as a review site, to peruse before engaging in business with another business, to see what people have said about them.

The racket is BBB members can get bad reviews removed.

That sounds a lot more complicated than taking a chance and paying the $2 to see if it works. If it doesn't your method works as backup.

Doesn't your argument against using the third party agency DMAchoice apply just the same to the BBB?

Most of the functioning of the US government at every level (city/state/federal) relies on private third parties doing the heavy lifting. In some cases it is visible to you up front (like this one), otherwise it is just happening behind the scenes. A blanket "I don't trust third parties" stance means you have to live a completely self sustained lifestyle off the grid.

> A blanket "I don't trust third parties" stance

Except this is not a blanket stance, but a very specific stance against the specific third-party in question: dmachoice.org, which states that they may use information they collect about you for digital advertising:

> Information gathered by cookies or similar technologies may be used for our business purposes such as analytics, research, digital advertising, and operational purposes. [1]

[1] https://www.dmachoice.org/static/privacy_policy.php

Sorry, but I'm not paying $2 to replace physical spam with digital spam.

> I file a report with the Better Business Bureau: https://www.bbb.org/file-a-complaint

Ah, the boomer/"greatest-generation" version of something like Angie's List. I used to believe in BBB too, until I realized it was just another middle-layer scam, sitting between businesses and consumers, with time-varying ideas over who should pay to either (a) get information (b) control information.

The International Association of Better Business Bureaus is listed as a 501(c)(6) and their EIN is 83-3454617 but they don't provide any links to their financial reports or required filings on their website and trying to search for their Form 990 comes up blank, even on the IRS website. But I'm sure they're totally legit...

All the shady behavior that Yelp has been accused of, but largely never caught doing, various state level BBB's have been caught doing.

It beggars belief that Yelp has gotten away with it. I have heard from 4-5 restaurant owners the same story: it costs $300 to hide bad reviews. Those that don't pay start getting more bad reviews.

> It beggars belief that Yelp has gotten away with it. I have heard from 4-5 restaurant owners the same story: it costs $300 to hide bad reviews.

Is there documented evidence of this available? Emails with DKIM signatures, recorded conversations with representatives who can be confirmed to work for Yelp, official Yelp correspondence, etc? Basically anything that can actually make a solid case instead of just anecdotal evidence.

Nope. What I have been told is it is always a phone call shakedown.

Random call, I am not sure if they followup. Suffice it to say, AFAIK no one has managed to record the shakedown calls.

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