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We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

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Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#21

Post by dkiebd »

yard2010 wrote: post #20
anonzzzies wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am happy I can export my data with google but boy it is annoying to do.

Those pricks throttled the download to 30 kbps. When I tried to download with aria, after a few failed attempts (not straight forward ofc) I got a message saying I can only download it 6 times, and that I should send a new request. This is evil.

I have downloaded my data with google takeout dozens of times without a single issue. Speed was very high (maximum possible for my connection) and never had a download error. I’m talking about multi-gigabyte exports of my email and my drive.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#22

Post by benjiro »

Here is another offender "VanceAI" ...

Try deleting your account with the delete button. Nothing happens. Everything on the site perfect, just that Delete button is broken (and the request times out).

But wait, you can send a ticket. Get response days later that it is marked as resolved.

You go back to the site ... O, i am still logged in with my old session.

Then you see your email: deleted_2544642405_blabla@gmail.com

So fake "delete" by simply putting a deleted and some timestamp before your email address, while keeping your other data.

O and the Delete button is also not fixed ;)

Companies really only seem to learn with some hefty GDPR fines.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#25

Post by johnisgood »

725686 wrote: post #24

Deleting your personal data is just an illusion. Companies just mark your data as "deleted", but keep the data anyway, in the best of cases just for auditing purposes. You will never, ever, be able to delete your data. Stop dreaming.

Exactly, that is what I have been saying for ages.

People think they can delete their messages on say, Discord. I tell them it is not deleted, just marked deleted. The data is still there.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#26

Post by temp0826 »

tracker1 wrote: post #23

Has anyone used deleteme or a similar service? What was your experience, and do you feel it was worth it? It feels like such a cat and mouse game, that should be easy to automate, that said, I'm not sure it'll be effective.

I have (optery, not deleteme) and I think it's good to use at least once to clear out a buildup of your info out there. I couldn't justify paying for it monthly but if I was a semi-important person it might be worth it, or at least 1 or 2 months out of the year. Many brokers aren't responsive and it takes forever or never actually happens, and stuff definitely creeps back, but from what I can tell there is a heck of a lot less of me out there.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#27

Post by JoshTriplett »

725686 wrote: post #24

Deleting your personal data is just an illusion. Companies just mark your data as "deleted", but keep the data anyway, in the best of cases just for auditing purposes. You will never, ever, be able to delete your data. Stop dreaming.

Don't stop dreaming. Keep fighting.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#28

Post by anonzzzies »

dkiebd wrote: post #21
yard2010 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those pricks throttled the download to 30 kbps. When I tried to download with aria, after a few failed attempts (not straight forward ofc) I got a message saying I can only download it 6 times, and that I should send a new request. This is evil.

I have downloaded my data with google takeout dozens of times without a single issue. Speed was very high (maximum possible for my connection) and never had a download error. I’m talking about multi-gigabyte exports of my email and my drive.

I have 900gb in my account and on my 500mbps connection it took forever to download, not because of my speed but because of theirs and it just 'connection failed' at 80% many many many times and asking to relogin. It should be illegal. Not supporting just wget -c (you can use it with a lot of trouble/hacks and it's not reliable which defeats the point) is just clearly done to annoy you into not doing it.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#29

Post by martin-t »

Here's how the law should work.

You own the data you produce, both intentionally (writing, making videos) and unintentionally ("metadata", logs). You have to explicitly give others permission to use that data for any purpose where money exchanges hands (and many where it does not). You can limit or revoke the permission at any time.

Re: We caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online

#30

Post by Someone »

cnst wrote: post #15
jFriedensreich wrote: post #11

And as important: making it impossible or very hard and annoying to export and own your data.

Some companies somehow blatantly get away with not allowing any export at all. For example, Amazon eero, the overpriced WiFi router that doesn't even work (without phoning back home and having an app installed on your phone). They had an outage like a year ago, and during said outage, all your existing ad blocking stopped working, too, even if you never rebooted during the outage, and even though said blocking is sup…

> Does anyone know how exactly does Amazon get away with not providing data export for their eero product?

I checked eero.com. It seems info about the product other than “it’s a secure WiFi router that doesn’t require users to manage it” is in the videos, if it is on that site at all, but I couldn’t get the videos to play, so I may be wrong, but why would a WiFi router have personal data on the device?

It will have the username and password at your internet provider, but what else does it store?

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