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Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

theintercept.com

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Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#151

Post by inopinatus »

Sujan wrote: post #126
latexr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And bye to some Hacker News points. The lowest score you can get on a comment is -4 ( https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo... ). > This will get nicely downvoted I suspect. Complaining about downvotes before they happen is more likely to get you downvotes than anything else you wrote in that post.

Oh, I did not know that. Thanks. A bit less "aversion" then for the future. My last sentence was triggered by having written a comment on another comment first, which insantly went to -3 (but later kinda recovered), so I almost didn't write this one, just not to have to get the negative feeling. It's a nice Sunday after all.

Don't sweat it. None of us will lay upon our death-beds wishing we had scored more points in an internet popularity contest.

Sometimes a downvote is because you made a salient and equitable point that threatened someone's cookie jar, an angry conservative enraged that someone expressed a progressive view (and vice versa), some humourless bastard who failed or declined to recognise what you thought to be in obvious jest, or a narcissistic asshole incensed that you dared observe their poor behaviour. These you may consider to be upvotes in disguise.

Notwithstanding all this, I suspect you will also discover there's a strong current of support for those surgically dismantling yellow journalism.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#152

Post by Nextgrid »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #124
Nextgrid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting quite tired of the "small businesses" argument about the GDPR. It's starting to become the "think of the children" equivalent but for data protection. Would you also be against food safety or physical product regulations (ban of leaded solder or other toxic chemicals)? After all, those can and do affect small restaurants and other businesses as well.

In general, no! But if someone proposed that all restaurants should perform chemical analyses on random samples of their food to check for spoilage and cross-contamination, I would have very similar questions about where the taco shack down the street is supposed to find an affordable chemical lab. Making it "instant and pretty for you to look at all the data" is a large, expensive endeavor and I don't see why it's n…

> But if someone proposed that all restaurants should perform chemical analyses on random samples of their food

To be fair, people propose things all the time. It only becomes law when enough people agree that it is needed. That process isn't always perfect but in general it works.

The reason we don't have a "General Food Safety Regulation" is that the current situation is good enough, either because the existing regulations are sufficient or that the industry can self-regulate (as it's usually bad for business to poison your customers). As a result, in most Western countries, you can be confident that any business that sells food will not poison you.

If we suddenly had a food poisoning epidemic because all vendors were unscrupulous and selling spoiled food, I would totally be in favour of stronger regulations even if it means small taco shacks can't compete. Having to go to a farther/more expensive place that can afford such checks is a price I (and I suspect most other people) am willing to pay if it means not getting food poisoning.

The GDPR came to be because it was determined that the existing data protection regulations were inadequate and the industry demonstrated that can't be trusted to self-regulate.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#153

Post by charcircuit »

mirntyfirty wrote: post #40
the_duke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the ridiculously annoying process for ending your Prime subscription also just accidental, bad UX? It miraculously uses very similar patterns.

True, and the ridiculously easy process to accidentally sign up for a subscription to each of your smallest of purchases.

It makes sense that Amazon would dedicate resources to making the sign up processes easier because it actually makes them more money compared to making the cancelling easier. That would be a waste of time to work on.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#154

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

yoaviram wrote: post #92

I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org, a service which automates the process of sending data requests (it's free, open source and were a registered charity). What is described in this article is, unfortunately, a common case with some big tech companies. I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's dark patterns all the way down. The…

"I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens."

Another idea for an experiment is to send 600 data deletion requests from 600 unique computer users simultaneously to a single data broker and see what happens. If the escalation process is automated when the data broker fails to respond, the most interesting results IMO will be from the data protection agency. It is difficult to ignore 600 cases. It also tests the broker's and agency's systems. In theory these systems should be able to scale. If they cannot, then it is arguable the broker and/or agency is making an assumption that privacy is something that only some people, a relatively small number, care about. At the very least there would be a question of whether these systems are adequate for what they are supposed to do.

This experiment might be thought of like a petition that requires a minimum number of signatures. What is the purpose behind having petitions and minimums for the number of people who sign them. Here, a minimum number of people must sign on to make a data deletion request before the bundle of requests are actually sent.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#155

Post by mschuster91 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #100
mschuster91 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That last part is pretty dumb! It's not just dumb, the whole process is at the edges of the law. Art. 12 GDPR mandates "intelligible and easily accessible form", which navigating through a number of pages, wait times and finally a 74-link download is certainly not fulfilling. The gold standard, for what it's worth, is a direct link from the privacy policy page in the section that details GDPR subject rights to the…

This is yet another example of how the GDPR is bad law. "Intelligible and easily accessible" is way too vague. Are 74 zip files intelligible and easily accessible? Of course not! I don't want to pull 74 links! Is 1 zip file intelligible and easily accessible? Of course not! Way too big to pull in over my low-bandwidth connection. Are zip files intelligible and easily accessible? Of course not! Not everyone understand…

That is how laws are usually written. Hashing out the details will be done by the courts.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#157

Post by inopinatus »

gdulli wrote: post #67
gorgoiler wrote: post #35

HN probably aren't required to let me download my data, but it sure would be nice. Does that option exist, on this site?

I consider HN to be one of the most user hostile sites there is regarding user content because they don't allow deleting comments. They force people into making a manual request. Which means the feature essentially doesn't exist for casual use.

The right to be forgotten is in tension with the need to preserve public discourse.

Nevertheless I have deleted many comments within the available regret window. I do wonder whether they're actually removed from storage, or merely elided by software.

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#158

Post by vmception »

yoaviram wrote: post #92

I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org, a service which automates the process of sending data requests (it's free, open source and were a registered charity). What is described in this article is, unfortunately, a common case with some big tech companies. I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's dark patterns all the way down. The…

Can we have a non profit for this? I think one of the issues for getting tax exempt status is designating a “charitable class” of people that it would be helping

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#159

Post by [deleted] »

oauea wrote: post #131
rdiddly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do it if you know how to use an API. See the 'API' link at the bottom of the page.

Will this include all logs & data that aren't publicly visible? The HN software employs various dark patterns such as shadowbanning & rate limiting accounts, all this info would have to be disclosed to, in addition to any internal communication about your account.

[deleted]

Re: Getting my personal data from Amazon was weeks of confusion and tedium

#160

Post by verve_rat »

vmception wrote: post #158
yoaviram wrote: post #92

I'm one of the creators of YourDigitalRights.org, a service which automates the process of sending data requests (it's free, open source and were a registered charity). What is described in this article is, unfortunately, a common case with some big tech companies. I've recently started an experiment to send data deletion requests to 600 data brokers and document what happens. It's dark patterns all the way down. The…

Can we have a non profit for this? I think one of the issues for getting tax exempt status is designating a “charitable class” of people that it would be helping

Um, they are a charity?
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