[HN Gopher] CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozen...
___________________________________________________________________
CEO of data privacy company Onerep.com founded dozens of people-
search firms
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 563 points
Date : 2024-03-14 21:17 UTC (1 days 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.
| rrix2 wrote:
| > The other entity is a pathological liar led by a queen
| on Google's leash for controlled opposition purposes
|
| Oh come on, Baker was around since the Netscape days. You
| just don't like her cause she was a Suit, and that's
| fine. But except for a bunch of engineers Netscape had a
| bunch of Suits. It's not some conspiracy that a Suit is
| still running things.
| LegibleCrimson wrote:
| I don't think that's what the word "private" means. It's
| not the same thing as "honest".
|
| Compare the data. Mozilla may be less honest than Google
| and Microsoft (a premise I also disagree with), but they
| are demonstrably harvesting much less data.
| st3fan wrote:
| "siphoning data" is a pretty bold claim. you can't just
| type those words without being very specific.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| For Google and Microsoft? That's literally their business
| model.
| reciprocity wrote:
| This is ridiculous. Firefox doesn't beat around the bush
| with telemetry and makes this clear when you install a
| new copy of it to your machine. It also does not require
| "messing around in about:config", this option is
| presented to the user in Settings, in plainly stated
| language and in a central location (unlike other
| browsers, particularly Edge, and Chrome, with privacy
| related settings in 40 different drop down menus).
| charcircuit wrote:
| The amount of "phoning home" is not correlated to how bad an
| app is for the user's privacy.
| 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.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Mozilla has never been trustworthy. The Mozilla Foundation is
| probably what most people are confusing it for, the nonprofit
| that actually cares, but Mozilla the corporation just wants
| money.
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| You're partly right. MoCo only cares about money. MoFo
| though is/was Mitchell's political slush fund. TBD how
| things will shake out once there is a permanent CEO but
| Mitchell is remaining chair of the foundation. She's also
| got really deep ties to how MoCo is funded (google) so it's
| likely the new CEO will be her puppet.
| apimade wrote:
| In my opinion, this is a failure of due diligence on behalf of
| the Mozilla Corporation. I'm sure their legal team is jumping
| into incident response mode right now.
|
| I think this is one of the problems of organisations not doing
| anything themselves, and offloading responsibility and
| liability to both external partners.
|
| If you trusted Mozilla Monitor with your personal data, their
| legal contact information is listed on their terms page:
| https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/subscription...
|
| The same terms page you agreed to which both limited their
| liability to $500, and granted them indemnification from
| liability.
| DANmode wrote:
| Now do DuckDuckGo!
| rexreed wrote:
| Tell me more
| DANmode wrote:
| Gabriel Weinberg, DDG's solo-founder, previously co-founded
| NamesDatabase, acquired in 2006.
| 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!
| jval43 wrote:
| _rent_ the cure. FTFY.
| geraldhh wrote:
| big pharma entered the chat
| 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.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Your data is sitting in an unencrypted excel spreadsheet
| somewhere as it moves between entities. Good luck.
|
| Your best bet is what the government minister mentioned
| elsewhere in this thread did. Generate noise. So much noise
| that none of your "PII" is even remotely accurate.
|
| You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate
| picture.
| imiric wrote:
| > You can't hide, but you can paint an incredibly inaccurate
| picture.
|
| How do you reasonably do this? You would have to spend an
| incredible amount of effort creating fake data everywhere,
| without having any clue if what you're doing is even working.
| With new AI tools and technologies it's likely that someone
| with enough resources and motivation would be able to filter
| out the signal from the noise anyway.
|
| I currently lean towards just minimizing my digital
| footprint, and carefully choosing the hardware and software I
| use. It still takes a lot of effort and sacrifice, and I
| don't expect this method to be foolproof, but at least it's
| reasonably manageable. At some point you do have to accept
| that absolute privacy is impossible in the modern world, even
| if you shun all technology.
| NSMutableSet wrote:
| >How do you reasonably do this? You would have to spend an
| incredible amount of effort creating fake data everywhere,
| without having any clue if what you're doing is even
| working. With new AI tools and technologies
|
| You answered your own question.
| imiric wrote:
| Not really. AI wasn't an option until very recently. How
| was this managed before?
|
| And even with AI, it would take a considerable amount of
| effort to flood all public channels with fake data. Do
| you do this via APIs for every service? Do you generate
| image and video as well? You would still have no idea
| whether your efforts are actually working.
|
| Not to mention that using this approach contributes noise
| to an already noisy medium. Your fight with an imaginary
| enemy worsens the online experience for everyone else. We
| have enough junk on the internet as it is.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >How was this managed before?
|
| By being rich enough to hire dedicated companies who
| provide this service. Reputation management it is
| sometimes called.
| mdiesel wrote:
| Use a different birthday for every service you sign up to,
| especially the ones like "restaurant wants you to enter
| details to use their wifi", same for other details that
| they don't need in order to offer you a service.
