"Law professor Ryan Calo studies digital market manipulation at the University of Washington, and he looks back to the 1970s when the Federal Trade Commission created new rules to deal with door-to-door sales.
“The idea was a kind of 1950s notion that women were at home, you know, tending to the house in their curlers,” Calo said. “And all of a sudden, some sweet-talking salesperson would come to the door and sell them a bunch of encyclopedias.”
The crux was that when you’re at home, you deserve more protections than when you are actively going to a store and seeking out commerce.
“The commission decided that if you’re going to be selling stuff to people door to door, you had to follow certain rules, you had to have certain disclosures,” he said. The decision included a cooling-off period, a window of time where buyers can cancel any order placed via door-to-door sales with no penalty."