What feels illegal but isn't?
For me: Cancelling paid subscriptions should be as easy as subscribing. I hate the fact that they actively hide the unsubscribe option or that you sometimes should have to write an e-mail if you want to unsubscribe.
Corporations that don't pay taxes being allowed to make millions in profit while their employees qualify for welfare because they pay them so little.
What's worse is those same organisations get corporate welfare (tax breaks) but fight tooth and nail to prevent their workers from getting it.
They should just make it so that whatever they announce as their "earnings" to their stockholders should also be the amount that they are taxed for.
Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don't need and didn't even want until the ad sold us on it? It's fucking wild.
Adblocking feels to me like it should be illegal, but isn’t. I have adblockers on all my devices and haven’t seen an ad for years; it feels like a secret super power and stopped the web from looking like a trashy back alley.
Nah, I pay for my bandwidth, I get to decide what it does and does not get used for. Even if that's not nearly as big a concern as it used to be in like the late 90s, it's the principle of I'm not going to pay for you to shove your garbage down my throat.
And yeah I haven't seen an ad in years and years on PC. People complain about youtube ads and I'm like 'What's that? I watch a lot of youtube and I've not seen an ad in like 10 years.' Sadly on mobile that's a little more complicated, but adding a private dns of 'dns.adguard.com' blocks most things.
It's weird they don't put more effort into stopping them, TBH. I've heard it's because they'd rather collect extra analytics than do any foolproofing that might interfere with it.
Marketing wasn’t really a thing until sometime around the Industrial Revolution and post-WW1. Before then, we didn’t really have the capacity to produce more than what people needed. Marketing basically just consisted of “here’s my product, here’s why it’s superior to others.” But with the post-war boom and the rise in manufacturing, producers were suddenly able to out-produce the demand. So they invented marketing, to get people to buy things that they didn’t actually need. The idea of “create a problem so you can sell the solution” was born.
Yeah I get the history, I'm more commenting on the fact that nobody really said 'Huh, is this a good idea?', it just slowly infiltrated everywhere and like the frog in the pot of slowly-boiling water we don't realize the shit we're in because of it.
Marketing basically just consisted of “here’s my product, here’s why it’s superior to others.”
That's what I think advertising ought to be. 'This product/service exists. Here's what a panel of independent testers (folks like Consumer Reports) has determined about its functionality, capabilities, etc.' No music, no slogans, no 'vibe-n-style' or whatever, just someone describing the basic facts about the product or service. Because I don't dispute that I have seen ads for something and been like 'holy shit this will make my life easier' or whatever, so I don't want to not be able to discover products.. I just also don't want to be manipulated by the companies that have a financial incentive to push them.
And the fact that a lot of children's TV shows are nothing but thinly veiled toy commercials. Hilariously parodied in Dinosaurs
Worst part is, those are usually the best ones.
Oh yeah, I grew up in the 70s/80s when that shit became rife. I loved Saturday morning cartoons until I got old enough to realize that they only existed to sell me toys (and to sell ads for other toys.)
You can thank Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays
Specifically his 1928 book Propaganda which basically created PR and modern advertising.
It happened gradually, like frogs in a kettle.
When it was just a guy putting up a sign in front of his smithy it was kind of harmless. Ditto for having a single text-only paper ad for people who are new to town. But, it was a slippery slope.
Yeah that's kind of my point: society has not stopped to think about the fact that the water is at a full boil and has been for a while. If I had my way ads would just be a basic, boring, 'This product/service exists, and this is what an independent panel of testers has determined about its functions and capabilities.' There have definitely been products that were advertised to me that make my life easier and that I use every day, so I don't want to lose the ability to discover them, I just also don't want these companies putting their dick in my ass and whispering into my ear that I'm not good enough person as a person if I don't like it.
Ordered food at Sonic on their app. After I ordered, it popped up with ads for travel, various credit cards, etc. Completely crazy to me that they're triple dipping on monetization now (sell me food, sell my data and then sell me other shit while trying to sell me food.)
I recently went to Sonic, didn't use the app, and ended up with norovirus for free.
This is why I use my phone as little as I can get away with, because these companies have built their apps as these little walled gardens where it's illegal to modify them to block their ads when that's not the case on a website. Fortunately in my situation there are very few occasions where I have to use my phone or an app for something.
Loaning money to your own political campaign and then paying yourself back, including an interest rate set by you, using donor funds.