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They do via their advertising copy, which strongly implies
| it. The productization of opinion is a Bad Thing in my view,
| for the simple reason that it becomes profitable to stoke
| conflict and commercial entities are therefore incentivized
| to do so.
| hermitdev wrote:
| You think this is bad? Wait until you see what the "news"
| media does!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In the US, I feel like I only see one side buying merchandise.
| Especially offensive and obnoxious merchandise.
| akira2501 wrote:
| A few seconds worth of work reveals how false this is.
| Perhaps it's just that you find one type of merchandise
| offensive but find the other type pleasant. Perhaps this open
| bias is coloring your perceptions?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I'm mid 30s, and I don't recall anytime other than the last
| 7 years in which I saw people wearing stuff that came
| anywhere close to "Fuck <president>". Or chanting it at
| random non political sporting events with families with
| children in attendance.
|
| And I don't see the other party doing anything equivalent,
| from giant flags on pickup trucks, to roadside merchandise
| stalls, to pick up truck convoys that harass and bully
| other candidates on the road...
| vkou wrote:
| Don't forget people modding their trucks to roll coal.
|
| I guess the liberal equivalent is driving a Prius or
| something. Both sides, right..?
| rig666 wrote:
| I'm pretty certain that the other side of your political
| leaning would say the same thing about your party.
|
| Ask anyone about there political merchandise and they will
| never see it as just "merch" but as a fundamental truth that
| is pivotal to there way of life they they feel is being
| threatened. It's much like calling someone's religious
| garments or iconography just merchandise and is a very closed
| minded point of view.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Yeah nah, that's some sweet Dark Brandon merch out there.
|
| Guarantee someone's already selling some Jacked Up Joe merch
| already.
|
| There's always someone selling merch though, a few years back
| a rather famous/infamous politician in NZ, Winston Peters,
| came out of left field to win a by-election in the electorate
| of Northland that the ruling National party government
| expected to win easy, the same party that had snubbed his
| offers to work together.
|
| So people started selling "King in the North" t-shirts with
| ol Winnie photoshopped onto Jon Snow. I, being honest, nearly
| bought one, because you had to admire his schtick.
|
| So yeah, there's always merch.
|
| But, AFAIK, at least no-one is selling Joe Biden fan art NFTs
| yet. It's like a double grift.
|
| And obviously Trump loves the merch far more because he gets
| a cut.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Winnie didn't show up a few years ago, he was around in the
| 90's. He's like a comic book villain that the writers keep
| reincarnating.
| greggsy wrote:
| Elvis' manager did this with 'I hate elvis badges'.
|
| It's not quite comparable though - this is deliberately
| deceiving a market into acquiring a service they didn't need,
| which is basically racketeering.
| DoodahMan wrote:
| that merch spam is so damn prevalent on Twitter right now! with
| hyperpartisanship and emotions so high i often wonder what the
| profits are like..
| 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...
| ugh123 wrote:
| Great list!
|
| My first thought was: "why stick all this info in a readme and
| not some nice json list I could scrape".
|
| I then thought: "maybe I can just have my AI friend scan the
| readme and do all the opt-out work for me"
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| has anyone tried the service advertised by the author of the
| list? Looks interesting / useful. [1]
|
| --
|
| 1: https://securityplanner.consumerreports.org/
| dheera wrote:
| I used Onerep until I was told it was shady. I now use Optery
| (https://www.optery.com/) which is a YC company. I'd love to
| hear if there are any issues with it.
|
| The problem is there are 200+ data brokers out there and I
| don't have time to deal with that many.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yeah, I saw when they announced on here, I think.
|
| One question: Do you know if they pay the data brokers a
| percentage?
| dheera wrote:
| I have no idea. I hope not.
|
| They submit opt-out removals though, so one would think
| that if they paid the data broker they would not have to go
| through that trouble?
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Why is it monthly? What happens if you don't renew?
