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Show HN: Simple Opt Out – Makes it easier to opt out of data sharing
- ibash 8y agoMake a chrome extension to click all the things for me.
- cjmoran 8y agoThe links I've tried have required I perform additional actions. LinkedIn was particularly bad, requiring dozens of clicks to turn off all tracking.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- troydavis 8y agoI'd love this too, but I think it would need to be performed by a human as an outsourced service. A fair number of opt-out methods are either phone or email only, particularly those where important data is involved (say, bank balances). Even the Web opt-out forms are often buggy and unloved, though perhaps not so buggy that they couldn't be scripted. I think the only good endgame would be FTC-enforced legislation that data sharing with third parties (except to deliver a requested service) needs to be opt-in. That looks a lot like "Personal data shall be collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes…" in GDPR 5(1)(b). Until a US GDPR equivalent is enacted, or customers stop buying from companies with opt-out data sharing that no reasonable person would opt in to (true of about half of the companies on this site), I think it'll be a sad state of affairs.
- KingMachiavelli 8y agoPer the Amazon Ad Personalize setting: > Because your selection above is managed through HTTP cookies, if you delete these cookies or use a different browser, you will have to make this same selection again. Sigh. So you have to turn this on on every browser on every device. It looks like the relevant cookies are ad-pref-session and apn-privacy. Perhaps syncing these (maybe only the latter one) would be just as effective as changing the setting through Amazon's site. Of course there is little way of knowing how effective changing this setting is.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- aynawn 8y agoIt would be better if there was a ublock origin for cookies. The addon would force cookie creation of every opt out cookie and maintain this information using some kind of list, maybe an EasyList for cookies.
- cjmoran 8y agoThey'd just start tracking that info on the server side (while still requiring opt-out per-device), and then we'd have to make the extension copy your session cookie between opted-out devices, and then they'd come up with a way to counter that...
- JetSpiegel 8y agoCookie AutoDelete just cleans them except in a whitelist of domains. It's the next best thing.
- physcab 8y agoAfter this past election cycle, I was getting spam SMS from every organizer in each county I have lived in over the past 10 years. Does anyone know any master list to remove contact info? Replying “stop” to each text message wouldn’t prevent others from getting through.
- __blockcipher__ 8y agoI don’t have an answer to you, but I changed my affiliation to No Party Preference after undergoing the same deluge of election spammers. When I asked them how they got my info it came from the Democratic Party (which I am thankfully now no longer registered for. Not sure why I ever made the mistake of signing up...)
- CaliforniaKarl 8y agoYou'll need to go to the RoV (Registrar of Voters), BoE (Board of Elections), or equivalent for those counties, and submit the paperwork to un-register. That should remove you from the voting rolls there.
- tvladeck 8y agoThe capital one link did not work. I got an error saying "Not acceptable"
- troydavis 8y agoThank you. Looks like the opt-out Web form is gone (I had found a URL linked from an old privacy policy but couldn't personally test it). I removed it (https://github.com/troy/simpleoptout/commit/1f4661d3139f8cb45c0aeab53fdfccbca2a49fcd https://github.com/troy/simpleoptout/commit/1f4661d3139f8cb4...).
- squegles 8y agoWhy is the Visa opt-out page, which requires the full card number, not secure. The certificate is invalid. See: https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do
- pstrateman 8y agoIt's a Symantec cert, which are not trusted by many browsers now. https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/03/12/distrust-symantec-tls-certificates/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/03/12/distrust-symant...
- nerpderp82 8y agoThe most egregious sharing and it results directly in identity theft is the sharing of your financial information after getting a credit card. I didn't have my own credit card until a couple months ago. I am old. As soon as that thing landed, I now get a constant stream of junk mail with my name and contact info plastered all over it telling me I need insurance, annuities, death insurance, more credit cards, financial management, etc. This should be illegal. The banks should be 100% on the hook for identity theft, they caused this themselves. Infact, I signed up for the Amazon Prime Card and they incessantly try to get me to upgrade to "account protection". How about YOU protect my account, you sent me the card (which appears to NOT have a mag stripe or a chip and pin, rendering it useless except online), how about you only authorize its use for Prime purchases shipped to my house? I really should stop using Amazon. Garbage.
