this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
118 points (97.6% liked)

Privacy

43941 readers
377 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

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] belluck@lemmy.blahaj.zone 79 points 4 days ago (3 children)

IIRC, they’re not a scam, but they also aren’t doing anything you couldn’t do yourself. They’re just sending opt-out requests to data brokers on your behalf.

[–] Steve@communick.news 66 points 4 days ago

There are hundreds of those data brokers. And new ones opening as others close every week. Doing it yourself, and keeping up with it on a regular basis? That's nearly a full time job. Nobody does that.

[–] ryannathans@aussie.zone 32 points 4 days ago

There's a lot of those though

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 10 points 4 days ago (3 children)

How time-consuming would doing it yourself be, if anyone here has tried?

[–] MoonMelon@lemmy.ml 26 points 4 days ago

I've tried, it sucks. Each broker has their own process, often several steps, and often a step is broken (like server errors, can't get past a captcha, "try again later", etc). You end up not just having to do the process, but also follow up with many of the ones that are ambiguous or returned server errors or whatnot. I did the top 8 or so brokers and then stopped.

[–] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 23 points 4 days ago

Quite. Some of them make it as difficult as possible, requiring the request to be physically printed and sent in via the post. Some hide the information regarding how to make the request as obscurely as possible. And essentially none of them treat it as a 'and don't collect any more' request so they just start up a new collection on you the next time you do basically anything with one of their 'business partners.' Allowing people to request deletion is just the excuse they use to keep collection legal when it shouldn't be.

[–] lattrommi@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago

I used to spend one day each year doing all the opt outs and data delete requests i could find. it was going well for me until this year. i averaged about 2-3 spam emails a day, combined across 5 different emails, one was made all the way back in 1997 and two of them were made when gmail first started.

someone got breached this year, i don't know who, and now i get a lot more.

i also used firefox monitor to check for info on breach websites and darkweb lists, around the same time i started getting more spam, my list of breached info went from ~16 to 600+.