To answer your question though, yes, in order to get these companies to remove your info, you have to submit an opt out that identifies who you are. There is a catch-22, otherwise, they would not know who to opt out.

There are a multitude of reasons why people submit opt outs beyond whether or not the person can pay, e.g. victims of domestic violence, police officers, public figures, government officials, members of the military, etc. The data brokers are aware of this and generally have processes to accommodate the requests.

Millions of people use some form of identity protection to protect themselves from identity theft, email spam, phishing, scams, hacking, etc. It is a multi-billion dollar market across the consumer, business, and government levels.

I do agree that we need stronger privacy laws in the U.S. ASAP!

Does this mean users have to keep opting out every 12 months? If yes, that sounds...dumb, isn't it? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly, is there a reason behind this 12 month period? Even if they wanted to let data brokers add the data back, 12 months seems too short a time. What am I missing?

Why is every bad thing opt out instead of opt in? This is so backwards...

Data brokers can often have a very liberal interpretation of what it means for the consumer to "authorize" the sale of their personal information. I would guess 99% of data sales were never actually “authorized” by the consumer to begin with, and are usually done through some backdoor implicit authorization that the consumer has no knowledge of whatsoever.

> Does this mean users have to keep opting out every 12 months? If yes, that sounds...dumb, isn't it? Maybe I am not understanding this correctly, is there a reason behind this 12 month period? Even if they wanted to let data brokers add the data back, 12 months seems too short a time. What am I missing?

Although it often causes harm and is often considered evil, there is a lot of economic value that results from the free flow of data. U.S. lawmakers recognize this and its partly why they’re so reluctant to pass strict privacy laws like they have in Europe. The other reason is that lobbyists for deep pocketed tech companies water down privacy laws significantly before they can pass. Even with the 12 month expiration, the CCPA is the strictest privacy law in the U.S., and most U.S. citizens have basically no data privacy rights whatsoever.

How long a data broker honors an opt out is highly variable by the data broker. But yes, in general, you have to continue monitoring these companies and re-submitting opt out requests over time, that's what Optery does with its ongoing scanning and removal technology. We have a little more info on this topic here:

https://help.optery.com/en/article/when-my-data-is-removed-f...

The organ donor database won't ask you every month to verify that you still want to do it - there is nil legitimate reason why this would be 'needed' in this case.

My impression there was that people where pretty conscious of opt-outs and wanting to manage them carefully, if only because the consequences of not doing so could be costly. We spent a lot of time talking about opt-outs and trying to honor them across different tools they used.

Many prospects came from purchased lists. Some were contracts where some other firm was specifically handling a marketing campaign for us, but others were clearly just purchased from a data broker who, presumably, filtered their data for people who indicated an interest in us.

When we asked how to handle these, the decision was that if you showed up on one of these lists, you had opted in. After all, that is what the broker told us.

This presents the first problem: If you buy data from a broker who you have not specifically engaged to campaign on your behalf, its a little gray what that data actually represents. This may be resolved by probing into to broker's collection and segmentation more, but as far as I can tell there's not a lot of incentive for the decision makers to care.

Anyways, I was not particularly thrilled with this approach, especially after working with some lists we purchased several times a year that always had a significant number of duplicates time after time. So I wrote that particular import to check for duplicates and filter them out.

Well, this worked great until the prospects, having no recent activity, grew stale and were cleaned from the system. Then when they showed up in the list again wouldn't match and get a fresh new subscription.

Which presents the second problem: If you don't hold on to their identifiable information, you cannot determine if they have previously requested to be removed from your offerings. So it may be dumb to have to opt out again, bit the alternative is to trust them not to use your information in the mean time.

This is just false. You can opt to keep e.g. a hash to check against future additions. Else you also would not be able to comply with the 12 month requirement.

Personal profiles are messy. People have different names, addresses, email, phone numbers, and different people sharing any of the aforementioned details. This is complicated enough with the raw data and unless you have a very simple profiles or opt-out rules, such as treating the entire household as one, you're going to need more than a simple hash to figure out if there is existing opt-out history.

Profiles may also need to be kept for transactional purposes. Presumably, data brokers and people who have only heard of you through brokers wouldn't have any transactional activity. But everyone else likely needs to deal with opt-outs on the distribution side, making opt-outs a solved problem that doesn't need to happen on intake.

So...sure, you can.

But I wouldn't hold your breath that this will be seen as a reasonable expectation for most developers or businesses to implement.

Why did you opt-out for VC? This seems to be a perfect candidate for a profitable and sustainable business because you don't really need a complicated infra or another 2 years to build an enterprise grade product. (unless I am missing something).

Thank you!

I wonder if you could build an opt-out service or protocol where you share a hash of your personal information instead of the info itself. With the hash you can identify matching records but you cannot create a record from the hash.

If Optery bought full datasets from databrokers, it could use a hash to identify matching records and submit those back to the brokers for opt-out (this wouldn't work for querying their public APIs...)

Probably not a feasible solution, but it's a fun possibility to think about!

I always chuckle when I see someone saying this. A buddy of mine (email marketer) tried to convince me that his 50 million large email database is "well protected" because they are using "industry standard md5 encryption". Of course its not encryption but rather hashing. He was so sure of his, erm, encryption, that he send me the whole database and said "here, crack it".

I found a large hacked Facebook email database online, run few python scripts to weed us most combinations of usernames (name+numbers, numbers+name, numbers+some random chars, etc) and some 1000 generic email domains names (like gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc). It took my regular i9 five days to go thru the whole 50M of md5s and compare each combination of usernames + domains names. Oh boy his shock when I returned some 70% "unencrypted" plain text emails back to him :)

Bottom line is, if there is some "industry standard" of hashing data, then there are ways to unhash it. Yes in many cases it may be in millions of years to circle thru all possibilities, but if your standard is first name + last name + email address (and all caps), then you can easily plug database of names and download millions of email records online and narrow down your hashing search greatly.

What would work would be a mandatory self block list (e.g. most EU countries have a 'do not call' opt-in list against telemarketers) and then the brokers have to check any new days against the hash of data points in this block list. But that requires government intervention, not startups that bandaid the problem.

Other people raised that concern when this appeared on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=27668140), and at the time, that’s indeed what the service did.

Even if one ignores intentional misuse, simple incompetence by a data broker seems like enough to cause a problem. It only takes one data broker to commingle fields from opt-out requests with existing data (and then share/sell/trade that existing data) for the opt-out fields to spread.

Based on how the underlying problem is presented in your own business model, it seems like this will happen regardless of whether a customers uses this service or not. Like conscripting a recruit into a losing battle (and arguably an unwinnable war) at cost to oneself with little specificity as to what qualifies as success.

Happy user of Optery here: you don't have to give Optery a whole lot of info. No SSNs or anything, just things they would search by to help you remove them. Are there fields for past addresses or people you lived with or past names you may have had? Sure. Do you have to fill them out? No. Are they provided in bulk to the data brokers? No.