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah I have the same concern. Are there any better options,
| short of hiring a human secretary, which I don't have the
| money for?
|
| My first priority is not having my personal info listed on
| the internet; ethics of where my money is going is second.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yeah, I did this, following one of the guides (possibly the one
| linked in the parent). It definitely worked with the worst of
| these bottom-feeders: mylife.com
|
| It involved phone call to an Indian call-center. While
| remaining polite (not easy) but persistent, I had to listen to
| multiple dumb pitches about their "services". I stuck with it
| and in the end they removed my name but indicated it "may" come
| back.
|
| That was in 2018. My name no longer appears when searching
| their website. I do, however, get MULTIPLE garbage emails per
| day from mylife indicating "changes" about my profile and that
| of my family and neighbors.
|
| I have avoided dealing with 3rd parties for this stuff. In
| addition to the fact that they may, as Krebs indicated,
| racketeer with the scummy brokers there's ALSO another concern:
| Some of them PAY the data brokers a percentage of the fees they
| collect to remove names. The last thing I want is for these
| bastards to get any money for their activities.
|
| BTW, the founder and CEO of Mylife.com is Jeffrey Tinsley. He
| appears to have made quite a fortune doing this data-broker
| shit.
| 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_.
| imiric wrote:
| I had a suspicion these services actually do more harm than
| good, even if they're well intentioned and not actively running
| a data collection scheme.
|
| But this is really a chicken-egg situation. How do you tell
| companies to delete your information without telling them what
| identifies your information? It's in these companies' interest
| to make this as difficult as possible, so a solution based on
| data hashes is highly unlikely to appear out of their good will
| alone. This requires strict regulation and high fines.
|
| There's also the issue of proving ownership of the data
| requested for deletion. Even in the EU with the GDPR, which is
| arguably the most progressive data privacy regulation we have,
| companies routinely violate this by requesting even more
| personal information from the requester.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > actually do more harm than good
|
| I've wondered about this too.
|
| I have a common enough name that about 2/3 of the info data
| brokers have on me is garbage.
|
| If every data broker could be relied on to faithfully delete
| my info I would sign up for Optery or Incogni today. I don't,
| because if even one of those 2/3 is a bad actor I'm just
| expending effort to clean up _their_ data.
|
| Specifically, the data I don't want them to have.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Ideally a regulator would intervene, demanding that the data
| provider prove that each person in their database has
| explicitly opted in. That should be really easy for these
| companies -- it's just another record to include in our
| files. If they can't prove it, they must delete all related
| data.
| notclive wrote:
| What does proof look like?
|
| On past projects we've recorded the time the user submitted
| a from (with a checked consent checkbox), but this doens't
| feel like rigorous proof.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| A scanned signature would work, I think, on a form mailed
| in by the user. The form would need to be clearly
| identified as coming from the data broker but could be
| provided by the company ultimately seeking your data.
| hirsin wrote:
| And when they autofill that value with 1, because they
| obviously got all of that data legitimately? Will consumers
| be asked to prove a negative?
|
| Even test cases will run into data sharing issues.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >And when they autofill that value with 1,
|
| amazingly enough the law is more clever than programmers
| assume it is, and the clever dodges programmers come up
| with tend to be seen through and just lead to jail time.
|
| Prime Exhibit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser
| 20after4 wrote:
| I don't understand how Hans Reiser is an example of this.
| He was convicted of murder and nothing about his case
| (that I could find) seems to indicate that he used
| "clever dodges" to skirt the law.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| if one followed the case at the time Reiser seemed very
| much the stereotype of the really superclever person who
| figured they were smarter than all those dumb folks who
| were never going to catch him and it all fell apart real
| quick.
|
| Then when it fell apart he dropped back to arguing he
| just looked guilty because he was too smart to look
| innocent or something
| https://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/02/23/2218256/hans-
| reiser-...
|
| https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2010/08/02/review-from-a-
| report... >He thought he was smarter than everyone else,
| but ultimately he was not
| 20after4 wrote:
| I see what you mean. There is some nuance to that which
| wasn't captured in the Wikipedia article or my general
| awareness of the details about the case.
| databroken wrote:
| Why not just outlaw data brokers entirely?
| mk89 wrote:
| Because they need them for their stupid election
| campaigns, surveys and crap like that.
| planede wrote:
| Ah, the evil bit.
