Thread locked because it's off-topic to our community. (Although there were some interesting discussions, thanks.)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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How about passing a law that makes it illegal to sell any of someone's data without express written consent for each sale.
And it’s explicitly opt-in, not opt-out.
It's argued it already is opt-in. That's the 'Agree' button.
I just got a text from my cell service saying they changed the terms of service, and I agree if I continue to use the service and privacy notive. Not even an agree button anymore just a FYI
Yep. "You must consent otherwise you're opting out of everything in existence and must go live in a cave." It's not consent if they didn't even ask, and it's not consent if you want to say no but there's literally no other option in existence. Just opt out of the whole internet and mobile phones I guess.
I'm glad we have options here in Europe. Not many, but there are at least 3 mobile and internet providers at my location, so whenever one tries to pull something like this, I just call them that I'm switching providers. I've netted a permanent 50% discount and even managed to convince them to keep the discount at my old flat (which was a student's shared flat where my friends still live) and also transfer it to my new home I have with my partner.
As far as I know, they can give you massive discounts, but you have to be willing to go through hell and run into a good call operator.
But also, that was like 10 years ago and I didn't need to do it again. I can imagine that in the age of clankers, things may be a lot different (also with the transition to late-stage capitalism and enshittification).
Dark patterns and dark intentions
Kinda what GDPR tried and now the internet is almost unusable because greedy companies put cookie banners on every fucking site
What is there to be worried about? We just want to collect valid data for our operations and to share with our 21,678 partners. It's basically legitimate interest.
It's financial interest that we as users should be earning
At least a portion
And what most websites doing is actually not allowed according to the GDPR, it's supposed to be a one-click opt-out. Unfortunately, the relevant court is in Ireland, which is the EU's hub for US big tech.
and it made the situation several orders of magnitude worse.
before you just used your favorite plugin and be done with it. you can't do that anymore, because you now have to allow for a cookie saying you don't want their cookies and you have to trust them to respect that. if that cookie is not there, they will bother you for the rest of their lives.
that is ignoring that you would have to individually opt out of every single one of their one million legitimate business partners.
i am using the ublock origin to block the dialogs, but it unfortunately works highly unreliably.
Yeah this is just whack-a-mole.
Multibillion dollar business idea: shitload of shell companies that keep your data constantly in circulation, undeletable. Subscription service that just re-sends your data to companies after deletion.
Multibillion dollar business idea
cool idea, except i am pretty sure you are late to the market and someone is already doing that 😂
And with a required minimum percentage of those data sales going to the individual.
Why is this in programmer humour?
Why is this funny?
woosh
/s
Something I never see mentioned in discussions about privacy and "deleting your data": all of these websites store information in databases, and databases are (usually) backed up on a regular schedule. This means that the databases in their entirety are written to tape or optical drive or whatever format, in a form where they could be remounted/restored in their entirety if necessary. Even if your data is "deleted" from the current active instance of a database, no company goes into all (or any) of the backed-up copies of that database to delete that same data there.
So it is impossible in a practical sense to truly delete your personal data, regardless of what any law says. It's not even possible to make it inaccessible to AI, since most likely when websites sell their data to AI companies, they are selling database backups that predate AI.
This along with the present "child protection" efforts around the world doesnt really target the underlying fascist mess which encapsulates the digital sphere. Deletion like this is a move forward, dont take me wrong - but in a way it is a strategic diversion for fascists to more discretely sell your data.
At this point I'm seriously considering just running something like openclaw with a basic model to just keep clicking on random stuff and browsing the internet, changing personalities each day at random, to flood my IPs data.
that already exists, without any LLM. just an extension to the web browser: https://adnauseam.io/
Set it to not click every single link, which is its default state or else they'll catch on and just invalidate everything that you submit.
They will just offshore the servers and nothing changes... Like the Do Not Call list, looks great on paper, I'm still getting calls from spoofed numbers from abroad. US/California law means nothing in India.
How about letting me sell my own data for my own financial gain. That way I can sell the parts of my life I want to sell
Grant Certiorari
Nice lawyer joke there.
Yeah, that's never getting deleted - it just sets a flag that 'this account is more interesting'