The Remarkably Human Samsung Unsubscribe Flow
Hello fellow haters of marketing emails that you get signed up for on the way to creating accounts, sometimes as an explicit checkbox (this is not about you companies, you are gorgeous and I love you) but mostly as an implicit acceptance that yes, I have created an account and of course I also want to be sent all your marketing material.
Today I had the joy of needing to unsubscribe from the emails of Samsung and was pleasantly taken aback by how human conscious they were. Ensuring multiple times that I am a human taking this action, and verifying that indeed I am the owner of the mailbox I want unsubscribed, in this age of agents and automation? I have never been treated as such a human for so mundane an action.
I am used to getting an odd marketing email, scrolling all the way down to hit the unsubscribe link, being taken to a confirmation page and it is done. No, not this email link to unsubscribe.
This leads me to the confirmation page and I am in a dilemma. Oh man, do I really want to miss out on the amazing offers, cool sales schemes, hot new products and upcoming deals? I guess, yeah, it is a hard decision, but I have made it. I did have to get past the sad puppy on the top too, that was another heart wrenching obstacle.

I am now greeted by a captcha. How cool! Samsung has taken pains to not let robots unsubscribe for me. We don’t want a rogue OpenClaw going around unsubscribing people willy-nilly on the wild internet now do we? Actually, what is the status of captcha these days, are they a solved problem with multi-modal LLMs? Are agents able to bypass these?

I applaud Samsung for attempting to secure me from such Rogue Agentic Behaviors. But wait, I was too early, their Department of Human Safeguards is so much more better. What’s more secure than saving me from rogue robots? Saving me from Malicious Meathands! Do you remember the days when people would just use your emails and do crazy stuff and we had to confirm you had access to the email before taking any critical action? Two factor authentication. Oh yes, let’s have two factor authentication for the unsubscribe flow. We wouldn’t want a hacker to unsubscribe us from all the amazing offers, cool sale schemes, hot new products and upcoming deals. No sir, let’s require an OTP.

And you know what, just for some extra security let’s add yet another captcha. Just to be double sure there are no rogue robots in play. Woohoo, we have made it to the end, as a human, as the authenticated owner of the email, in unsubscribing from the emails.
I will say though, I feel a bit short-changed in terms of quality of service. Samsung says it is going to send at least a few more emails. We spent so much time together to ensure that doesn’t happen anymore, so.
But, but, let’s not lose the plot here. Samsung continues to be a stalwart of human effort appreciation, and for that we are grateful.