alt Hacker News I wish to opt out of receiving exclusive promotional offers and updates about products I might be interested in.
What this means:
When checked: They will send you marketing emails. Uncheck to stop promotional emails.
How it tricks you:
They use 'opt out' and 'wish' to create a double negative - saying no to opting out means saying yes to emails
Replies
The double negative is incorrect, but perhaps the negative "opt out" is being a bit obfuscated by the "wish".
It's been common for these types of questions to say something like "I wish to receive exclusive offers..."
So this phrasing is a little bit tricky in that if someone doesn't read it carefully they will think checking the box is saying yes to marketing spam, when in reality it's the opposite.
5 bucks say it was written by a LLM
It would seem to me that "I wish to opt out" doesn't make it clear whether you actually opt out or not, simply that it would be your desire. So checking or not checking wouldn't make any difference, as neither way is answering the actual question of opting out.
Yes, I came here to say that. "Wish" definitely does not create a negative, and ticking the box is the correct thing to do.
The worst offender I've seen in this regard was some GUI program on Windows, and it had this checkbox in its installation process with some wording like this:
"Please do not uncheck if you do not wish to not install XXX (bundled bloatware)"
I just assumed that the default state must be installing the bloatware, and changed it, and fortunately I was right.