united-states
Short Answer
As a practical matter, if you want to opt-out from something and they want you to send them a letter saying so in the mail, send them a letter (via certified mail) and be done with it.
It isn't worth the trouble to try to enforce you opt-out rights by any other means of notice, when this one can be used without any room for them to question the validity of your notice in any future dispute.
It costs less than $6 U.S. to send a certified letter (and there are cheaper options that cost less than $2 U.S. to get proof of mailing, which is all you need). Mail outside the U.S. is similarly cheap. And, this doesn't require any special legal training or knowledge.
In contrast, it would cost thousands of U.S. dollars to litigate the notice issue alone on the merits, in a future dispute, even if you won in the end, which wouldn't be 100% certain, and this would delay your efforts to enforce your rights by weeks or months, even if you win.
Long Answer
As usual, there are different rules for different situations.
When The Means Of Giving Notice Is Specified By Law
Service of legal process is valid only certain senior officers and employees of a company pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 4 and parallel state law court rules and statues.
Similarly, many states specify exactly how notice must be given to exercise certain legal rights, such as a notice of a landlord to a tenant to vacate a property, a notice of an intent to file a mechanic's lien, a notice of a personal property lien under the Uniform Commercial Code, or a notice of a deadline to file objections to the validity of a trust.
Subpoenas must be hand delivered personally to the actual person who is supposed to personally testify or comply with the subpoena pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45 and parallel state court rules and statues.
Statements Made Under Penalty Of Perjury, Or With An Oath Or Affirmation
In the case of statements made by a company official under penalty of perjury (or with an oath or affirmation), generally only the actual knowledge of the company official making the statement is relevant for criminal perjury.
But sometimes the statement of a company official made under penalty of perjury in an official capacity (or in an oath or affirmation) is binding on the company for civil and administrative litigation purposes based upon the knowledge of anyone in the company (and may give rise to legal penalties or sanctions, or a finding of fraud by the company for civil purposes, if the statement made is not true).
Notice Rules Established By Contracts
Contracts frequently specify an exclusive means by which notice must be given.
But, frequently, in litigation, a court will find that failure to give notice by the method specified in the contract is not a material breach of the contract, or is not a substantial breach of the contract, if the person to whom notice was supposed to be given received actual notice of the matter to be communicated, and the court will instead treat the notice that was given in a manner not conforming to the contractual requirement as valid if the person to whom the notice was directed received actual knowledge of the matter as a result.
Showing The Malicious Intent Of A Company
In criminal prosecutions and in certain kinds of civil litigation where intent (usually willfulness, e.g., in a fraud case) is relevant, typically, only actual knowledge of the board of directors and senior management team and the actual knowledge of people assigned by the company to deal with a particular matter is relevant.
The Common Law Constructive Knowledge Rule For Agents And Its Exceptions
Still, there are many circumstances when the general common law rule of agency law that a company has constructive knowledge of everything known to all of its agents and employees is the law.
For example, in a case alleging that a personal injury or property damage caused by the negligence of the company, the knowledge of any agent or employee of the company can be used to establish a case that a company acted negligently.
The main exception to the general constructive knowledge rule would be in cases where an officer or employee is adverse to the company, such as a case where the officer or employee is embezzling money from the company, in which case the knowledge of the bad actor and their co-conspirators is not attributed to the company (at least, in litigation over the bad acts in question).
Another arguable exception to the rule that a company has constructive knowledge of everything known to its agents (although there isn't nearly as much case law supporting this exception as there is case law supporting the general rule), is that arguably, you have to communicate to someone who has apparent authority to receive a particular kind of information, or at least, to someone who has apparent authority to deal with the kind of matters being communicated to the person.
A court is unlikely to apply the doctrine of constructive knowledge of an agent to, for example, knowledge of a privacy policy opt-out notice given to a janitor or a rank and file employee in the hardware division of company where you are a consumer of its software.
But a court is unlikely to let a company off the hook for liability if, for example, a customer communicates information about their customer-company relationship to a customer service representative, even if the company wants to have a policy of ignoring those communications, if that policy isn't backed up by a contract.
But see, in a harsh exception to the general rule, Colorado Revised Statutes § 38-10-124 (requiring courts to ignore oral communications between potential borrowers and authorized agents of a financial company regarding offers to allow the potential borrower to borrow money from the company, even if it is in a legally consented to recorded oral communication and would otherwise give rise to a valid contract or legal claim and it would otherwise constitute fraud to deny that the conversation took place as claimed).
Is a company allowed to claim that it doesn't know something, even if
its agent knows it? Or do I need to care about the internal machinery
of companies and go to at least some threshold of effort to send my
messages in ways understandable to that machinery?
There is no formal "the company doesn't have its sh*t together" exception the the rule that the company has constructive knowledge of information provided to an agent. The whole purpose of the constructive knowledge rule is to create a strong legal incentive for large corporate bureaucracies to quickly and accurately share information with the people in the organization who need to know it.
Obviously, of course, this constructive knowledge rule is a legal fiction. In any big bureaucratic organization, it isn't uncommon for the left hand to not know what the right hand is doing. As a practical matter, if your goal is to make sure that the company acts in a way consistent with what you have communicated to it, it is best to follow the channels of communication that they request (and to do so in a way that you can document credibly after the fact if there is a dispute that you made the communication).
Application To These Facts
I called in to tell a company something. The people I could reach on
the phone are definitely agents of the company, and they definitely
got my message. But they told me that they couldn't internally handle
what I had told them, and asked me to tell the company the same thing
again by postal mail at my own expense, because the only internal
procedure the company had to accept this sort of message worked that
way.
(This is, of course, a message opting me out of something I have a
legal right to opt out of, so it is in the company's best interest to
design its internal procedures to minimize the number of opt-outs
processed.)
Often, a requirement like this would be specified in a contract or term of service agreement or some similar written policy to which you either expressly agreed, or were bound to in a contract-of-adhesion by using their services.
If so, the contractual provision on notice requirements would generally be upheld unless they are unconscionable or contrary to an applicable statute or regulation.
A Real World Example Of The Constructive Knowledge Rule's Impact
Some companies go to great lengths to prevent their employees and agents from have communications in which they might gain knowledge through less formal means of communications like phone calls with people outside the company.
For example, one major mortgage servicing company that I dealt with on behalf of a probate estate had a special department that was in charge of handling the mortgage accounts of customers who had died. But this company didn't allow anyone in that department to have a business telephone or email account of any kind, so that all communications with the company had to be in writing via mail and Federal Express. The company claimed (dubiously) that this was because members of that department were "not trained in customer service."
On the other hand, this same company repeatedly denied that the mortgage borrower in question was dead, even after it had received a certified death certificated transmitted to it by return receipt mail to their designated address. So, I wouldn't exactly offer up that company as a model, and this company probably lost lots of lawsuits as a result of its dysfunctional communications practices and due to courts not giving credit to its bureaucratic policies.