There are a number of things that are legal here in the US, which would count as corruption in other places.
The FTC under Biden was actually craking down on that. It was called the "Click to Cancel" rule, but that was literally a month before the election. :/
Lina Khan was a perhaps once in a lifetime bureaucrat doing good for the people at a rapid pace on normal government timelines and now she’ll probably never get that job or a better one again.
Any type of exit fee like account closing. Any costs for leaving should be charges before leaving as part of business costs either at the start or part of monthly or whatever. Leaving should be free.
Looking at you, Adobe.
EULAs that say 'using this
<whatever>
indicates your acceptance of these terms'. Seems like it ought to be illegal but it's super common.Just because they put it in the terms doesn't it legal.
You know, I'm not actually sure how binding it is exactly, aside from not totally. It must do something or they wouldn't bother getting pretend consent.
I just assume it's legal because it's so common, you'd think if it was illegal someone would've challenged it by now and nobody could put it in their EULAs anymore.
Paying for anything and then being stopped from owning it should be illegal.
What the fuck am I buying software for if not to own it and have my privacy protected while using it?
Fuck EULA's and the companies trying to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour 😤 just for a couple extra bucks selling our data to the highest bidder.
100%. If buying isn't owning then stealing isn't theft.
Surprisingly a lot of clauses in EULAS are and get "stricken" (even though this one still stands).
Leaving a supermarket without buying anything
That largely depends on what you take with you as you leave.
Sometimes I get so pissed they don't have the main item I came for, that I go put everything back on the shelves, exactly where they came from.
Companies changing the terms of the contract on you.
Yes, but - in many of those contracts (particularly end-user license agreements) you agreed to them changing the terms of the contract. You also have an "out" - not using the product any more.
You're right though: it's slimy. Anything slimy thing can be put into a contract!
Source: I'm not a lawyer, but worked in an office with a lot of them, and worked with software license agreements in particular.
I'm so curious now. Do you know how those apply? I mean, can they change the terms on you without notice or is that notice legally required? And say they want to feed all your data of however many years to AI. If you accidentally use it once, do they get permission for everything? What if you agree only because you want to delete your data?
I have so many questions. lol
Dating sites besieging their users with bots and fake profiles.
My car insurance goes up as my car loses value. Years ago you could choose to only insure it up to a certain amount. My kids drove an older car and i designated $10k in insurance for it. That cut the insurance price to about 60%. Texas no longer allows that.
Isn't most of the insurance for liability? I can see a logic where older cars are less safe, and thus accidents are more likely and would cost more, hence the higher costs. But I'm just guessing.
Collision insurance, the kind that pays for damage to the policy holder's car in the event of a crash caused by the policy holder or an authorized driver of their car often more than doubles the overall cost of insurance. Collision insurance is usually optional when there's not a loan.
Your car may lose value, but the cost to repair goes up. Hence the insurance increases. Also the likelihood of a total loss goes up as well.
The insurance will never pay more than the value of the car, so if the repair cost goes too high they'll just declare it a total loss and pay the "fair market value" of the car. And yes, a total loss is more likely, but that doesn't mean the insurance pays more, on the contrary, they use that to pay less.
A free trial automatically rolling into a paid subscription.
In the US, unsubscribing from email spam is legally required to be easy under the CAN-SPAM act. For paid subscription services, I believe they also are required to be as easy to leave as they are to join in the EU and California.
Somewhat related, many dark patterns are treated like fraud.
the CAN-SPAM act
I once wrote a community college paper for my friend in exchange for some work on my car. He had to write a paper on the CAN-SPAM act.
I did the assignment, covered all the requirements, explained it and whatnot. I then wrote a SECOND paper, appended to the end of the first. This second paper also met the length requirements, but was a parody. About the Hormel meat product, Spam. In cans. Can-Spam. I was very proud of it. It was funny.
I kept asking my friend if he ever got feedback from the professor. He never did. It was then that I learned professors often don’t read papers like this, they just assign them to get students to read and practice writing. It made me sad.
I've seen a few memes where people go to the canned spam on social media, report their posts: reason: It's spam
Shooting plainclothes cops that execute a no-knock warrant on your home.
Seriously.
All states--ALL states--have a castle doctrine that allows you to use lethal defense to protect yourself inside your home. A no-knock warrant being executed by cops out of uniform means that you have a reasonable belief that your home is being invaded, and that your life is at immediate risk. Now, admittedly, you probably aren't going to survive that exchange of gunfire. But the state is going to have a really hard time charging you with shooting at/killing a cop if you do.
