We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17466555 and marked it off-topic.
I'm also confused at your flamewar comment. I saw that people were keen to challenge me on the morality aspect, but it was not what I was actually objecting to or taking the discussion on -- I was asking about the legality. If you look and see where the OP himself finally responded to my question [1], we had quite a nice discussion on that very topic that even got upvotes with no objections so far as I could see (but do let me know if you see otherwise). How this a flamewar, when we had a nice and civil conversation on the exact subject I inquired about?
If that wasn't what you meant, I'm sorry I got it wrong! Moderation is guesswork. We try as hard as we can to guess right, but definitely still get it wrong sometimes.
Since when was the ability to cancel something online meant for the disabled?
Either you or a loved one is disabled, and that's why you're so sensitive (if so, I cut you some slack). Otherwise, I have no clue why you're throwing such a hiss about this. Many businesses (like cable companies) are being complete assholes by making it hard for you to cancel their service. Sometimes you have to lie and act unethically to get back at people like that. Hey, you wouldn't have to if they were ethical in the first place! They started this whole prisoner's dilemma! Me? I would love to cooperate and be honest all the time!
It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request.
I agree that it does feel a slight bit scummy, but after thinking about it I decided that I was OK with it. I can see how some others might think differently though.
Yet I think I have a stigma claiming illness or disability... don't know. So, next time I'm going to try this:
I am a foreigner and have serious issues understanding
spoken English. Please avoid calling me and let us try to
resolve the issue over email.Wow, that's interesting. They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)? How does that work for companies that give discounts (say) to the disabled? Can everybody lie to get them legally then? This doesn't sound right. (Note that it doesn't have to necessarily be the ADA outlawing this, so I wouldn't just rely on that.)
> Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one.
Do you mean to have one medically or legally? The former is obvious to me but the latter isn't.
That's correct, generally. I mean, if you show up at an airport with an oxygen take, be prepared to demonstrate that you medically require it. It's also different for employment, where your boss may ask you to provide evidence that you need a special accommodation to do your job.
The ADA has exemptions for when it would be unsafe or unreasonable to provide accommodation, and those are the only places where anyone can discriminate against someone for whatever their condition might be (eg the vision and prescription requirements for pilots). In fact the ADA explicitly disallows asking for any general information about disabilities - an employer can only ask yes/no questions about specific criteria.
I can’t imagine what their argument for not supporting someone cancelling their subscription would be.
Fun question: if you were to say you were cancelling for medical reasons would they be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if the call center asked what it was?
That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.
But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.
[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.
I agree, but at the same time you probably wouldn't be interested in saying most of these lies, so it's difficult to use that as a basis for assuming the legality of the ones we might be interested in.
> Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].
This is where I'm stuck. Fraud seems to have a wider scope than money (the obvious counterexample being if you're giving someone something other money, it can still result in fraud). What I'm unclear on is how wide the scope gets. Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages? I don't know what the answer is (which is why I asked), and it seems to me that it could go either way.
IANAL, to be clear. But yes, fraud is generally defined legally as deception for "gain", which is usually, but not always, denominated in money.
Beyond that, like everything else in law, it gets complicated. Are you asking about civil or criminal fraud? Where?
Also, even if you have a case that is technically civil fraud (say, I tricked you out of a dollar) or criminal fraud (I overstated my income on a mortgage application by a dollar), for small-dollar amounts you'll find you have a lot of difficulty actually bringing a case/no DA will touch it, simply because it is too small to waste court time on.
Incidentally, that final point is why ATT and Comcast want to kill class actions. If the people they cheat can't band together, it is too much trouble for anyone to recover that $2.74 "Up Yours Because We Can ILEC Infrastructure Recovery Fee".
IANAL.
You basically described the whole field of advertising, if you make misrepresenting facts illegals, there's not a lot of businesses that would not be fined.
I'm willing to take the risk.
People with fully functioning hearing should have to sit through 2 hours of comcast customer service trying to cancel their service.
Only the lucky people who have handicaps should be able to easily cancel their subscriptions.
When you sign a subscription, no one promised it would be easy to get out of it. They're lucky not to have to pay a cancellation fee.
I mean you could argue the same for parking right? If everyone parked in the disabled section then you'd encourage having more such parking. And this also requires paying a representative more hours to deal with emails etc. It's not like there's zero cost.
They just don't want that. Because they don't want you to cancel.
Parking spaces on public roads is a separate issue, and it's more in line with driving in a bus-only lane (technically illegal but it is because you need a particular permit -- so it requires more than just being disabled).
