The SMS consent flow that survives scrutiny

TCPA exposure lives in the plumbing, not the intent. Four joints fail; all four are engineering. What the law requires of your program is your counsel's call — this is a map of where programs actually leak.

Joint 1 — The capture

Marketing texts ride on the subscriber's prior express written consent, and "written" means a record of an affirmative act: the customer did something unambiguous — typed their number into a labeled SMS field, checked an unchecked box, texted a keyword. The classic failures are structural: a pre-checked box; consent buried inside "I agree to the Terms"; a checkout phone field that quietly doubles as a marketing opt-in. The test a flow has to pass is simple to state: could you show a stranger the screen and have them say, without coaching, "yes, this person signed up for marketing texts"?

Joint 2 — The disclosure

Next to the capture sits the disclosure: who will text, that it's marketing, that messages may be autodialed, that consent isn't a condition of purchase, message frequency, "message & data rates may apply," and how to stop. This copy is boilerplate-ish, but its placement isn't — it has to be where the consenting person can see it at the moment of consent, not three links deep. Clear and conspicuous is a design property.

Joint 3 — The opt-out

This is where current enforcement actually lives. "STOP" has to work — and under the FCC's revocation rules, so does any reasonable way a person says stop: a reply in other words, a message through your contact form, an email. Revocations have to take effect promptly — the FCC's rule gives a short, fixed window measured in business days — and they have to propagate to every system that sends: the SMS platform, the abandoned-cart automation, the winback campaign someone configured in a different tool two years ago. The lawsuits that write headlines are full of plaintiffs who said stop and received message forty-one.

Joint 4 — The records

When a demand letter arrives, the question is never "did you mean well" — it's "produce the consent." That means, per subscriber: what they saw (the form and disclosure as they existed that day), what they did, when, and from where; and for departures: when they revoked and when sending actually stopped. If your platform can't produce that tuple, the program runs on faith.

What I deliver

The inventory first, free: your capture points, disclosures, opt-out paths, and record-keeping as they exist today, gap by gap. Then the implementation — corrected forms and disclosure placement, opt-out plumbing wired through every sending system, records made producible — and a dated record of the corrected state for counsel's file. The overview has the whole arc.

Contact

Email alex@adanielsson.com. You'll get a reply from me — usually the same day, always from a person.