Ask HN: Automatic binding-arbitration opt out?

2 points by afn 2 years ago | 1 comment

I've been seeing an increase in notifications from various service providers about changes to their terms of use, often including the addition of mandatory arbitration clauses for which there is a 30-day opt-out period. It would be great to have a service that connects to my Gmail account, identifies notifications like these, and automatically sends a snail-mail opt-out request on my behalf.

Is there anything like this out there? It feels like there's a more generalized class of problems that this falls into, where consumers are placed in a suboptimal default state, and opting out requires some minimal but non-zero amount of effort. Sort of adjacent to the "call Comcast every 12 months to renegotiate my cable bill" problem (for which services already exist). Are there similar unsolved problems that fall into this class that could be addressed by a single service?

toomuchtodo 2 years ago |

There is no service that does this to my knowledge. What’s needed is a site where you can register your personal info, and then when a new arbitration event is “seen”, the site adds it to its database, notifies everyone in their database of the potential action required, and then gives you the ability to complete a template (with perhaps an account number or such) with your personal information prefilled. This would then be sent to the counterparty with a record kept in the event they dispute the opt out request.

I suppose you could notify users based on inbox activity if your could coorelate arbitration notices to inbound emails through domains and their integrity into (DMARC, etc). Check out the newsletter app Meco for what the UX around their Gmail integration looks like.

Also, consider contacting the FTC and filing comments that instituting arbitration requirements should require reporting to the FTC or other agency; you’d then have a central source of truth to crib off of.