Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/04/new-york-times-writer-is-shock.html
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So you don’t have to read the article
Sift, which determines consumer trustworthiness, asks you to email privacy@sift.com. You’ll then have to fill out a Google form.
Zeta Global, which identifies people with a lot of money to spend, lets you request your data via an online form.
Retail Equation, which helps companies such as Best Buy and Sephora decide whether to accept or reject a product return, will send you a report if you email returnactivityreport@theretailequation.com.
Riskified, which develops fraud scores, will tell you what data it has gathered on your possible crookedness if you contact privacy@riskified.com.
Kustomer, a database company that provides what it calls “unprecedented insight into a customer’s past experiences and current sentiment,” tells people to email privacy@kustomer.com.
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What kinda stuff does BB know about us? (Note: this is not a request to auto-dox myself.)
Broadly speaking, if I were one of the Head Mutants, what kind of information could I dredge up on one of the peons comment-cows wretched annoyances vibrant members of the BoingBoing community?
Serious and earnest question, not a prelude to a gotcha or a rant. (That I know of.)
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what prevents someone from filling out the form on behalf of someone else (perhaps an “enemy”) and gaining all sorts of info on them?
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Dunno, but another good question is “what happens when I can buy my enemy’s deets for $4.99 with promo code BIGBROTHER”?
That might actually be what gets something done about all this, which makes me wonder how long the data-barons will be able to resist the temptation to turn this kind of thing into a retail consumer product.
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Not that shocked, TBH. Yeah, it sucks, but hey, the internet! Sigh.
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Of course requesting your file from Sift probably sets a “Privacy Freak” flag.
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I’m pretty sure abusive exes are finding that out right now all over the world.
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Hacker News has a decent discussion of this (of obtaining your or somebody else’s score).
If you don’t want to read that thread, then the one big takeaway for me was that the act of requesting your data probably provides them with more data and you confirms the data they do have.
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That was my first thought. I ran into one of these awhile back with completely wrong data and when confronted they asked me to provide corrections. (Fuck no!)
Makes you wonder if they add bad info on people that aren’t fully populated just to get them to cough up the real deets. 
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I sense a great disturbance in the force, like a mass migration to California where a legal request can be made to delete these files!
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A wonderful driving trollies opportunity lost.
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The following is copied from the BB ToS, but first, note that my copy of Privacy Badger informed me that it “detected 70 potential trackers on this page.”
Oh, happy day!
YOU GRANT US THE RIGHT TO USE YOUR STUFF
By submitting User Content, you grant us an unlimited license to use your content in any way we choose. This includes creative uses such as republishing the work on our ad-supported Website, forums, and elsewhere, and practical uses such as copying your content to make back ups of it, displaying it on the website, and distributing and modifying it as needed to make the Site work.
Because our servers are located remotely, and because User Content is retained indefinitely, you grant us these rights worldwide and irrevocably, and agree that we don’t owe you royalties for any use of your content based on these rights.
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Excellent, you da real MVP.
My fear on this is that requesting one’s data may also create additional data for them to track, however finding out what they do have might be worth it though if there’s nothing i can do about it maybe not? It may just give me even more anxiety and existential dread
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Usually, we ALL know that!
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So how do I get them delete my file?/s
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So how do I get them to delete my file?
By having your local parliament make it illegal to do otherwise. Nothing short of the force of law will fix this.
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It’s times like these I wish I had been born into the Australian bush with no social security number, no DNA, no irises, no fingerprints, no distinguishing characteristics of any kind.
But then I realize everyone in society is trying to find a way to monopolize my existence anyway and there is no way to escape this hell
