Mission statement

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The mission of this Wiki is to document a new generation of consumer exploitation that bears no resemblance to issues of the 1950s-1990s. We focus on the issues that often go unnoticed by review sites, tech press, and traditional consumer protection publications.

Consumer protection has changed

What is "old" consumer protection?

30 years ago, consumer advocacy dealt with more visible problems:

1. Unsafe products
2. Misleading labels
3. Materially false advertising
4. Bait & switch pricing
5. Not delivering goods after payment
6. Lead in toys
7. Discrimination

What is "new" consumer protection?

Today's consumers face different forms of exploitation that strike at the heart of what it means to own something, and are deliberately designed to be difficult to understand or resist. Above all, unlike the issues above, these issues are usually not even illegal.

Modern businesses have perfected the art of subtle control. They are able to:

1. Remotely deactivate products you "own" via cloud services.
2. Alter a purchased item into a significantly different version after the sale.
3. Gather personal data without adequate disclosure and sell it without proper consent.
4. Hinder service cancellation by designing systems where signing up is a single click, but canceling involves navigating a complex process of sending certified mail and enduring endless phone menus.
5. Change the definitions of "purchase" and "own" deep within an end user license agreement, providing legal grounds to remove items you have "purchased" from your library.
6. Intentionally create obstacles to repair, causing otherwise functional devices to become unusable.
7. Coerce you into forced arbitration by sending an email and assuming that not responding signifies agreement to new terms of service.

"Old" style consumer protection covers exposing and pursuing companies that break existing laws. Modern consumer protection efforts exist and are distinct, because the consumer protection laws that currently exist are not fit for purpose. Companies are able to exploit legal loopholes, or legally dubious strategies which are not met with meaningful consequences, to trap their customers in unfavorable positions. They rely on complexity & fatigue to prevent resistance.

These abuses of the consumer have a common thread:

• Take away the consumer's right to say "NO".
• Take away the consumer's right of ownership.
• Take away the consumer's right to privacy.

How we're taking action

This Wiki exists to document and expose these practices, making visible what companies work hard to keep obscure. By creating a centralized knowledge base of modern consumer exploitation tactics, we aim to help consumers understand how their rights are being systematically violated through technology, psychology, deliberately complex legal mechanisms, as well as the ineffective governmental bodies that allow it to happen.

Our goal is to bring clarity to these new practices that companies intentionally make opaque and to provide consumers with the information they need to recognize and fight back against new forms of exploitation.

How this Wiki will be used

It is expected that the Wiki will be contributed to by a wide variety of people, both technical and non-technical, who share a desire to see consumers be treated more fairly. It will enable this by being quick and easy to contribute to, with a low barrier to entry for contributors. This barrier to entry should be maintained at the minimum level necessary to combat spam and bad actors.

The base focus of the Wiki is expected to be on issues frequently discussed on Louis Rossmann’s channel, and those adjacent to the right-to-repair movement, though this may grow to a more all-encompassing definition of consumer protection over time. The minimum desired goal is to have a site that records, in a helpful and searchable format, the specific issues and topics that have been discussed on Louis’ channel over the years, with factual citations.

Ideally, it should aim to grow and act as a one-stop-shop, where a user can discover how the companies they buy products from are working against their interests behind the scenes, and what they can do about it. It should serve to highlight how consumer rights have been eroded over the years and give people the knowledge and tools to fight back against the tide. It will feature factual documentation relating to specific instances of consumer abuse, articles that track the consumer-protection-related activities of large companies and certain individuals, as well as articles and content which serve to educate users about the different forms of consumer abuse.

The Wiki will aim to be viewed as a legitimate source that, though not perfect, can generally be relied upon to provide accurate information, in a similar vein to other Wiki-projects. It is crucial for the Wiki to take steps to avoid causing harassment or financial harm to companies as a result of false or misleading information. It will enable this by attracting an excellent team of moderators, and giving them powerful and effective tools to combat spam and misinformation. If problems arise in this area, we will treat them with the utmost seriousness, as they may jeopardize the entire project.

In seeking this legitimacy, it is important that the appropriate tone is used. The exact tone that is appropriate for a given article will be defined in the Editorial Guidelines (along with the range of acceptable tones for the wiki as a whole) and will vary based on the type of article. In general, we will aim for professionalism. A project like this cannot obtain or maintain legitimacy if every article comes across as being written by someone with an axe to grind or by someone who is more interested in proving a point than the truth. Please see the Wiki Content Policies page for more guidance here, as well as the Editorial Guidelines page.

What makes something appropriate to record within the Wiki?

The line between systematic abuse of customers and an unlucky streak of bad customer experiences is blurry, and can be particularly hard to find for a user who’s just been on the receiving end of bad service. The following guidelines should help you determine whether a particular incident is appropriate for inclusion on the Wiki.

An incident is to be included in the Wiki when one or both of the following is true:

• It fits into the niche of "new" consumer protection - e.g., revocation of rights of ownership, or widespread changes of the terms of the sale. If it is only possible because of these new mechanisms of consumer abuse, then it can be included here. A story relating to a single customer, or a small handful of customers, only rises to the level of being included here if it is relevant to "modern" consumer protection.  Even if it only affected a single customer, the very fact that these things can happen in the first place means that they need to be documented.
  
• It is a large-scale consumer abuse. An old-style consumer protection story only belongs here if it is a systemic practice that is happening to a large group of people. For example, consider how Intel denied customer warranty replacements for its 14th generation CPUs. This practice, even if it is an "old" style anti-consumer practice (selling a defective product, and ignoring warranties en masse), is something that is systemic & widespread, beyond an individual anecdotal experience. Another relevant example is Asus' warranty policies here.

See the description at the beginning of the Mission Statement to learn what is meant by "new" and "old" consumer issues.

A practice does not belong here if it belongs in a Yelp review:

Louis had a bad experience with a bad technician, salesman, and service writer at Caliber Collision. They lied on timeframes, and they did a poor job of installing new parts on his car. This, however, is not to be included in the Wiki.

Instead, this is an issue to be settled elsewhere, by contacting the local consumer protection/licensing bureau (for instance, Department of Consumer Affairs in New York City), and by providing feedback on Yelp or Google.

1. This does not fit any of the categories above of removing privacy, rights of ownership, taking away the right to repair, or forcing anyone into a terms of service agreement in a sneaky way.
2. There is no evidence that what they did is systemically pushed onto all customers.

Hyper-local, run-of-the-mill issues do not belong here.

A plumber who repeatedly ghosts work, disappears & sets up a new company when people go looking for a refund is not worthy of report here. The story of Eugene the contractor belongs on a personal blog, Yelp, and Google. Reports on his behavior should be made to local, city, state, and federal authorities where they apply. A contractor who sets up a new company any time someone looks for a refund after being ripped off may be an anti-consumer scammer, and it may well be that knowing about him would prevent future people from getting scammed. However, this is simply too small and local to warrant inclusion in a Wiki whose purpose is specifically to inform consumers about the modern landscape of consumer protection issues.

For information on the types of articles the Wiki is expected to contain, please see our Article Types page. For a quick guide on what you can do to help, please see our How to help guide!

Editorial guidelines

The Editorial guidelines have been moved to their own page. Leaving this redirect here for now in case anyone comes looking for them!