[CrispyKerosene]

Troy mentions "data opt-out services. Every person who used some sort of data opt-out service was not present."

Anyone have experience with these sort of services? A search brings up a lot of scammy looking results. But if services exist to reduce my profile id be interested.

[JohnMakin]

> Anyone have experience with these sort of services?

Quite a bit. Often if you request removal or opt-out, you'll reappear in a matter of a few months in their system, regardless of whether you use a professional service as a proxy or do it yourself. The data brokers usually go out of their way to be annoying about it and will claim they can't do anything about you showing up in their aggregated sources later on. They'll never tell you what these sources are. A lot of them will share data with each other, stuff that's not public. It's entirely hostile and should be illegal. I am trying to craft a lawsuit angle at the moment but they feel totally unassailable.

I'm extremely skeptical of any services that claim they can guarantee 100% removal after any length of time of longer than 6 months. From my technical viewpoint and experience, it is very much an unsolved problem.

[adelie]

my understanding is that there's a bit of a catch-22 with data removal - if you request that a data broker remove ALL of your information, it's impossible for them to keep you from reappearing in their sources later on because that would require them to retain your information (so they can filter you out if you appear again).

[hedora]

I’ve heard this claim, but they could use some sort of bloom filter pr cryptographic hashing to block profiles that contain previously-removed records.

There could also be a shared, trusted opt-out service that accepted information and returned a boolean saying “opt-out” or “opt-in”.

Ideally, it’d return “opt-out” in the no-information case.

[michaelt]

Hash-based solutions aren't as easy as we might hope.

You store a hashed version of my SSN, or my phone number, to represent my opt-out? Someone can just hash every number from 000-00-0000 to 999-99-9999 and figure out mine from that.

You hash the entire contents of the profile - name+address+phone+e-mail+DOB+SSN - and the moment a data source provides them with a profile only containing name+address+email - the missing fields mean the hashes won't match.

A trusted third party will work a lot better IMHO.

And of course none of the data brokers have much reason to make opt-outs work well, in the absence of legislation and strict enforcement - it's in their commercial interests to say they "can't stop your data reappearing"

[makmanalp]

> Someone can just hash every number from 000-00-0000 to 999-99-9999 and figure out mine from that.

That's what salts are for, right? It wouldn't be too hard to issue a very large, known, public salt alongside each SSN.

> And of course none of the data brokers have much reason to make opt-outs work well, in the absence of legislation and strict enforcement - it's in their commercial interests to say they "can't stop your data reappearing"

This is the actual reason, IMHO.

[ses1984]

If the salt is public, what’s the point, then you can get all the salts, and combine them with every possible ssn, and you’re back where you were before.

[lazide]

Yup, it would be trivial to create a one way hash of various attributes to perma ‘opt out’ someone.

But how would they keep making money that way?

[zo1]

So for a perfect match they'd need to have some sort of unique identifier that's present in the first set of data you ask them to remove, as well as being present in any subsequent "acquisitions" or "scrapes" of your data.

If these devs that scrape/dump/collate all this info are anything like the ones I've seen, and they're functioning in countries like the US and UK whereby you don't have individual identifiers that are pretty unique, then I'd say the chance of them being able to get such a "unique" key on you to remove you perpetually, is next to impossible. And if it's even close to being "hard", they'll not even bother. Doubley-so if this service/people/data is anything like the credit-score companies, which are notoriously bad at data de duplication and sanitation.

Likewise, if you want them to do some sort of removal using things other than a unique identifier, then you have to have some sort of function that determines closeness between the two records. From what I've heard, places like Interpol, countries' border-control and police agencies usually use name, surname and dob as a combination to match. Amazingly unique and unchanging combination, that one! /s

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Sorry, I value my legal rights over the viability of the data broker industry. If they can’t figure out a way for lawfully not collecting my data, they should not collect data period.

[ehvatum]

I mean, if we’re not allowed to know that we’re not allowed to surveil the shit out of you, it seems like something we can’t worry about

[hsbauauvhabzb]

Not really my problem, I’ll sue you when you get breached.

