What It Costs to Tell

Abstract

Non-deception is a legal standard and a negative one. It asks whether you said something false, whether you created a materially misleading impression, whether a reasonable consumer would have been deceived. It can be satisfied entirely by silence. A company that says nothing at all deceives no one. A company whose contract contains, on page thirty-one, an accurate description of the fee it will charge you in month four has not deceived you either — courts have said so many times, and they are not wrong on the law. Disclosure is an active standard and a positive one. It asks a different question: did you surface the fact that it costs you money to surface? The fee. The limit. The outage. The failure rate. The thing about your product that the customer would never have found, would never have thought to look for, and will not know to be angry about until someone else tells them.