How to erase personal information that companies have on you
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Users are increasingly concerned about apps and services holding too much personal information. Time to review who knows what about you?
Click here to see the full blog post
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Other parts of the world it is not so easy, there are also ad companies that have collected data. -
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I read a Guardian article about the Jumbo: Privacy + Security Android app which promised a similar service. Since the article assured me it would not misuse my data, I decided to give it a go (otherwise I would not have trusted it, expecting the kind of pretend protections you mention above).
I guess it might work for some people, but in my case all it seemed to do was look for bad settings in Google apps (I already have all these set properly) and Facebook etc. (which I don't have on my phone) - so pretty useless in my case.
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Excellent article, but many of us do not have GDPR protection (I am in Canada where we have only minimal protection). We have good ideas and ideals on personal data protection but 99.5% of companies just chuckle as they read our letters and chuck them into the proverbial 'round filling cabinet'. We have some good legislation, PIPEDA, but it only applies to the collection, use or disclosure of personal information in the course of a commercial activity. Regulated companies and telecommunications companies are also covered by this.
I am personally fighting two battles on this front and get stonewalled at any attempt to get relevant information. Our only resource seems to be litigation which the Evil companies know the average person cannot afford. -
If you are not too sure which services you use are a problem, you can look them up in "Terms Of Service Didn't Read" https://tosdr.org
They also have an extension which can be useful when deciding if a site/service may not be worth the risk -
@Dr-Flay , I've been using it for a long time, but while it only shows the conditions of a fairly short list of services, also well known the most of them, are not as useful as they might be.
Besides, it does not solve the underlying problem. We can delete for example our data from Google (?), but not those that Google has already sold to third parties and what they do with the data.
As I said before, if our data is in the network, they stay there until the end of time and even the sites that know them multiply. Nothing changes for this, due to many laws and regulations that it gets. The first barrier is always the discretion of the user himself and even this is not certain by the metadata.
Always keep in mind, EVERYTHING that is on the network about a user, by definition is public. -
@Dr-Flay There is also Brightfort's EULAlyZer which will read through the terms and report on words or phrases which may indicate "potentially hidden behavior" or add-on programmes.
It is free for personal use.
If you want to interact with it, it will keep a database of license agreements and ReadMe files you have analyzed. -
@Dr-Flay , thanks, I'll take a look, though, a company with an http page and not https? Ehm ...
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