Item — HN Reader

> "He said users can visit a page in Facebook’s help center, which provides links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to Facebook."

The link provided is: https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_perma....

LOL. The amount of personal information requested at those "opt-out" links is suspicious and/or ironic.

Examples of information requested to "opt-out" of the USA partners' reach include: Social Security Number (!), date of birth, "all variations" of full name, all recent mailing addresses, ... (!!)

2 comments

I thought that at first too. But they want to make sure they're removing the correct person. I don't know how else they could do it.

They're surveillance companies, so they could probably figure that out based on device fingerprinting if they wanted to. Or they could just remove every record matching the request, since no sane person actually wants to be in their database. But of course neither of those things will ever happen, for obvious reasons.

they could make it opt-in from the beginning, but that'll never happen

I like it when a company whose sole business model depends on pervasive surveillance states "we take privacy very seriously"...