
Ask HN: User Privacy Litigation? - d--b
Hi, it seems that these days, you can&#x27;t buy anything on the internet without creating an account that asks for your email address. When I do this, I religiously make sure I uncheck the &quot;do you want to receive news about xxx&quot; button. But apparently, this gets ignored quite a lot, and I end up receiving tons of crap in my mailbox.<p>My question is: is there a point in trying to litigate this? I mean, can I get some compensation from people spamming me while I didn&#x27;t want to? Obviously this is not worth going through a lawyer, but if I can automate the filing of the complain, and hope to make $50 each time I get an email I didn&#x27;t solicit, that&#x27;d be definitely worth the trouble.<p>Similarly, I often close accounts, but I&#x27;m pretty sure that no company out there actually deletes my data. Is there a way to enforce this?
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Nextgrid
Are you in the US or in Europe? I'll answer with an EU perspective since I'm
more familiar with the situation there.

The "best" course of action is to file complaints with your country's privacy
regulator. I say "best" in quotes because by the looks of it nobody actually
gives a shit about enforcing the GDPR and the regulation is flawed in the
sense that you can't actually sue a company for violating it.

In order to file a complaint you must first get in touch with the offending
company, raise your concerns, and if they don't give you a satisfactory
response _only then_ can you actually raise a formal complaint with the
regulator. Of course, the problem here is that even if they stop spamming you
it doesn't guarantee they've actually stopped spamming everyone else, and you
can't tell unless you take time to manually create new accounts to prove
whether they're still in violation.

Unfortunately there isn't really a way to get money out of them for their
violations. Best way is to name & shame, refuse to do business with them
and/or hit them where it hurts by redirecting any further spam/marketing to
someone high up in the company to annoy them directly and waste their precious
time.