[laweijfmvo]

1. They could be required to store a private copy of the removal requests, data that they can't sell (not ideal)

2. Sounds like "data brokers" that sell private information just shouldn't exist...

[rjmunro]

> They could be required to store a private copy of the removal requests

They would leak that in the next data breach.

[wodenokoto]

They could store a hash.

[jandrese]

Which would never work because real life data is messy so the hashes would not match. Even something as simple as SSN + DOB runs into loads of potential formatting and data entry issues you'll have to perfectly solve before such a system could work, and even that makes assumptions as to what data will be available from each dataset. Some may be only name and address. Some may include DoB, but the person might have lied about their DoB when filling out the form. The people entering it might have misspelled their name. It might be a person who put in a fake SSN because they're an illegal immigrant without a real one. Data correlation in the real world is a nightmare.

When you tell a data broker to delete all of the data about you, how can you be sure they get ALL of the data about you, including the ones where your name is misspelled or the DoB is wrong or it lists and old address or something? Even worse if someone comes around later and discovers the orphan data when adding new data about you and fixes the glitch, effectively undoing the data delete.

It's a catch-22 that if you want them to not collect data about you they need a full profile on you in order to be able to reject new data. A profile that they will need to keep up-to-date, which is what they were doing already.

[vineyardmike]

> Even something as simple as SSN + DOB runs into loads of potential formatting and data entry issues you'll have to perfectly solve

You don’t have to solve it perfectly to be an improvement.

Also this is BS. Not every bit of data is perfectly formatted and structured but both of your examples are structured data. You can 100% reliably and deterministically hash this data.

There’s so much in your argument that can be replied with “imperfect is better than status quo”. If you give someone the wrong DOB, it’s “not you” anyways, at least let me scrub my real data even if the entry is imperfect for some people or some records.

[JohnMakin]

> You don’t have to solve it perfectly to be an improvement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

[kube-system]

> You don’t have to solve it perfectly to be an improvement.

They don't want to solve your problem. You aren't their customer. They want to comply with the letter of the request in as much as it covers their own butt in terms of regulatory requirements and/or political optics.

[lanstin]

People switch digits in their SSN.

[BehindBlueEyes]

There's a trivial way to not re-add data that was removed: don't do it without user opt-in, whom admittedly you have access to ask at the moment of data collection. If you don't have the ability to ask users to opt in, you probably shouldn't be collecting the data anyway, with very few exceptions like criminal records.

edit for clarity: by criminal records, I mean for the official management of them, not for scraping their content.

[lynndotpy]

I've had a very bad experience with Liberty Mutual following a data opt-out from another service. They sent me on a runaround, ending with an email saying to follow "this link" to verify myself. (There was no link, only sketch.) I ended up getting a human on a phone through special means, and they sent me a fixed email with a working link.

I should be hearing back from them in the next 32 days, as this was 13 days ago.

[dawnerd]

I got a quote from them and immediately initiated a data removal request. It seems like it went through, got a link in the email. Thanks for the reminder that I might need to follow up to make sure they followed through.

[shadowgovt]

It's hard to make collection, aggregation, and sharing of facts illegal.

Not to minimize the harm that can be done by such collections, but the law is justifiably looking for a scalpel treatment here to address the specific problem without putting the quest to understand reality on the wrong side of the line.

[digging]

> It's hard to make collection, aggregation, and sharing of facts illegal.

Sure, but the US has a precedent in HIPAA. Not saying it's copy-paste, but... maybe it should be.

I would prefer the law be more restrictive than less, because I don't believe this is true:

> law is justifiably looking for a scalpel treatment here to address the specific problem without putting the quest to understand reality on the wrong side of the line.

I believe the law may use that noble goal as cover for the actual goal: restrict the ability of capital holders to accumulate capital as little as possible. Data sharing isn't a public good in any way. It's mostly not even useful for the targeting purposes it claims. It's extremely reckless rent-seeking that knowingly allows innocent people to have their lives wrecked by identity theft.