| godelski wrote:
| My impression is that it depends what company you use. I
| don't really trust them but at the same time, there are a lot
| of other companies. All I can really say is that Optery will
| give you a free report with very minimal information and on a
| test they dug up far more information that I provided (the
| minimum).
|
| Given that these companies, like Incogni and DeleteMe, are
| now sponsoring big time YouTubers I'd imagine they are soon
| going to get a much closer look. At minimum, they are making
| far more people aware of the situation and data out there.
| Even though many of the VPNs fall far short of the promises,
| it is setting a strong signal that people care about privacy
| and entering the public lexicon is the first step. I hope
| these can be a catalyst towards more state or federal privacy
| protection.
| tlogan wrote:
| When you use these 'delete me' services to remove your
| information from a platform like Dropbox, there's a hidden
| catch. These services are often linked to companies that trade
| in email addresses. By submitting your email for deletion, you
| might unwittingly end up having it sold to marketers or data
| brokers, potentially leading to even more spam and unwanted
| contacts. Or maybe nice target ads ... depending who bought
| your email address
| EasyMark wrote:
| Devil's advocate here, n=1 is just a data point is rarely the
| whole story. I would assume, but obviously I could be wrong,
| that the legit ones actually can check if your info exists in a
| company before they send a take down request. I have no proof
| of that but it's probably nearly as good as n=1.
| 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.
| runjake wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Ironport getting bought by Cisco and then Cisco
| letting their product rot while simultaneously jacking up
| prices blew Ironport's reputation. They were excellent
| appliances before the acquisition.
| 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
| Arrath wrote:
| Watch these vultures frame it as clever vertical integration.
|
| They control the supply (the sites with your info) and the
| demand (the sites you can go through to request it get taken
| down)
|
| /s, obviously
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| It's been going on for years https://www.theguardian.com/tech
| nology/2018/jun/12/mugshot-e...
| m463 wrote:
| this seems to fit the definition.
|
| _In many cases, the potential problem may be caused by the
| same party that offers to solve it, but that fact may be
| concealed, with the intent to engender continual patronage._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
| throwaway2474 wrote:
| See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin
| andirk wrote:
| Lol those orbs! Oddly, Worldcoin's main exchange is
| Binance which stopped doing business in USA so I couldn't
| get a bag. Up almost 10x. Not bad for a sphere that
| proves "personhood". With AI making actual people vs
| machine created more difficult to discern, it may have
| evermore applications.
| walterbell wrote:
| From _" The Sopranos"_, Patsy and Burt failed extortion
| attempt at "Starbucks",
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz7Gu6agA
| dylan604 wrote:
| I always loved that scene. The times, they are a-changin
| _factor wrote:
| Related, proofpoint is notorious for this as well. They will
| block your mail server without cause, forcing you through their
| process of delisting.
|
| Pay and your problems magically go away. Proofpoint was
| consistently the only block hit.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Tbf putting up cash is a great signal for 'not a spammer'.
| _factor wrote:
| True, but not the only method. You'd be surprised how many
| spammers drop with greylisting enabled.
| tedajax wrote:
| Not really it's just a cost of doing business and if paying
| that cost "legitimizes" you then the ROI is probably
| significant.
| _factor wrote:
| Similar to a mafia coming to your small business and
| telling you you need to pay to stay open, otherwise
| they'll make sure you. Still just the cost of business?
| Seems more like a power imbalance.
| api wrote:
| Prostitution is not the oldest profession. Racketeering
| probably is. Probably started with the most basic form: giving
| your food to Ugg to pay him to stop his brother Grug from
| punching you.
| friendlyHornet wrote:
| Professional bullying
| cellis wrote:
| Aka taxation!
| vkou wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between the
| two.
| 9991 wrote:
| Banditry is when the baddies drop by periodically to
| demand a portion of your labor on threat of violence.
| Government is when they don't leave.
| EasyMark wrote:
| the last guy who stole an Amazon box off my porch didn't
| put up a school for my kids, the road in front of my
| house, help the homeless guy I gave my second burger to
| the other day get out of the cold, make sure the water
| out of my tap didn't kill me, etc
| yMEyUyNE1 wrote:
| Yeah, there is a huge difference between opportunist
| petty thiefs and organized crime bosses.
| Dudhbbh3343 wrote:
| Many large drug cartels pay for schools, give out food to
| the poor, and control some forms of crime to increase
| public support or at least prevent their protest.
|
| Once organized crime gets big enough, it's really
| difficult to distinguish from a weak government.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Sure and many feudal warlords grew the same way but at
| some point the Castle decayed away and became a tourist
| destination and what was left behind was the community
| and governance.
|
| Once organized crime gets really big, it stops being
| crime and persists on organization alone.
| Dudhbbh3343 wrote:
| I agree, but I would argue that the label of "crime" is
| mostly semantics. The violence (or at least the threat of
| violence) of the crimes still persists, but whoever is
| the most powerful group gets to change the label of their
| violence from "crime" to "law enforcement".