About dozen States do NOT have a castle doctrine, and have duty to retreat laws instead.
No, castle doctrine exists in all states. You do not have a duty to retreat when it's inside your own home in almost all cases.
I'm gonna assume by "all states" you mean "all states within the USA".
I believe that most other countries call them provinces rather than states. But yes, if you live in a country that has a normal police force, and you don't have to worry about out-of-uniform cops using no-knock warrants to kick your front door in, then this is definitely not going to apply to you.
In Indiana cops are not excluded from castle laws
Even better: you have a specific legal right to resist police attempting to illegally enter your home. :D IIRC, the law was passed after the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that under then state law you had no right to resist even blatantly illegal actions by police.
Voting/speaking against fascism
Yet.....It's not illegal yet.
I like that growth mindset!
Fun fact: There's technically a right to free speech in the constitution of the People's Republic of China. But we all know how that goes.
Just like with any rule in any society; without enforcement, they are nothing but merely the words of people. ahem USA ahem
Which is the reason the right to bear arms is the second amendment.
The founding fathers anticipated and understood that without the ability to defend it, the right to free speech only exists while the population and propaganda are in agreement.
For subscriptions, I highly recommend using disposable cards like Privacy.com (no affiliation, just a customer). If I want to try out Prime, or Starz, or a "free until..." promotional offer, I just spin up a card. It's connected to my bank account, locked to that single merchant, and they can't charge more than whatever spending limit I put on that card. Honestly, I don't always even sign in to a service to cancel, it's much easier to just pause or delete a card, and then they can't charge you anymore. It's free for us because they collect a small portion of the transaction amount (like Visa, PayPal, etc)...
I used them for a couple of years. But I kept finding that when I went to re-sign up for new vendors they wouldn't support the cards for some reason. Has this gotten better?
That actually is illegal.
What surprisingly is legal: dating a 14yo.
Weird country.
Which one?
No
Capitalism
Interest based loans. It’s completely legal to use debt to kick the poor deeper into the gutter so that they can never stand up again.
Pretty much any tax avoidance loopholes. The more money I have the more I see how ridiculously skewed in favor of the rich everything is. My income is taxed at a lower rate than my capital gains, meaning that not only did I make several thousand dollars last year on stock sales I did literally nothing to earn, but I paid very little on taxes for it. There is also a scheme a friend of mine uses to reduce his tax burden even more by recording losses that only exist on paper by swapping between essentially equivalent assets. The system is designed to punish poor people for being poor and reward rich people for being rich.
A popular scheme I have seen is:
Owner registered and de-facto runs an incorporated Company. Company employs Owner and pays them a small salary (down to state minimum wage even), so Owner minimizes the income tax they pay.
The car Owner drives is owned by the Company for "business purposes", which allows the car to be operated within 50 miles of the Company (and farther with supplemental insurance). Company counts the car purchase/lease, maintenance, gas as expenses, bringing down the bottom line.
Flights, travel, meals could be paid by the Company, as long as it's tangentially "business related".
The house Owner lives in (or several houses for the family) is owned by the Company and is rented to Owner for very cheap, so Company pays the taxes, maintenance, etc, breaking even, or taking a loss on this house. Again, this brings down the company's bottom line.
Somehow, purchases for a Company can be exempt from sales taxes, too.
In the end, on paper, the Company is barely making any profit, but the Owner might be enjoying a nice car, nice house, and vacations. All for "business purposes" of course. While you pay taxes on your income and purchases like an idiot
It gets worse. CEOs take out zero interest, or exteremly low interest loans on corporate assets. They then use the money tax free.
Having the door held open for you while walking towards it but changing directions in the last moment.
Yes, there's a lot of unspoken rules that are out there, but never actually enforced. Facing the other way in an elevator was one example I remember from my social sciences classes.
If I saw someone facing the rear wall/corner of an elevator but not acting unusual in any other way I think I'd feel like I was getting pranked somehow, lmao. I could go in and use the elevator and nothing could happen but one or more people facing the "wrong" way and I'd feel like I was the butt of a joke in some unfathomable way
I think it's the unnecessary number of turns you'd need to make to actually use the elevator but still face the rear well while using it that makes it feel weird to me, but idk
Ripping a tag from a pillow that says "Under Penalty of Law: Not to be Removed By Anyone but the Consumer"
Political parties sending you a reply-paid envelope that says it'll enrol you to vote postal ballot, with a return address that sends your information to that party, so long as they eventually do forward your info on to the Electoral Commission to register you for a postal vote.
