> The absolute worst offender are political activists: (In the US)
The alias I used for one of the big donation platforms has apparently been given to every single person running for any political office in the state along with many out of state. It gets dozens of emails a day, most of which automatically end up in spam.
Same here. I put my email down when I was a democrat. I still get emails from them after unsubscribing many, many times.
The problem with unsubscribing is that distributing your email address isn't illegal, so they put you on a new list with a different name and - you didn't exactly unsubscribe from THAT list did you!
I actually had good success calling the office of the spammer in question and complaining to the person answering the phone. A young staffer with political ideals tends to pick up the phone and they empathize. They take my email address and seem to do something with it. I did this maybe 4 times over a span of a year and the chain reaction stopped.
I think this is a two-party problem? Due to the polarity, people (as a mob) are 'forced' to back their party regardless of how scummy the affiliated actors act. Your regret means nothing because you probably still won't vote for another party and they already have as much of your money as you are willing to give. They can continue to harvest funds with these dark patterns with no cost - and they will find some whales who strongly respond to the marketing no matter the spam.
The Trump campaign has had some remarkable temerity in this field:
>GROSS: So let me stop you. So in order to not make monthly donations, you had to notice that there was a pre-checked box saying you were making monthly donations. And you had to uncheck that box. You had to take action (laughter) if you didn't want to make monthly donations?
>GOLDMACHER: Exactly. That's what they did earlier in the campaign. And then they made the box more complicated. They added a second box to take out a bonus donation a few days later. And they added all kinds of extraneous text in each of these boxes. And so by the end of the race, the disclosure that this box that was pre-checked would withdraw a monthly donation was buried beneath seven lines of other text that had nothing to do with the fact that it was going to take this money out every month, and seven lines of text saying there's going to be a second donation. So if you sign up to give $25, you gave that day, they took out another $25 a few days later. And then it took out $25 every month. And then this is what they did at the end of the race which caused such a spike in refund requests. They didn't take the money out every month, they started taking it out every week. And so while somebody might miss that their donation happened a second time the next month or they take a couple of months on their credit card to miss, you don't usually miss that suddenly, your credit card has four contributions in a single month when you intended to only make one. And so what happened in the reporting that I did was that there was a huge surge of complaints to credit card companies of fraud, saying, this is wrong. I didn't sign up for these kinds of donations.
The alias I used for one of the big donation platforms has apparently been given to every single person running for any political office in the state along with many out of state. It gets dozens of emails a day, most of which automatically end up in spam.