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We call those "paragovernamental organizations", for
| obvious reasons.
|
| If they get too powerful, we just drop the "para" on that
| name.
| 9991 wrote:
| Of course, he left.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure you can tell the difference between the
| two.
|
| Paying money so you don't get roughed up looks pretty
| much the same whether it's a bandit or a king doing it.
| vkou wrote:
| Here in the US there aren't a lot of kings, but if you
| have the fortune of living in a commonwealth nation,
| you're free to get rid of yours.
|
| Unless you're in the UK, though, King Charles is not
| exactly asking for anything from you.
| patcon wrote:
| Isn't this just a white-hat/black-hat hacker dynamic, except in
| this case the latter is legal?
| ironmagma wrote:
| Well, both hats ostensibly are at least doing real work
| (finding vulnerabilities).
| vmfunction wrote:
| The lesson for the modern ago. Don't put stuff into digital
| form if you want privacy!
|
| Some places don't allow use of smart phone. They actually ask
| you check your phone into a coat check type thing at door! One
| journalist friend often leaves the smart phone at home.
| philjohn wrote:
| More theatre performances are doing this now.
|
| Cabaret at the Kit Kat club in London places a sticker over
| any camera lens. The Burnt City, an immersive theatrical
| experience, makes you place your phone in a pouch that is
| then sealed with a tamper evident fastening before you enter
| the venue.
| jojobas wrote:
| This lesson can't be bashed into children enough.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Never did.
|
| It wasn't paranoia it was a healthy dose of "if this is
| possible, someone is doing it"
|
| Turned out they in fact were doing it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| More like : If it is not explicitly illegal and
| _aggressively enforced by someone_ , a business will
| attempt it, regardless of whether it makes money or not.
|
| Everything else is fair game apparently.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| This sets a terrible precedent. For most, a phone is all or a
| combination of; house keys, car keys, bank cards, medical
| records, photo albums, etc. Giving all that up to a stranger
| (albeit behind a passcode) is a step backwards in security
| and privacy. An alternative that I have witnessed is places
| place your phone in a lockable bag that you then carry with
| you. They unlock the bag when you exit.
| weedfire wrote:
| Beyond about 150 people (and sometimes well below that number)
| reputation ceases to be an even loose correlate of character
| and becomes, instead, a platform through which the influential
| extort the rest in order to stay on top.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| That sounds like credit bureaus.
|
| You know, those entities that hoover up any and all info on
| you, that you cannot opt out of, maintain information whether
| its accurate or not and refuse to delete obviously erroneous
| data, then release it *all* to the world by being extremely
| poor stewards of said data, then charging you for credit
| monitoring for the rest of your life, since your _immutable_
| info just got shared with assholes.
|
| Guess who owns most/all of the credit monitoring entities?
|
| Edit: typo...words are hard.
| ragestorm wrote:
| Luckily you can mail them a permanent opt out for most of
| that stuff. IIRC, it removes your name from the searchable
| list of info 3rd parties use for marketing.
|
| Additionally, if you haven't, freeze your credit at all
| bureaus including LexisNexis.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| I've frozen all of mine, because thanks to Equifax, I don't
| have a choice.
|
| I wish you good luck opting out. I'm not talking about what
| the law says, I'm talking about how they act.
|
| Technically, you can dispute incorrect info. What that
| dispute amounts to is the bureau asking the entity if it's
| accurate. No proof needed. If they say it's accurate, then
| you're stuck with it, until you jump through many, many
| more hoops.
| 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".
| sangnoir wrote:
| The former British prime minister executed a similar technique
| to hide his scandal by releasing search-engine chaff. He had a
| press interview where he claimed one of his hobbies was
| painting miniature red buses, and the scandal he was hiding was
| false and distateful ads on a (real) red bus as part of a
| campaign for Brexit.