[shadowgovt]

As someone who helps care for elderly relatives with widely-dispersed out-of-state families, I can point to HIPAA as an excellent example of why crafting this kind of law is difficult.

I think we are going to discover, once people do the research, that HIPAA has done net harm by delaying flow of information for critical-care patients resulting in lack of patient compliance, confusion, and treatment error.

Yes, there is harm potential in insurance companies denying coverage or claims because they are privy to too much information about clients (a scenario that, I'd note, we could address directly by law via a national healthcare system or banning denial of coverage for various reasons) or by employers or hostile actors (including family) discovering medical facts about a patient. I have to weigh that harm potential against my day-to-day of having to fight uphill to get quality care because every specialist, every facility, and every department needs a properly-updated HIPAA directive for a patient (and the divisions between these categories aren't clear to the average non-medical observer).

[digging]

Huh, I wasn't aware of such a viewpoint. I've never had or heard of problems with HIPAA preventing timely or accurate care, even with my father going in and out of hospice toward the end of his fight with cancer. I'm really sorry to hear it. At the same time, I do have to wonder if that kind of problem genuinely outweighs the protection HIPAA has given millions of people against harms small and large. (I guess with the state of data privacy today, HIPAA may be basically useless, but that isn't exactly HIPAA's fault.)

[makmanalp]

> HIPAA has done net harm by delaying flow of information for critical-care patients resulting in lack of patient compliance, confusion, and treatment error.

You won't find any disagreement from me that HIPAA is very complicated. However there's a certain level of whining and foot dragging that happens in the industry that we should take with a massive grain of salt. There's so many HIPAA compliant and still convenient ways these days to have patient communications, but the industry doesn't want to invest and doesn't care about patience experience enough, and then go "sorry, HIPAA :-(((" every time.

With GDPR, after Schrems II happened and it became clearer that the EU-US Privacy Shield was no longer a valid workaround, I personally observed companies (including the one I was in) suddenly moving mountains to complete migration projects and privacy upgrades in just a few months that the industry previously deemed was technically unfeasible or impossible, cost prohibitive, business destroying, etc. And they still remained massively profitable and growing. If they had just done the right thing early on it wouldn't have been on such a tight deadline either.

That was the final straw for me in terms of being very firmly convinced that we should be telling companies to shut up and comply a lot more because they will never do the right thing on their own even if it wasn't /that/ hard. Another approach here is to start holding them liable for the personal costs of data breaches etc and let the incentives take care of themselves. In fact, why not a bit of both?

[lupire]

Europe figured it out.

[shadowgovt]

Sure, I should probably have clarified "In the United States," where there's a First Amendment that most attempts to make fact-sharing illegal immediately fall afoul of.

There are definitely exceptions, but it puts strict scrutiny on any novel prior constraint of speech.

[harimau777]

Instead of making it illegal, we could simply make the people who aggregate the data liable for making people whole if the data is misused.

[mistrial9]

this is true and nothing new.. mass "gray market" personal information services lept into markets since VISA and Mastercard fifty years ago, and somewhat before that with driving records, in the USA. The "pure land" of democracy in North America was never pure, and the Bad Old Ways have crept into the corners since the beginning.

[JohnMakin]

The difference now though is an attempt to legislate personal data collection, such as the CCPA. I strongly believe they are violating the law, and that if I opt-out or request removal, an answer of "oh well nuthin we can do" is not acceptable when my data re-appears either on their platform or on another platform they provided data aggregation services to.

[fsckboy]

>The "pure land" of democracy in North America was never pure

don't mix your pet grievances together, having full public knowledge of every person in your country is democratizing, frankly, an aid to democracy, not a hindrance. Not saying I want to live in that world, but it's not an impure democracy.

Norway (and others?) already publishes everybody's income statements. Not healthy imo but I guess would aid more accurate snitching (and envious resentment).

[paulgerhardt]

Consumer Reports just published (as in last week) a report[1] surveying a number of these services and found almost all of them to be a little bit effective, none of them to be highly effective, and the cheapest of the lot to be the most effective (EasyOptOuts).

