[alfanick]

> Oh wait, never mind. I guess I won't be signing up for electricity, then?

You ~~will~~ should be picking up your phone and calling the electrical company to confirm and to tell them their links are nonsense. Couldn't bother with AI agent on phone, or 60 min waiting queue to a human? Fuck it, don't pay the bill, figure it out later.

[xp84]

This advice sounds like nonsense. CS has neither knowledge of what layers of enterpriseware has wrapped their links, nor the domains that software uses, nor any control over those decisions by software engineering or marketing (or perhaps even more removed, some third-party electricity account management platform that they buy as a service).

You certainly could operate on policies like this, but I think most people prefer to spend their time differently instead of arguing with strangers who don't have any way to solve your problem.

[jeroenhd]

Their customer support people don't know what I mean and they especially don't have any power to change this.

The problem isn't paying the bills (I can't recall the last time I ever needed to do that manually), the problem is that pretty much every service uses trackers and shorteners. The only way to opt out is to opt out of society.

Maybe I should, but this "read the link before you click" advice isn't just geared towards hardcore privacy advocates. It hasn't worked in ages. It also doesn't help that companies like Outlook rewrite links to make them redirect through their malware scanners as well.