
Show HN: Simple Opt Out – Makes it easier to opt out of data sharing - troydavis
http://simpleoptout.com/
======
nerpderp82
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.

~~~
perl4ever
There's something called DMAchoice that lets you opt out of a lot of junk
mail. It's at [https://dmachoice.thedma.org/](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.

~~~
nostromo
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.

~~~
jrowley
I think you are looking for this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zubmkHMRP3U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zubmkHMRP3U)

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KingMachiavelli
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.

~~~
aynawn
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.

~~~
cjmoran
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...

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squegles
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](https://marketingreportoptout.visa.com/OPTOUT/request.do)

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

[https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/03/12/distrust-
symant...](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/03/12/distrust-symantec-tls-
certificates/)

------
alexfringes
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?

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physcab
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.

~~~
__blockcipher__
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...)

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zxcvbn4038
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.

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a-dub
[http://optout.aboutads.info](http://optout.aboutads.info)

one button. over a hundred opt out cookies.

~~~
jammygit
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

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jrowley
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!

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colordrops
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.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Just like the Do Not Track header?

~~~
colordrops
That's not a legal requirement or a database.

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abtom
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.

~~~
alkonaut
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!

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troydavis
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.

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

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fyfy18
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.

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

~~~
troydavis
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...](https://github.com/troy/simpleoptout/commit/1f4661d3139f8cb45c0aeab53fdfccbca2a49fcd)).

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

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

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

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SubiculumCode
Dark UIs are all over opt out pages in general.

~~~
walterbell
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?

------
ykevinator
Anyone know if ublock does this for you?

~~~
troydavis
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](http://simpleoptout.com/#additions-and-updates)

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