- rpedela 8y agoI understand the frustration but how is that identity theft?
- nerpderp82 8y agoMy mailbox is full of unsolicited offers from financial services companies, already filled out, they just have to be sent back. It is a huge liability.
- SubiculumCode 8y agoDark UIs are all over opt out pages in general.
- walterbell 8y agoHow can an organization fund development of a headless bot, which runs on residential IPs to navigate opt-out dark patterns, on behalf of a human who authorizes the bot as their agent?
- alexfringes 8y agoGiven that the Chase link asks for your Social Security Number, this page could be a good test of those Google phishing lessons from a post earlier today. More constructively, though, I wouldn’t mind a service that does this for me in perpetuity. Has anyone heard of something along those lines?
- colordrops 8y agoThis is clever but not sustainable. There needs to be the equivalent of the "no call" list that does the same thing for internet marketing.
- JetSpiegel 8y agoJust like the Do Not Track header?
- colordrops 8y agoThat's not a legal requirement or a database.
- a-dub 8y agohttp://optout.aboutads.info http://optout.aboutads.info one button. over a hundred opt out cookies.
- jammygit 8y agoI'm not really comfortable storing tracker cookies in my browser so that I can tell the trackers I don't want to be tracked. I don't really believe it either since apparently a lot of tracker companies just fudge the rules anyway
- Klonoar 8y agoAll it takes is one "clear cookies" action to undo all of this. :\
- jrowley 8y agoI browse hacker news most days, and this by far is one of the most helpful links I've come across in a while. What a useful project. I'd love to see it get automated using some interactive version of testcafe or phantomjs, so it would pause to let me enter my credentials for each site. Now that would be cool!
- abtom 8y agoSince most of these only concern "ad personalisation" and not data collection/sharing, I don't see the point of doing this. They're still collecting your data, only difference being now you're not being constantly reminded of it. For myself, I'd rather keep these turned on to get a sense of what data they are harvesting.
- alkonaut 8y agoIf they personalize/target an ad, isn't that using my info? I don't care if they gather and store my info, or if they take a tracking cookie and pass it to an ad-net, I want neither!
- foreigner 8y agoI want the opposite of this site: "Simple opt in" that makes all the GDPR cookie warnings go away.
- fyfy18 8y agoHave there been any developments on this since GDPR came into effect? Per the legislation, you have to explicitly opt in before any data sharing can happen (unless it's a business requirement, but it's pretty hard to argue something is if you can opt out). Most ad networks get around it with click-throughs that you have to accept before viewing a website, which per the legislation shouldn't be allowed, as it says you should be able to use the service without opting in.
- ykevinator 8y agoAnyone know if ublock does this for you?
- troydavis 8y agouBlock Origin[1] will block a ton of tracking and is worth running, but it won't block most of the data retention and sharing that simpleoptout.com covers. simpleoptout.com is mostly for personal data that's not from Web visits at all. For example, many banks can share/sell your account balance with third parties; many retailers can share your name and even purchase history with third parties. In some cases, it's data that was retained by a company when they process a user-initiated Web request (and since it's not a separate request, a content blocker can't block it). Here's a bit more background: http://simpleoptout.com/#additions-and-updates http://simpleoptout.com/#additions-and-updates [1]: uBlock Origin is different than uBlock (https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ub...). Everyone should run uBlock Origin (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) unless they have a reason to run something else.
- troydavis 8y agoIf anyone visited on a mobile device and saw an odd page layout, the mobile view should now be fixed. At least one mobile browser handled a CSS declaration unexpectedly.
- zxcvbn4038 8y agoI used this site a few years ago to opt out of everything (I had to send letters to everyone, no buttons to push) and had very good success. I hardly get any postal mail these days, I don’t show up on any of the “people search” web sites, and I’m a legend in the HR department - they call me the invisible man because they found so little information about me. But I had a passport and a global entry card, so they decided I did exist.