Of note, opting out of a service by yourself by hand was only 70% effective ($0). Using EasyOptOuts was around 65% effective ($20) and using Confidently was only 6% effective ($120).

[1] https://innovation.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/20...

[0x2a]

Permission Slip by Consumer Reports (automated):

https://permissionslipcr.com

Simple Opt Out (manual list):

https://simpleoptout.com

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

I manually did a handful of opt-outs and am not in the list.

[spdif899]

I use permission slip and I am not in the breach as far as I can tell

[eks391]

Did you use a grep command? The file is too large for me to open and I have not used grep before to have confidence with it.

Edit: nvm, ``` findstr /i /r ".000000000." ssn.txt ``` did the trick in powershell, with the zeros replaced with the ssn. Also there is a star after each period that HN has changed to italicize the text instead of showing it.

[roughsquare]

"Not available in your region" bloody hell.

[wongarsu]

A lot of the data opt-out services are operated by or have the same owners as data brokers. So at the very least they are selling both the poison and the cure.

[jmkni]

If you're willing to tempt fait, the best way to 'opt-out' is to tell people, when they call asking to speak to 'your name', that 'your name' sadly passed away recently.

[bragr]

I knew someone falsely declared dead (probably a paperwork mixed up around pensions when his ex-spouse died). Without warning, he lost all of his pensions, social security, medicare, etc, along with most financial institutions freezing accounts and canceling credit cards. Many long phone calls, letters, and lawyers eventually resolve most, but that never fully purged the public and private death records so there would be random issue for the rest of his life (failing fraud checks, brief interruptions to pensions, trouble with the cable company).

[avh02]

You'd think something like that would require a death certificate to actually happen

[bragr]

There _was_ a death certificate, just not his

>probably a paperwork mixed up around pensions when his ex-spouse died

[red-iron-pine]

most places do. though often a poor quality faxed copy is sufficient

[autoexec]

I prefer to just never answer a phone call unless I know who is calling and it's someone I know personally and want to speak to. Even then, those people know I'd rather they text anyway so when they do call it's more likely to be really important.

[actionfromafar]

I have tried that, with a particular caller. They always call back.

[rolph]

that sounds very traumatizing, next explain that you have,

filed for injunctive relief from emotional duress due to actions of defendant.

and cant speak any further as instructed by legal cousel

[j-bos]

Could cause you to be listed as deceased in some database sending your life into a Kafka story.

[lupire]

"How do you know he's dead?"

"I called him on the phone and he told me!"

[lazide]

Called on the phone - and the person who picked it up said the dude was dead.

Which is how it plays out when someone dies, generally, and the family is there dealing with the aftermath. FYI.

[dawnerd]

Data brokers don’t care. Whoever calls you will move on but that’s it.

[laweijfmvo]

I have used (free trials) and currently use (discounted annual) a service called incogni. It's hard to really verify what's going on, but they at least show the brokers they are contacting on your behalf, and I've directly received confirmations from some.

Anecdotally, searching my name on Google pretty much no longer returns those scummy "People Finder" pages that just scrap any public records they can find.

That said, I hope incogni is happy enough with my money that they themselves don't do anything scummy.

Also, freeze your credit at the big three. do it now.

[0x2a]

And turn on the Global Privacy Control header in your browser:

https://globalprivacycontrol.org

[zikduruqe]

In the past I have just searched for my own name. And when I found a match, I would go to that site and request to be removed. It is a lot of work, but thus far it has been successful.

And I say this, because I was on a TV show years ago, so my real name is all over the internet from an entertainment point of view. But, if you search my real name, there are little to none pointing back to "public record" websites and the such.

[silisili]

Many seem scammy, and I went through the search before and gave up.

Then, as fate would have it, a HNer(tjames7000) mentioned he made EasyOptOuts for this reason, so I signed up. Cheap, seems effective, absolutely no complaints.

[tjoff]

Since it is Troy I assume it is legit, and I haven't read the link yet. But... How does he know that?

Has the opt-out services leaked as well? Or is noone using them? How would we know?