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The letter [PDF], sent by the chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau to PayPal’s general counsel, says the Commission is concerned that the amendments to the existing agreement “may violate federal laws governing the use of autodialed, prerecorded, and artificial voice calls, including text messages.”
The revised PayPal agreement, which kicks in on July 1, expands the company’s authority to contact users with autodialed, pre-recorded calls to “any telephone number that you have provided us or that we have otherwise obtained.” It also broadens the scope of acceptable reasons for the company to robocall or spam-text you, all without providing any way to opt out.
“If PayPal plans to make autodialed, prerecorded, or artificial voice calls or text messages to its customers, please be aware that federal law places strict limits on such communications,” reads the letter from the FCC, which describes prerecorded marketing calls as a “greater nuisance and invasion of privacy than live solicitation calls,” and that “can be costly and inconvenient” for consumers.
The FCC reminds PayPal that before a company makes one of these calls, it “must obtain the prior express written consent of the recipients,” and if the call is anything other than telemarketing, PayPal “must also get prior express consent (either oral or written) for such calls to wireless phones.”
There are very specific requirements for meeting the “prior written consent” standard, like that it must be in writing; must bear the signature of the person who will receive these messages; must include the telephone number to which the company will be authorized to make these calls.
Most importantly, “The person signing the agreement is not required to sign the agreement (directly or indirectly), or agree to enter into such an agreement as a condition of purchasing any property, goods, or services.”
Given that accepting the PayPal user agreement is a simple yes/no affair, and choosing “no” means you can’t use PayPal, the FCC believes the company may be in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
If PayPal fails to update its agreement to let customers know they can opt out, or fails to allow users to opt out, the company could face penalties of up to $16,000 per call or text message.
There’s also the matter of being able to robocall users on “any telephone number that you have provided us or that we have otherwise obtained.”
The FCC says this “does not meet the level of specificity required by law.”
“Consumers have the right to choose on which line(s) they wish to receive telemarketing or advertising calls, if they elect to receive such calls at all,” explains the letter.
After news broke about the PayPal user agreement changes, the company wrote a blog post explaining that you can opt out of these robocalls after the fact by going to this website.
To us, because the opt out happens after you sign the agreement and is not spelled out in the agreement, this still seems to fall short the prohibition against requiring a consumer to consent to receive autodialed telemarketing or advertising calls as a condition of purchasing any property, good, or service.
Interestingly, in PayPal’s blog post, the company says there is nothing really new about its user agreement, which may be an unintended admission that the company could possibly have been violating the TCPA for quite some time.
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Under state law, references to minors are banned in alcohol advertising. But Rep. Keith Murphy sponsored legislation that would’ve allowed certain images. He had a good reason to push it — he owns a bar and wanted to sell the Michigan-brewed beer there.
According to the Associated Press, House members think he should be able to, getting the two-thirds vote needed to override Governor Maggie Hassan’s veto. It’s now up to the Senate to vote whether to override the veto.
Gov. Hassan said earlier this month when she vetoed the bill that changing the law would undermine New Hampshire’s efforts to fight underage drinking.
But Murphy had argued that having a baby on the bottle isn’t the same as showing glamorous college kids drinking at a house party.
“No reasonable person would believe that this label is intended to appeal to minors in any way,” he said,
Under the proposed law, which images make the cut would be decided by the state’s Liquor Commission.
House overrides veto regarding minors on beer bottles [Associated Press]
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Thanks Lenovo! Without your sponsorship the world might not have this story on the “rise of the social supermodel.”
And it’s not because they’re embarrassed that their editorial content is running alongside a story whose entire existence is paid for by some car/drug/food/insurance company. No, the defenders of native advertising say it would be doing a disservice to these ads-in-editorial-clothing to merely slap the “ad” label on them.
The Daily Beast, for example, goes the “Sponsored Content” route in labeling the native ads it runs. And the site’s managing director-chief product and strategy officer (a job title straight out of some 1950s satire novel) tells AdAge that this is because this faux content doesn’t interrupt the reader’s visual flow unlike traditional ads.
“A great display ad will divert people’s attention from what they sought out to do,” he explains. “Content is the thing people are seeking out. It is the end of the behavior chain.”
Which is exactly the point of concern. We should know when we’re being advertised to. Placing paid-for content in the same format and positioning as legitimate news content blurs the line.
A recent survey of native advertising found that, in general news stories, only 41% of respondents were able to say that the sponsored stories were clearly ads. The percentages were much higher in entertainment and business news stories, but there should never be any confusion between content that is decided upon and created by an independent editorial staff and that which is crafted at the behest of an advertiser.
But yet when AdAge looked at 24 different websites, ranging from hard news sources like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to less-serious fare like The Onion, it found that not a single one of them used the word “advertising” to describe this bought-and-paid-for content.
The line between advertising and editorial is only blurring as advertisers seek new ways to put their brands in front of your eyeballs and some media companies are more than willing to make it happen. Conde Nast, the grand dame of snooty magazine publishers, recently (and proudly) announced the creation of an in-house “studio” to work with advertisers to give their sponsored crap that distinctive Conde feel. Forbes crossed a line earlier this year when it decided to promote an advertorial on the front cover of one of its issues.
We know it’s not easy keeping a publication alive, and we know it’s tempting to take that easy ad money in an age where everyone online wants everything for free, but at what point do we just give in and hand over the editorial reins to Coca-Cola and Nike?
