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CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

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Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#51

Post by dpkirchner »

imiric wrote: post #34
omnimike wrote: post #24

I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.

I had a suspicion these services actually do more harm than good, even if they're well intentioned and not actively running a data collection scheme. But this is really a chicken-egg situation. How do you tell companies to delete your information without telling them what identifies your information? It's in these companies' interest to make this as difficult as possible, so a solution based on data hashes is highly…

Ideally a regulator would intervene, demanding that the data provider prove that each person in their database has explicitly opted in. That should be really easy for these companies -- it's just another record to include in our files. If they can't prove it, they must delete all related data.

Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#53

Post by [deleted] »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #9
carimura wrote: post #5

in the same category of "Best of the Internet", my favorite are the sites that claim every person on the planet has an "arrest record found" and you can see those records for $49. Or if you're that person, pay us $99 to remove it.

Well in the US we are on track for that to be true. But seriously - trading both sides (or, selling protection, as the case may be) is quite a profitable business model.

[deleted]

Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#54

Post by imiric »

akira2501 wrote: post #42
samstave wrote: post #12

So on a serious note, we were discussing this in another thread about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698546 and using that to automate the unsub from trackers: --> This really needs to be used to make a tool to automate all the "delete my data" requests and have users map out deleting their data/PII etc from data brokers to a git something and people can submit the recipes to delete your personal data. I jus…

Your data is sitting in an unencrypted excel spreadsheet somewhere as it moves between entities. Good luck. Your best bet is what the government minister mentioned elsewhere in this thread did. Generate noise. So much noise that none of your "PII" is even remotely accurate. You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate picture.

> You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate picture.

How do you reasonably do this? You would have to spend an incredible amount of effort creating fake data everywhere, without having any clue if what you're doing is even working. With new AI tools and technologies it's likely that someone with enough resources and motivation would be able to filter out the signal from the noise anyway.

I currently lean towards just minimizing my digital footprint, and carefully choosing the hardware and software I use. It still takes a lot of effort and sacrifice, and I don't expect this method to be foolproof, but at least it's reasonably manageable. At some point you do have to accept that absolute privacy is impossible in the modern world, even if you shun all technology.

Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#55

Post by godelski »

imiric wrote: post #34
omnimike wrote: post #24

I can’t give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with “delete me” requests from these “privacy” companies. The privacy company would literally take your personal info (name, email), and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the company to delete your account _even if you didn’t have one_.

I had a suspicion these services actually do more harm than good, even if they're well intentioned and not actively running a data collection scheme. But this is really a chicken-egg situation. How do you tell companies to delete your information without telling them what identifies your information? It's in these companies' interest to make this as difficult as possible, so a solution based on data hashes is highly…

My impression is that it depends what company you use. I don't really trust them but at the same time, there are a lot of other companies. All I can really say is that Optery will give you a free report with very minimal information and on a test they dug up far more information that I provided (the minimum).

Given that these companies, like Incogni and DeleteMe, are now sponsoring big time YouTubers I'd imagine they are soon going to get a much closer look. At minimum, they are making far more people aware of the situation and data out there. Even though many of the VPNs fall far short of the promises, it is setting a strong signal that people care about privacy and entering the public lexicon is the first step. I hope these can be a catalyst towards more state or federal privacy protection.

Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#56

Post by anigbrowl »

ummonk wrote: post #21
anigbrowl wrote: post #16

You see this a lot these days (though I suppose it's just more visible now). Another example is people selling political t-shirts (many offensive or obnoxious) to both sides of a partisan divide.

I don’t think that’s bad unless the seller claims to be representing the causes they’re selling for.

They do via their advertising copy, which strongly implies it. The productization of opinion is a Bad Thing in my view, for the simple reason that it becomes profitable to stoke conflict and commercial entities are therefore incentivized to do so.

Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#59

Post by Terr_ »

sangnoir wrote: post #32
omoikane wrote: post #28

I wonder if there are reputation protection companies that try a different strategy: for every user that requests their service, prop up thousands of fake identities with the user's name, but each with some inconsistent profile that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the original user. So if someone search for a person, their search results would be flooded with garbage. Since it seems very difficult to try t…

The former British prime minister executed a similar technique to hide his scandal by releasing search-engine chaff. He had a press interview where he claimed one of his hobbies was painting miniature red buses, and the scandal he was hiding was false and distateful ads on a (real) red bus as part of a campaign for Brexit.

TIL:

> For example, the disaster surrounding London’s new Routemaster city buses disappeared into the depths of the web after Johnson made completely nonsensical statements in the media about building model buses from wine crates. Coverage of these statements triggered a flood of search queries on Google that displaced negative search queries and Google Suggest results related to Boris Johnson.

> Research showed that before the wine crate buses interview, 100% of Google Suggest and search results on page one that were displayed in connection with Boris Johnson had negative connotations. After the interview, it was only 20%.

> Additionally, when news broke that British Government members had flouted Covid guidelines to meet for wine and cheese during a ‘work meeting’, it was seized upon by the British press as “partygate.” Soon after, Johnson was quoted in interview saying, “I don’t work from home. The cheese will distract you.” As a result, negative coverage of the British Government’s party-gate incidents were glossed over by search suggestions and results, and keywords with negative connotations no longer appeared in Google Suggest prompts.

Source: https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/cheese-wine-and-whistles-m...

Re: CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-search firms

#60

Post by LoganDark »

WhatsName wrote: post #8
actualwitch wrote: post #2

Apparently it is also the same service that Mozilla Monitor uses, as per ToS. Big yikes. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/subscription...

That is probably the bigger story right here. Not trusting scammy businesses is easy. Getting fooled by big name like Mozilla a different story.

Mozilla has never been trustworthy. The Mozilla Foundation is probably what most people are confusing it for, the nonprofit that actually cares, but Mozilla the corporation just wants money.
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