I have no idea what any of this means
In Australia, one way you can apply for a postal vote is by sending an application form by mail to the Australian Electoral Commission—the nonpartisan government agency responsible for overseeing federal elections.
Political parties like our centre-right–to–far-right LNP and centre-left–to–centre-right Labor will often send you a letter, in the lead-up to an election. Inside that letter will be an application form, and a reply-paid envelope addressed to the party headquarters. But the address doesn't say "LNP party headquarters", it says something like "postal vote centre".
If you fill out the form, I believe the parties are obligated to send it on to the AEC. But there is no law preventing them from harvesting your data to use for marketing purposes before they do so. Because political parties have exempted themselves from a lot of the usual privacy laws.
There have also been accusations that they might delay sending your details on by a few days if you're from an area less likely to vote for them. Increasing the chances your postal vote doesn't arrive in time for you to actually use it. Not sure how founded that is, and I doubt it would be legal, but it also may be difficult to prove.
I don't know how this works in the US, but where I live after a year subscription (let's say for your internet provider or something). They can only renew per month. So if the year subscription is over you can cancel any service every month and they can't hit you with any fees.
Back in the day if you'd forgot to cancel your plan you'd be stuck with them for another year. It sucked!
Most investment instruments, apparently, going by the reactions I get when I explain shorting IRL. It's like people think there's only a few approved transactions and doing anything creative (or actually standard but clever) must be a crime. Feudalism's over, guys.
Taking a penny instead of leaving a penny.
What would everyone be leaving them for then?
Entrapment mostly.
Non-profit scams. You can set one up, put out a call for donations claiming you do some blah blah blah work, and give yourself most of the money in the form of a salary/bonus. Only a small percentage of the money ever needs to go to anyone in need.
This happens in all sorts of corporate and religious charities. The NFL was technically non-profit for many years, and that should say it all.
Walking around absolutely drenched in water.
Spam calls. Like, if you're willing to spend, what, 50 dollars?, you can absolutely destroy people's sanity with never ending calls from disposable numbers
Technically this is illegal in lots of countries. It's just hard to enforce afik.
I think in the eu we have some legislation about it. I have the feeling of reading about a law like that before. Subscription buttons needing to be as clear as unsubscribe.
Ice cream, after you haven't had any for 2 weeks
torrenting Wikipedia
oh and crypto mining, like ur actually printing money, how tf is that legal
It's because crypto isn't actually money. It's just something somebody might give you money for.
In theory, you can walk to your nearest forest and collect pine cones and then sell them to people.
That's about the same as crypto, only pine cones are actually useful.
Fiat currency like the US dollar is just as intrinsically worthless. It has value only because people accept that it does, they trade with it, and it has legal status as tender "for all debts, public and private".
People trade bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for goods all the time, without converting it to USD or anything first. I mean, yeah, usually the thing they're buying is drugs or something but it's the same as handing your local dealer a $20 bill.
Hey now. In harsh3466 land only I have the authority to mint pinecones!
I mean, artisanal gold mining is still a huge thing in certain less-than-awesome areas. The basic way gold works is what inspired it in the first place.
Why would you torrent Wikipedia?
This isn't an illegal thing but more of a tip for the thing you hate. Most credit card companies will let you open and close virtual credit cards tied to your main account, but with a new card number etc. I make a new virtual card for every subscription I have. If I want to cancel the service and it takes more than 5m to do so through the company that provides that service, I just turn off the virtual credit card they will try and fail to charge for the next payment.
Move to the EU.
No don't we're fine since you're isolationist now please kindly unfuck your country yourself
stealing food from the grocery store
Damn, where you live at where this is legal because shit is about to get ROUGH where I'm at and I'm trying to get free groceries.
They write in Finnish in other comments, but I don't seem to be able to confirm or deny the law there, at least not with a quick search.
I did find an article that suggested that it's been ruled legal in Italy, but only if you're homeless and hungry. I can imagine that if you tried it and had any assets whatsoever, they'd find a way to put a lien on those assets rather than let you get away with it.
depends, many placed closed down as of recently due to the massive lifting problem. this is less of a problem in wealthier areas.