Project 365: 105/365

Are you familiar with the concept of opt-in and opt-out?

For formal definition you can refer to ICO's site. For human word a more comprehensive explanation, here's a situation to help you understand. Suppose you've received an email from an unfamiliar company introducing their product/service, you read it and delete it, and the email didn't bother you. Then you keep receiving emails about updates of that product/service until you feel annoyed receiving 'em. You want a way out. There's a link for you to unsubscribe the updates. That's called opting out. Another situation is that you've stumbled upon an interesting site and you want to subscribe to their updates. That's called opting in.

In other words, opting in is completely up to you to decide whether you wana receive updates from a site, giving them your permission to put your email address on their mailing list. Opting out is more like putting you in their mailing list first, without your permission, and give you an option to unsubscribe from receiving it.

According to privacy law, opt out is a MUST-HAVE option for those companies that chose to do marketing by sending mass emails without the permission of the targeted audience. If they don't, they'd be violating privacy.

I guess most of us are familiar with receiving spam emails and shit. All we need to do is just clicking the 'unsubscribe' link and it'll direct you to the site that confirms you'll not be receiving their crap again. Of course it depends on the content of the emails la. If it is those emails where your friend watched some porn and accidentally clicked something wrong and it automatically sends emails that contain link to viagra wtf to all the contacts, of course you can't opt out to that HAHAHA.

There's a situation I find tricky because I have no idea how one can opt out of it. Seriously. When your fb friend started doing business on fb, USING THEIR PERSONAL PROFILE, not having the courtesy of creating a special page for it for people to like or unlike, what are we supposed to do? When we log in to check out how our friends are doing, we'll have to endure countless of statuses about the business flooding our news feed.

After giving it a serious thought for a few months, the best solution is:

*click* *choose unsubscribe from this friend*

Done.

For the sake of opting out from the dreadful business statuses, sorry pal, I don't mind missing your REAL personal status update. Hope you'll get a page soon but till then, sayonara!