My point is that your are jumping the gun with discussions of legality here. The litmus test should be wheter it's shitty to lie about a disability in order to cut through reselling bullshit. Other commentors have more than adequately covered this topic though.
Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
> Generally, if I'm cancelling a service, I could not possibly care less about how much it costs the company to process my cancellation. That's completely their problem, and I'm not about to make it mine.
This was not the point of my comment. The point wasn't to sympathize with the company for their costs. The subjects of concern were other people with disabilities who may have otherwise been helped by the same representative (who probably also couldn't care about the company's costs either). The point of mentioning the costs was that the costs imply they can't just instantly add representatives to avoid affecting other such customers.
What you can do is facilitate (or mandate) an automated system that allows people to cancel your service with them.
A better analogy might be sidewalk ramps, which probably get used ten times more often for prams (strollers) than for wheelchairs. If they were absent or faulty, complaints by owners of prams can help grease the wheels of local government.
Sidewalk ramps are not a scarce resource; my use of them doesn't in any way detract from their use by a disabled person. Any visible use of them ultimately benefits everyone.
Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
> Online cancellation (compared to telephone cancellation) is like the latter, not the former.
Wait, what? No, it's like the former. How do you know these agents handling your cancellation weren't assigned to handle similar cancellations from other deaf customers? How do you know the representatives don't have to go through extra procedures (such as documenting and obtaining authorizations for the non-standard cancellation, or bothering more reps to figure out whom to forward the inquiry to) that wouldn't take them far more time than it would take the phone agent? Meaning you could well be taking up a resource that was reserved for disabled folks, slowing down the responses for them in the process. Heck, even if the amount of time spent isn't any more than for a phone call, it's likely to be a separate set of agents handling these special requests than taking calls, meaning you'll still be slowing down this service for those who actually cannot use the phone.
What I find baffling is that neither you nor anybody else is making the most compelling counterargument I can see here, which is that cancellations aren't time-sensitive, so a slower reply would be unlikely to do anyone much harm as a result of slow service. Meaning it's one way you could argue disabled people are not suffering any tangible harm from slow replies. But to argue that it doesn't even affect the service provided to them in the first place is bizarre, especially if you think about what would happen if tomorrow everybody decided to follow this advice and do the same thing.
Though even in your scenario, you are assuming that a company wouldn't adjust its resources as telephone usage drops and written submissions increases. And yes, the point you make in your second paragraph also applies—a written cancellation request places the time onus on the company rather than the customer.
But either way, it is always a good thing if the methods used by people with disabilities are mainstreamed rather than treated as oddball special exceptions.
And this one does the same? Who says that guy going through the emails for isn't otherwise going to be helping someone who is actually deaf?
> This gets around an unethical business practice designed to charge money from people who no longer agree to receive services.
This sounds like the most legitimate argument here, if this is indeed unethical. Not sure what my stance is on this.
From- Someone who works in billing for a SaaS company.
It isn't like parking, because 99.9% of the time, it's in and out in a couple minutes, and 100% of the time you are physically present in the stall.
But if you take the only parking spot, that person pretty much has to go home. The car could be there for hours, even the whole day. Versus two minutes.
This huge moral difference is accurately reflected in the law- it is absolutely, perfectly legal to use a handicap stall without a disability.
Huh... that's actually very much the opposite of how I would interpret that sentence, but okay.
When someone asks me if I know something is illegal, to me, it seems they are being quite explicit that they are talking about legality and not morality, since otherwise they could tell me that that something is not cool, not that it's not legal. To me this is obvious, but maybe everyone else finds this strange and this is evidence that I just think weirdly, I don't know. But either way it's certainly not that I don't try to think in the first place.
Re the topic at hand. I think that people view this as at most trivially illegal. By bringing up the question, people are in some way assuming that you are against the new CA law. Not saying that you said that explicitly, but I think that is what is going on.
First of all, he said "deaf", not "hard of hearing".
Second ̶o̶n̶e̶, so you're fine with lying to get services you otherwise wouldn't if no one can actualy prove you're lying?
When it comes to them being dishonest about forcing me to call in order to endure a pitch to upsell me? Absolutely.
The cool thing about disability accommodations is that they're also super handy for the able-bodied, too.
I'm not super up on the history of computer dictation and voice control but I'm pretty sure some of that was driven for use by people with mobility limits that kept them from using a keyboard and mouse. Now we all have voice controlled virtual assistants.