1y ago

My bank gives me the option to opt out of marketing communications. It takes three clicks to opt out of each category, and there are three pages like this!

Marketing should always be OPT-IN by default, but these extra steps to opt out is truly asshole design.

Oh, and on the opt-out confirmation screen, you get two options: Yes or No. The button colour for "yes" is white, and the “no” button matches the “save” button on the previous screen, so it's easy to accidentally cancel the opt-out. Double-asshole design!

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If this is the marketing opt-out screen you know damn well they're selling everything they can about your purchase and banking histories. I would change to a credit union post haste.
- On of my banking apps fails to open when I disallow connections to graph.facebook.com. Their support team has indicated that it's not their app. I have logs from various vpn-like capture apps, and my firewall. Pretty icky.
  
  It's crazy because banks were so uptight about security (rooted phones) when it comes to tap and pay.
  But they'll just throw facebook into the equation without a 2nd thought.
- I would change to a credit union post haste.
  Unfortunately, our local credit union would end up costing a lot more per month in fees than the "free" account I have with data mining. LOL
  
  I do not understand this, I don’t recall ever having seen bank/CU accounts that cost money.
  Hell my credit union pays me like 2-5% on my checking account, can’t remember and CBF to look it up, and like 3%on my savings.
  I have had checking accounts without interest before, but never one I had to pay for, and I am not using shady online banks either, mine are legit respected ones.
Inbound calls? Outbound calls? I would not want to sit through an ad instead of being put straight through to a bank rep to report a missing card or some other important issue
This kind of stuff should be 100% opt in as you say!
- Inbound calls? Outbound calls? I would not want to sit through an ad instead of being put straight through to a bank rep to report a missing card or some other important issue
  Hopefully, it also includes the “upsell” when you do call for something. Like, after the problem is resolved, “we have some other products you might be interested in.”. I don't want to hear about anything that I'm not asking about.
  
  Seriously. My checking account bank has a very small number of jobs:
  Recieve my paycheck.
  Transfer money where I say.
  Occasionally deposit/withdraw cheques or bills.
  Tell me how much money of mine you have.
  I don't want any new features.
Name and shame
- Simplii is the name in the picture, but I don’t know who that is.
  
  Bingo. It's Simplii Financial (Canada). They are owned by CIBC, the fifth-largest bank in Canada.
you don't have a bank, you have a direct marketing company that knows the password to your checking account
As a developer this seems like a lot of extra work. I would assume that this was a supervisor's idea.
But I wouldn't necessarily consider giving the customer every possible option a bad choice. Giving customers the ability to fine tune their email notifications is really a bonus feature.
However, this is a horrible design choice to display 3 pages of multiple options. It's an asshole design.
It would be pretty easy to group them into a drop down list where multiples in that category can be selected or deselected with a couple of toggles.
I would assume this was some genius executive decision, but there's a very small chance it was a stupid design choice. Regardless the designer will always be blamed.
- This is not a supervisor,it's the Marketing director... Believe me this is 1000000% intentional.
- All I wanted as an "opt out of all" option and that's that. This was done on purpose, no doubt. They also had a redesign of the app many months ago, which made is incredibly hard to use because of the color scheme. I can imagine some people with accessibility issues are simply not able to use the app now.
  
  Thanks EU for enforcing opt-in regime which makes this obsolete.
  https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/subjects/eprivacy-directive_en here
I'd opt out of that bank if they did this to me.
- I'm fortunate that they give me the option to opt out of pretty much any and all forms of marketing, but Jesus Christ, it shouldn't take a half hour to do it!
Which bank so that people can avoid it?
Ah yes, I got this email today as well. Absolutely user-hostile. Not only is every opt-out 4 clicks (opt-in is only 3) the categories are very confusing and unclear. Some of them just sound like you are opting out of all email communication which I don't want to do unless they actually have something important to tell me (however unlikely). I would also bet $1k that by this time next year they have either opted me back in without consent or added a new category that is default-enabled.
Along with their switch to SMS 2 factor (no option for TOTP and they removed the email option they used to have) I am seriously considering switching. The problem is that every other bank seems worse.
- The problem is that every other bank seems worse.
  And that's the problem. Literally no good options.
  
  Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
Much of the bullshit they're doing aside, I'd kill to have that much granularity in notification preferences on various services. Too many times it's an "all-or-nothing" situation. The more specific I can get, the better.
Edit: actually, I just realized that they don't even give any real options for each communication method. Nevermind lol
I got the same thing, and I suspect this is their "malicious compliance" way of dealing with some new rule about needing to let people opt out of marketing. There are 33 separate settings.
At least now I can probably leave their app's notifications enabled for 2FA without also getting marketing notifications.
I think it was LinkedIn I remember seeing also did this, right before I uninstalled the app. NextDoor does something like this but not 3 pages worth. The harder it is, the less people that will do it - and the companies doing this know that!
- I've had accounts with no fewer than 5 different banks (personal and business accounts), and as shitty as this bank's opt-out process is for marketing, they have been fine to bank with.
  Several others won't even give you the same opt-out options, will take a monthly fee, and will still mine your data at every turn.
  With banks, it seems to be "choose the least evil one". 🤑
I'm to the point that certain industries should be prohibited from doing ANY 3rd party marketing. Finance and health at a bare minimum. I have financial information protection rights and medical information protection rights. Literally 0 information should be shared by my bank. Just as much should be shared by my insurer or medical providers. Just... No. Not my app usage habits, not my "anonomized" habit data, nothing.
It's like when you try to stop Android autodeleting app data for all my apps when I don't use them in 3 months (I have plenty of storage, and I don't want this stuff gone if I lose internet). You have to click on Settings > Apps > All apps, and for each app, click on it, scroll down, toggle the 'delete all app data after 3 months of inactivity' button, go back, repeat for all ~150 apps, remember to do this whenever I install/reinstall an app, and sometimes the settings just seems to randomly revert and I find my app data has been deleted, and then I need to manually check each app again, because Google didn't consider that people might want to turn this 'feature' of for every app at once, or at least have a list of toggles, rather than having to go into the app settings for each app.
- That's awful! Is it stock android? I'm not seeing the option on my Samsung phone, but I'm also on Android 12 😮‍💨
  
  Maybe Samsung removed it in favor of their own app pauser.
  This is what I see on a normal Pixel phone
  Personally I don't have much issue with it, as I usually uninstall apps that my phone points out are going unused. In reality, I want zero apps and to just use the mobile web for everything but that's not possible due to dark patterns.
  Cough Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Reddit cough cough
  
  Yeah, Motorola Android is basically stock, right?
  
  I'm honestly not sure what they are talking about, I'm on Android 14 on my s23 and that isn't a feature, nor has it ever been on any android phone I've ever had or seen. There is an option to remove permissions for apps that have not been used, but not to delete all storage for an app after an amount of time.
At least it allows you to opt-out... as opposed to not at all:-(.
- Yes, I'm quite thankful that the option, especially with the granularity, is offered. But they really could have made it user-friendly by having an "opt into all" and "opt out of all" in addition to these individual settings.
  
  Nope. They get more profits if they do it this way, or even if they do not, the manager in charge WANTS it this way or else it would be different. Wishing otherwise does not make it so, unfortuantely:-(.

46 comments