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Comment by causal | Hacker News Reader

I like this in theory, I don't have time to chase down every data broker to opt-out on my own. I'm just wondering how I can measure whether it's really effective or not.

Anyone have experience with this kind of thing?

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This is always my pessimistic view of the world we live in today. Why in the world would they delete that data vs just putting it on mute/ignore/etc? The only "proof" you have is if you send a request to see the data they hold on you. If they send you an empty report because the ignore flag was set, you would only see an empty report. You have no evidence that the data was actually deleted.

I also wonder if it stops them from collecting it. Also, what are the legal requirements if a customer asks their data to be removed?

Still, I'm not giving up a plausible solution because potentially it's only a partial solution.

> Why in the world would they delete that data vs just putting it on mute/ignore/etc?

If you're serious it's because having a fig leaf is useful to reduce risk in controversial business practices, especially if the vast majority of people don't take advantage of it.

And I've never seen a single stalker-corp ("data broker") executive serve prison time for failing to delete data that they claimed was deleted.

Either that has literally never happened, or there's inadequate auditing/enforcement, and I don't consider the former to be plausible.

That's because this is actually a data validation service for brokers. Most of their data is junk or incomplete, but now they know which pieces belong to actual people who want to pay money for it to be deleted.

I get your point but also this is what whistleblower laws are for. A lot of times it’s in the company’s best interest to comply… until 50%+ of the population opts out

The data brokers that show your info will be listed, so you can spot check them yourself to see if they still show you. Not perfect, but should give you some confidence that if it says your data has been removed, it actually has been removed.

(You can scan for brokers before upgrading to Plus for automatic opt-out, so you can also check beforehand that you can see your data.)

That doesn't account for them retaining your data and simply toggling the 'Publish' flag from 1 to 0.

True.

Optery customers get Removals Reports every 90 days. PCMag.com wrote this about the Optery Removals Report: "With the Removals report, you see what was found along with a new screenshot demonstrating that the data was removed, and a link to verify the removal. No other personal data removal service I’ve seen gives you this level of verification."

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