this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
76 points (97.5% liked)
Privacy
31935 readers
677 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have had a lot of success.
First I went through this list and filled out lots of opt-out forms: https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-Out-List
Then I emailed everyone on this (dated) list: https://github.com/privacybot-berkeley/privacybot/blob/master/app%2Fservices_list_06May2021.csv
I got a lot of follow up emails suggesting that my requests were honored, or having me do follow up steps to have my request honored. Only two pushback emails suggesting that they don't have legally respect my opt out, to which I provided them a strict do-not-contact request that hopefully encourages them to do nothing with any data they might have on me.
It was a huge amount of effort (~50 hours), but my private info was nearly ungooglable a couple of weeks after I finished.
After seeing a huge difference, I then signed up for DeleteMe, and compared to a few friends of mine who never did their own work before signing up, my quarterly reports are extremely sparse. Hopefully it's easier for them to play whack-a-mole with my data since I did lots of the initial work.
So far I can't find anything about myself I wouldn't want to see on any search engine. If I did, I would just find the opt out page and try to nip it in the bud.
They seem like a scam. Their "Free Scan" gives the same results on a 20 year old email address as it does on a 2 years old address.