Show HN: Simple Opt Out – Makes it easier to opt out of data sharing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Simple Opt Out – Makes it easier to opt out of data sharing

simpleoptout.com

233 pointstroydavis54 comments

The 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.

I understand the frustration but how is that identity theft?

My 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.

Including social security numbers and other unique identifiers?

The number of American companies that will assign debt to your name without reasonable identity verification is greater than zero.

Okay, do you have a source? Regardless how is getting unsolicited financial mail, identity theft? I really don't understand. Am I missing something?

I'll save you a direct source and offer this: do you live in the US? In a state with lax consumer protection laws regarding payday loans?

Just do a quick search for online payday loan and start up, if you dare, a few applications and see how easy it is to get a high interest payday loan just by possessing a driver's license that you can scan and upload.

Doesn't even have to be yours. Long as it isn't expired. It is shockingly and worryingly easy.

Now if you're wondering how they managed to take out a loan in my name with nothing but a driver's license and no SSN or anything else, to that I would say ask my attorney because four years and a sum of money I'd rather have spent on more fruitful things like maybe buying a house--we still don't know, and neither does "Speedy Cash".

Strange. My Amazon prime credit card has a chip and a mag stripe, and I continue to get very little junk mail even after having their card for a while...

I don't think the Amazon prime card generated deluge of mail. It is mostly their "account protection" up-sell that grates on me. Sell me the service, then frighten me into upgrading the security on said service.

There's something called DMAchoice that lets you opt out of a lot of junk mail. It's at https://dmachoice.thedma.org/

Since I signed up, I hardly ever get junk mail from anyone I haven't done business with. I don't think I've gotten a credit card solicitation in years.

This is awesome, thanks.

I’ve tried this multiple times and it doesn’t seem to work for me.

I literally get no value from the post office other than packages. None. I actually just got rid of my mailbox when I bought a house, but they just started laying it on the ground.

I legit want a mailbox that visibly shreds everything placed in it like a Banksy painting at this point as a revolt against endless spam.

> visibly shreds everything placed in it like a Banksy painting at this point as a revolt against endless spam

I wonder if there's money to be made in a mailbox that instantly drop the contents into a shredder.

I think you are looking for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zubmkHMRP3U

Important to point out that this service isn't free. It's only $2 for 10 years, but still worth knowing.

Wait what? If I paid, I didn’t realize it.

Well, they do have your CC info...

The scary thing is I don't remember giving them that, either. Which isn't to say I didn't...

I never paid.

If you want to opt out of credit card prescreenings for free you can use: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

You can get 5 years online - to do it for life you have to mail something in. Pretty painless process for the online version at least.

Where they get you is that they /require/ you to have multiple years of credit history over multiple accounts if you want to get a mortgage.

I almost couldn’t get a mortgage loan because wellsfargo (in between committing fraud) insisted on having three lines of credit that had been in use for more than a year. I only had two - i had to use my recurrent gym payments as a third and that required more paperwork and hit our maximum loan amount. This was despite having a single employer and a consistent income for a decade.

Banks and credit agencies need to be reigned in - actual liability for losses they caused, and provide you with market rates for credit monitoring - because we know that they’re not paying that when they give you a year of “free monitoring”.

Also credit agencies should be financially accountable when they make false claims about you. They don’t need to put any work into making sure they’re accurate as they decide you’re responsible for it, and they make money from us having to get credit monitoring.

The credit card solicitations are coming from companies that are purchasing credit headers from the credit reporting bureaus (Trans Union, Equifax & Experian). The credit header is just your name/address/credit score band. Just log in to each bureau and opt out of credit header sharing. They will honor it. Use annualCreditReport.com for one annual credit report/yr from each bureau.

Per 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.

It 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.

They'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...

Cookie AutoDelete just cleans them except in a whitelist of domains. It's the next best thing.

Why 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

It's a Symantec cert, which are not trusted by many browsers now.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/03/12/distrust-symant...

Given 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?

After 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.

I 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...)

You'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.

I 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.

http://optout.aboutads.info

one button. over a hundred opt out cookies.

I'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

I 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!

This is clever but not sustainable. There needs to be the equivalent of the "no call" list that does the same thing for internet marketing.

Just like the Do Not Track header?

That's not a legal requirement or a database.

Since 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.

If 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!

If 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.

I want the opposite of this site: "Simple opt in" that makes all the GDPR cookie warnings go away.

Have 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.

The capital one link did not work. I got an error saying "Not acceptable"

Thank 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/1f4661d3139f8cb4...).

All it takes is one "clear cookies" action to undo all of this. :\

Make a chrome extension to click all the things for me.

The links I've tried have required I perform additional actions. LinkedIn was particularly bad, requiring dozens of clicks to turn off all tracking.

I'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.

Dark UIs are all over opt out pages in general.

How 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?

Anyone know if ublock does this for you?

uBlock 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

[1]: uBlock Origin is different than uBlock (https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ub...). Everyone should run uBlock Origin (https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock) unless they have a reason to run something else.

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