[HN Gopher] CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozen...
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       CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-
       search firms
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 118 points
       Date   : 2024-03-14 21:17 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (krebsonsecurity.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (krebsonsecurity.com)
        
       | actualwitch wrote:
       | Apparently it is also the same service that Mozilla Monitor uses,
       | as per ToS. Big yikes.
       | 
       | https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/subscription...
        
         | Dalewyn wrote:
         | Considering how much Firefox phones home, I daresay Microsoft
         | and Google are more private than Mozilla because they're at
         | least god damn honest about their practices.
        
           | lagrange77 wrote:
           | God damn honest is maybe slightly exaggerated.
        
           | actualwitch wrote:
           | > Microsoft and Google are more private than Mozilla
           | 
           | Having used an app firewall, I have determined this to be
           | false.
        
           | LegibleCrimson wrote:
           | I don't understand the logic. They're more private for
           | admitting that they don't respect your privacy?
        
             | Dalewyn wrote:
             | Microsoft and Google don't even try to hide the fact they
             | will siphon your data, whether you like it or not. You can
             | turn off some of the egregious siphoning, but that's about
             | it.
             | 
             | Mozilla meanwhile claims to be the champion of digital
             | privacy, marketing Firefox as _the_ private browser of
             | choice along with a host of ostensibly privacy products
             | such as VPN, all the while also siphoning data. Turning it
             | _all_ off requires digging deep into about:config.
             | 
             | One group is honest (or at least relatively more so) about
             | what they do. The other entity is a pathological liar led
             | by a queen on Google's leash for controlled opposition
             | purposes. As such, I daresay Microsoft and Google are more
             | private than Mozilla because you know what you sign up for.
        
         | WhatsName wrote:
         | That is probably the bigger story right here. Not trusting
         | scammy businesses is easy. Getting fooled by big name like
         | Mozilla a different story.
        
           | actualwitch wrote:
           | They should have definitely done a more thorough due
           | diligence before partnering with them.
        
       | DANmode wrote:
       | Now do DuckDuckGo!
        
       | alexnewman wrote:
       | sigh, i never trusted these sites and it never achieved anything
       | for me.
        
         | ghaff wrote:
         | One redeeming thing about the monetization of the Internet is
         | that these deep web people search sites are generally not free
         | any longer. There was a time when, for free, you could
         | basically search a person who didn't have an especially common
         | name with maybe a couple for tidbits about them and could you
         | find a huge part of their life history and, of course, info
         | like birthdays.
        
       | carimura wrote:
       | in the same category of "Best of the Internet", my favorite are
       | the sites that claim every person on the planet has an "arrest
       | record found" and you can see those records for $49. Or if you're
       | that person, pay us $99 to remove it.
        
         | fnordpiglet wrote:
         | Well in the US we are on track for that to be true.
         | 
         | But seriously - trading both sides (or, selling protection, as
         | the case may be) is quite a profitable business model.
        
       | wly_cdgr wrote:
       | Takes one to know one!
        
       | hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
       | Sell the disease, and then sell the cure. Capitalism at its
       | finest!
        
       | samstave wrote:
       | So on a serious note, we were discussing this in another thread
       | about:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698546
       | 
       | and using that to automate the unsub from trackers:
       | 
       | -->
       | 
       | This really needs to be used to make a tool to automate all the
       | "delete my data" requests and have users map out deleting their
       | data/PII etc from data brokers to a git something and people can
       | submit the recipes to delete your personal data.
       | 
       | I just did so on one of the more terrible ones yesterday - and
       | the dark pattern was it would put you in captcha-loops... and
       | youd have to reload/retry several times before stopped asking you
       | firehydrant bus traffic motorcycle crosswalk over and over.
       | 
       | but to save unsub/delete me scripts with this would be nifty.
       | 
       | A recipe bounty would be neat - for example - Optery found me in
       | more PII dbs than I expected - and it would be cool for people to
       | see which brokers they are found in and there is a bounty list
       | for all the brokers people are finding for someone to create a
       | Delete-Me for each thing, so that one hopefully has the help of
       | many to navigate the minefield of dark patterns in such.
        
       | anigbrowl wrote:
       | You see this a lot these days (though I suppose it's just more
       | visible now). Another example is people selling political
       | t-shirts (many offensive or obnoxious) to both sides of a
       | partisan divide.
        
         | ummonk wrote:
         | I don't think that's bad unless the seller claims to be
         | representing the causes they're selling for.
        
         | lotsofpulp wrote:
         | In the US, I feel like I only see one side buying merchandise.
         | Especially offensive and obnoxious merchandise.
        
       | j-bos wrote:
       | This kind of thing feels better left to trusted 1st parties,
       | oneself. Link to a list of data broker opt out
       | methods:https://github.com/yaelwrites/Big-Ass-Data-Broker-Opt-
       | Out-Li...
        
       | j-bos wrote:
       | Indusrty connections aside, it's not a good look that thaf the
       | CEO of a privacy company did not register domains with some form
       | of Whois privacy.
        
         | SkyPuncher wrote:
         | Why? I don't understand this at all?
         | 
         | It's largely unnecessary for corporate owned domains. You know
         | who owns it from the website they publish.
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | Some TLDs prohibit Whois privacy altogether; this stance isn't
         | maintainable globally.
        
       | omnimike wrote:
       | I can't give specifics, I know someone who had to deal with
       | "delete me" requests from these "privacy" companies. The privacy
       | company would literally take your personal info (name, email),
       | and _email it to every company they could think of_ asking the
       | company to delete your account _even if you didn't have one_.
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | It's like the old days of Ironport. Ironport built a rack-mount
       | spam filtering appliance for business. They also built a rack-
       | mount spam-sending appliance for business. That blew their
       | reputation.
        
       | SteveGerencser wrote:
       | A not-so-secret dirty little secret is that many of the
       | reputation management agencies also own many of the public
       | records websites that publish mug shots, court records, and so
       | on. When you hire them to remove that information from the
       | internet it puts you into a cycle of being removed from one or
       | two of their website and added to something else.
       | 
       | You end up in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Complete with
       | monthly fees.
        
         | greggsy wrote:
         | It's racketeering
        
       | omoikane wrote:
       | I wonder if there are reputation protection companies that try a
       | different strategy: for every user that requests their service,
       | prop up thousands of fake identities with the user's name, but
       | each with some inconsistent profile that are almost, but not
       | quite, entirely unlike the original user. So if someone search
       | for a person, their search results would be flooded with garbage.
       | 
       | Since it seems very difficult to try to get a leaked identity
       | removed, maybe try to hide a tree in the forest?
        
         | runjake wrote:
         | Reputation management companies do this. It's normally referred
         | to as "disinformation".
        
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       (page generated 2024-03-14 23:00 UTC)