We @ https://redact.dev are working on a pure software mechanism for doing these optouts directly from your own device. We already have full mass deletions for over 40 social media and utilitys.
The pricing seems to implicitly acknowledge this: $35/m billed monthly vs $8/m billed annually! Would you really expect anyone to intentionally renew monthly? I can't argue that people forgetting to unsubscribe pays the bills, but as a business model it leaves a bad taste.
It’s hard to imagine what the situation actually looks like behind the scenes.
random companies will buy the data, do a little collation and merge datasets from multiple sources, start their own frontend, and resell it to consumers doing google searches for phone numbers, names, etc
because they’re not directly affiliated with the primary brokers, there are hundreds of these independent frontends… and unless you contact each one, they can all resell their data (even to each other)
so if you miss one removal, it’s possible your data gets picked up by a new frontend from that frontend… your data can kind of proliferate through this gross ether forever
These "data removal" services spend a lot of effort going after the frontends, which is pretty self-serving: they can show the customer that there's something new to remove every single month or quarter, so you have to keep paying forever.
Parent's argument is that current approach leads to an endless cat and mouse game the user ends up paying, when there would be ways to end it faster and cheaper.
Does that mean the user keeps paying just to have someone somewhere do "something" ?
And that, even if fundamentally it can't solve the sutiation, can't prove it's even improving in any specific ways (telling you it removes hundreds of instances doesn't tell you how many have been added in the meantime), and they also have no incentives to be too zealous as the numbers in the reports would be going down and the motivation to subscribe also diminish.
Ps: perhaps the way out of this is to make it a non profit that provides jobs to people in need, and have the subscription a recurring donation ?
yes this is what I mean, you need to contact each one to have data removed… there are hundreds of these
As much as I routinely fine-tune and fix up a comment after initially writing, I will happily go back to the old days before such ability became common, in trade for the sanity of references that don't disappear or change meaning after the fact. The typos don't hurt as much as the swiss cheese and schitzo conversations.
Yes, I do see the irony of writing that here. :'(
It's pretty clear you're putting something in the public when you're commenting on HN; this isn't a surprise and nothing is done surreptitiously. If you contribute to a debate in some TV discussion programme then you can't have that deleted later either.
And there are options without wholesale deletion: specific comments can be deleted or edited for specific reasons, and your account can be "soft-deleted" by changing your username to something random.
If you want to have more ephemeral temporary conversations then that's fair! But HN is not the right platform for that, IMHO.
This made me curious about archivist ethics: https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-state...
> Privacy: Archivists recognize that privacy is an inherent fundamental right and sanctioned by law. They establish procedures and policies to protect the interests of the donors, individuals, groups, and organizations whose public and private lives and activities are documented in archival holdings. As appropriate and mandated by law, archivists place access restrictions on collections to ensure that privacy and confidentiality are maintained, particularly for individuals and groups who have had no voice or role in collections’ creation, retention, or public use. Archivists should maintain transparency when placing these restrictions, documenting why and for how long they will be enacted. Archivists promote the respectful use of culturally sensitive materials in their care by encouraging researchers to consult with those represented by records, recognizing that privacy has both legal and cultural dimensions. Archivists respect all users’ rights to privacy by maintaining the confidentiality of their research and protecting any personal information collected about the users in accordance with their institutions’ policies.
Yes, it makes the web poorer as a knowledge base, but it's in response to companies like reddit ruining the internet by baiting in users, changing the agreement and then trying to keep the content that was written under the previous agreements.
a real flaw is that companies in this niche are actually centralizing data to re-sell while adding a new line in the dataset that says "wanted to remove their data footprints"
edit: and as a result of automation, our prices are also way lower than most similar services
Edit: this looks like a totally different service. Mass deletion of old posts is one thing, removing PII from data brokers is another.