| Terr_ wrote:
| TIL:
|
| > For example, the disaster surrounding London's new
| Routemaster city buses disappeared into the depths of the web
| after Johnson made completely nonsensical statements in the
| media about building model buses from wine crates. Coverage
| of these statements triggered a flood of search queries on
| Google that displaced negative search queries and Google
| Suggest results related to Boris Johnson.
|
| > Research showed that before the wine crate buses interview,
| 100% of Google Suggest and search results on page one that
| were displayed in connection with Boris Johnson had negative
| connotations. After the interview, it was only 20%.
|
| > Additionally, when news broke that British Government
| members had flouted Covid guidelines to meet for wine and
| cheese during a 'work meeting', it was seized upon by the
| British press as "partygate." Soon after, Johnson was quoted
| in interview saying, "I don't work from home. The cheese will
| distract you." As a result, negative coverage of the British
| Government's party-gate incidents were glossed over by search
| suggestions and results, and keywords with negative
| connotations no longer appeared in Google Suggest prompts.
|
| Source: https://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/cheese-wine-and-
| whistles-m...
| zarzavat wrote:
| He is a well known proponent of the technique:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_cat_strategy
|
| > There is one thing that is absolutely certain about
| throwing a dead cat on the dining room table - and I don't
| mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That
| is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian
| friend, is that everyone will shout, 'Jeez, mate, there's a
| dead cat on the table!' In other words, they will be
| talking about the dead cat - the thing you want them to
| talk about - and they will not be talking about the issue
| that has been causing you so much grief.
|
| - Boris Johnson
| mr_toad wrote:
| Seems like a variation of starting a war to distract from
| domestic issues.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "Wag the Dead Cat?"
|
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wag_the_Dog)
| geraldhh wrote:
| almost as if the public appreciated the diversion
| szundi wrote:
| Genius. Makes the reason of the demand for his company!
| siva7 wrote:
| You're fine if a search machine returns zero results about you.
| Never put your personal information out in the wild. This
| includes a linkedin profile. I haven't found a solution if you're
| a business owner but even then try to limit exposure as much as
| possible.
| mozempthrowaway wrote:
| Gentle reminder that Mozilla Monitor is just OneRep, albeit
| marked up for Mozilla Corporation's profits (yes Mozilla is a for
| profit, its foundation is not).
| ufocia wrote:
| Non-profit doesn't mean no profit.
| st3fan wrote:
| It is nuanced and not really well explained with a hot-take.
|
| How about https://crscpa.com/blog/how-much-profit-can-a-
| nonprofit-make...
| frankhhhhhhhhh wrote:
| Dirtbag.
| srvmshr wrote:
| Asking as a complete amateur, how do these people databases &
| privacy companies work? They claim to get personal details,
| family connections, social media content and even court records
| etc for not-so-exhorbitant price ($30 per report as ballpark?)
|
| Do they just scam people by compiling whatever is available on
| search engines? In one or two cases, I have seen them at least
| giving the house address or family member details right. So there
| seems to be more at play.
| cj wrote:
| Even without using a paid service, if you know what state
| someone lives in and can narrow it down to a few potential
| counties, it's typically not that hard to find someone's
| address by searching online property tax assessment records
| which usually expose the full address of the property, the
| owner's name, and the assessed value.
|
| Same for court/criminal records, marriage records (in some
| states), etc.
| dheera wrote:
| Worth a mention here -- there's a YC company that submits opt-out
| requests and seems much less shady than Onerep to me:
|
| https://www.optery.com/
|
| (I'm just a user, not associated with them.)
| nottorp wrote:
| Good bussiness. He has a duty for profit to his shareholders
| yadda yadda yadda. Why even complain?
| Pokerface777 wrote:
| What's the best way to feed them fake data?
| htrp wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/250/ (Snopes)
|
| There really is an XKCD for everything
| blitzar wrote:
| Founder, CEO & Cereal Entrepreneur gunna do what they do best.
| docmars wrote:
| I find it funny when things like these happen, while conspiracy
| theorists get lambasted for calling out much less nefarious
| schemes (with evidence), only to be proven right weeks or months
| later when a "more official" source confirms it after gaslighting
| them for that period in between.
| zkid18 wrote:
| A bit off-topic, could someone explain how data brokers operate?
|
| I've been involved in the development of B2B SaaS solutions, and
| there are a few providers, such as ZoomInfo, Apollo, and
| Clearbit, that greatly assist the sales team in gaining a deeper
| understanding of customers. It seems that venture capitalists
| love those businesses.
|
| Has anyone attempted to create similar companies that offer Data
| as a Service?
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