Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Data Removal Services or just Google myself and remove my own data (startrek.website)

submitted 11 hours ago by nagaram@startrek.website to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I have been upset recently by a colleague googling me and found my full name on several 3D Printing sites I used to use. I guess I signed in with my google account and so it just pops up now that I've deleted all my socials.

I have a fairly uncommon first + last combo so the cursory google search and then sending "delete my data" emails from the email they know from the 3 data brokers who popped up seems good and now just my linkedin is showing (this is the ideal state).

Is there more I'm missing? should I go for a deleteme subscription in case I missed anything? Other sources I should go to?

I really don't mind sending my own emails to these pests, but is that really all the services are doing? Or is there a backend I'm missing?

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[–] nagaram@startrek.website 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Most of the address and numbers they do have are off or old.

I moved through a lot of places in college and one of those 5 are usually what shows up.

Now that I think about it I did used to sign up for a bunch of religious mailing lists before I would leave an apartment because I thought it was funny.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemm.ee 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Yeah, sounds like you had awful digital hygiene. Not that it helps to have good digital hygeine like I did. All it takes is the majority of people's opinions becoming sufficiently extremist for your life to be irrevocably ruined.

Unfortunately, emailing people won't actually get your data removed. They are supposed to, legally speaking, but they have already sold your data to those who maliciously make use of it. That's the only reason they let that law be in place, because once they sold data, the new owner is not obligated to delete their copies of that data. And they sell this data multiple times, meaning there are now countless owners of data about your personal history. Not just for advertising, either. It is increasingly obvious it's being used to sway elections. If you value democracy, get an ad-blocker and refuse to disable it for any reason.