Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

That's a bit carried away, don't you think?

There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.

Meanwhile hyperscalers are constantly in your eyes and ears and they have a million ways to bypass those regulations and get into your headspace regardless.

Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.

Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.

Some have worked themselves into a place of eternal captive attention, everyone else is either climbing the mountain or running the treadmill.

And all those employees' livelihoods depend on it working. Otherwise they starve.

Be thankful you, as presumably an engineer, don't have to be exposed to this game. It's Darwinian and adversarial, zero sum, a fight to survive.

Maybe you're happy working for someone who does all this work for you or figured out a tiny niche where it isn't necessary. But reality is much different.

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped.

I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely unethical.

"X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant.

Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.

> Dollars are spent on attention. You don't make it in this world without securing some attention.

I love your word choice here. "Securing" almost perfectly defines it, because you are acting with hostility against the person whose attention you are seeking to capture.

> Your URL bar is an ad. Your phone default settings and push notifications are ads. Your app store is an ad. Every new feature or OS update is an ad. Your new tab screen is an ad. Your browser updates are ads.

How do you define ads? Those are not ads in my book. An update is not an ad, I can't think of any valid interpretation of that other than "existence is an ad because people who interact with it might want to do do again" but at that point the word "ad" has lost all useful meaning.

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

The premise is that people are specifically opting OUT of those emails. Feel free to keep "hustling", feel free to treat people as resources to exploit, just don't be shocked and upset when those resources treat you like a parasite to be removed from their lives without concern for your financial wellbeing.

> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?

Unless I asked for it, it is both unethical and will turn me as potential customer away, and it is illegal (GDPR).

> There are unsubscribe buttons with laws that enforce that they work.

They don't. Period. Full Stop. There are tons of companies that I have told to stop sending me emails that just... continue to do so. And some that won't _allow_ me to tell them to stop (I need to create an account to tell them not to email me... but they shouldn't be emailing me if I don't have an account).

So no, they don't work.

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