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Today is an important date in the histories of both consumer protection and crowdfunding: for the first time, the Federal Trade Commission took legal action against someone who used Kickstarter to fund a project that they didn’t produce. That’s the good news. The bad news is that since the man behind the scheme has no money to distribute to backers, the settlement doesn’t actually do anything for people who backed The Doom That Came To Atlantic City.
This saga dates back to 2012, when a new game company, The Forking Path, run by Erik Chevalier, announced that it would be crowdfunding a cool board game that combined the science fiction of H.P. Lovecraft with the classic game Monopoly.
The campaign raised 350% of its goal: neat! Only the game never shipped. The project creator claimed that legal problems with Hasbro, the company that owns the rights to Monopoly, held it up. Sounds plausible enough, except for how it isn’t true.
The FTC found that this was not true, and that the project creator actually had used the funds for things other than printing up board games and casting figurines: the agency says that he spent it all on “unrelated personal expenses such as rent, moving himself to Oregon, personal equipment, and licenses for a different project.”
He also owes backers the promised refunds: $111,793.71, to be precise, but that judgement has been suspended because he doesn’t have the money to send the refunds. If the FTC discovers that he has money that he’s concealing, the judgement will be un-suspended, and he’ll owe the entire amount to jilted Kickstarter backers.
Under the terms of the settlement, the game’s creator is prohibited from conducting any more misleading crowdfunding campaigns, or employing anyone to run a misleading crowdfunding campaign in the future. That’s good, and it might cheer up backers, but doesn’t help them in the end. No, another game company did that, not a government agency.
The hero of this crowdfunding economy disaster is Cryptozoic Entertainment, the company that later put out the game after the Kickstarter-funded scheme collapsed and the rights reverted to the people who originally designed it. They sold copies of the game, which is great, but they also offered free copies to people who backed the original version on Kickstarter, a wonderful gesture.
PROPOSED STIPULATED ORDER FOR PERMANENT INJUNCTION AND MONETARY JUDGMENT [FTC]
Kickstarter-funded board game cancelled a year after raising over $100,000 [The Verge]
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Legislation that would’ve allowed the automaker to open up three new retails in the state passed easily in the House of Representatives in May, but the Senate never took up the bill.
The government relations manager for the California-based company says Tesla wants the General Assembly to have another go at the proposal during the upcoming special legislative session, reports the Associated Press. If nothing happens soon, he said Tesla plans to revisit the bill next year.
“We’ll still have a very compelling argument to come and be regulated and fairly compete in the state,” Will Nicholas told the AP.
Tesla worked out a compromise with the Connecticut Automotive Retailers Association for the bill that passed the House, as the group originally didn’t want the state law that prohibits direct sales to be changed.
The legislation itself didn’t mention Tesla by name but it did require new stores to comply with existing consumer protections mandated by the Departments of Motor Vehicles and Consumer Protection.
The AP asked Nicholas if Tesla would go with the same language next year, as well as sticking to that three-store limit. He says the company will probably change things up based on the company’s level of business in Connecticut.
“We would have been a bit stifled with the current concessions that we made,” he said.
Tesla recently suffered a similar blow in Texas, where the company will have to wait up to two years for the state’s next legislative session before it can get the chance to sell cars directly in that state.
For now, Connecticut customers can head over the border to either New York or Massachusetts, where Tesla operates retail stores.
Electric carmaker Tesla not giving up on Connecticut stores [Associated Press]
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(tjean314)
New research in the journal PLOS ONE (h/t Washington Post) takes a crack at figuring out the return trip effect: Researchers from Japan had study participants sit in a room and watch a 20-minute movie recorded by a cameraman walking around the city. Some subjects were asked to indicate each time three minutes had gone by. They watched two movies and rated which one was longer.
One group watched a round-trip from point “S” to point “E” in image on the left, while the other took two separate one-way trips:from “S” to “E” in the lefthand image, then from “S” to “E” in the righthand image.
(PLOS ONE)
Psychologists have sought to explain this phenomenon in a few ways. One is that it kicks in when you’re paying attention to how time is passing: You’re going to be late in five minutes, but you’re stuck on the train and you’re still five stops away from your destination. Time ticks slowly by, each second thunking against the deadline in your head. But when you’re just on the way to the grocery store and thinking about what you’re going to eat, it doesn’t take that long.
It’s like waiting for the water to boil — it’s not gonna do it while you’re watching (yes, it is, because that’s science, but you get it).
For example, say you’re really, really excited that you’re going on a trip to [X], the place you’ve always wanted to visit and now you’re finally, finally going and you just can’t stop talking about it or thinking about or dreaming about it or planning for it and oh my god you’re so excited.
Heading toward [X] while paying so much attention to it will make it seem like a longer trip than when you’re returning home, forced to leave [X] behind in order to face the real world and your boring, normal existence. You put your headphones on and tune out. Before you know it, you’re home and sad that it’s all over and you reach for the cheese dip.
Another thing that could play into this time warp could be that when we’re visiting somewhere we’ve never been, we don’t recognize sights and scenes on the way. But during the reverse trip, we see things we’re now familiar with, which makes the trip go faster. It’s like, “Hey, there’s that cheese castle we passed on the way here, I remember that.”
How come we don’t feel the return trip effect on our daily commute? Probably because we’ve taken the trip so often that we know exactly how long it will take, a 2011 study suggested, as noted by WaPo. But maybe if you were excited to go to work one morning because you knew it was free doughnut day that day, the journey could seem much longer than your slog home at night.
There are likely many reasons why we feel the return trip effect, and heck, the brain is a complicated thing so we may never unravel the mysteries of time perception. At least you know you’re not the only one.
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