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Comment by Malarkey73 | Hacker News Reader

Here in UK I have been receiving about 5-10 emails a day from various companies - most of whom I don't remember - telling me I need to sign up again so they can keep my details and keep spamming me.

Fantastic.

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Same here, finally recruitment agencies will unsubscribe me from jobs offers that I'm totally not interested in. I used to get a few emails per week asking me if I'm interested for relocation and work in [insert programming language I have no experience in]. I asked them many times to stop emailing me this crap, they never did until this week :)

I'm loving that too. It's amazing just how many mailing lists I'm on that I either haven't signed up for myself or have forgotten about.

Indeed. I was reading a tragic article about the energy cost of bitcoin and I started to wonder how much energy, bandwidth,HD space is totally wasted on sending everybody spam, junk, messages every day that they will never read. And keeping info for the same. I wonder if it is a reasonably large chunk of the total energy and infrastructure of the whole web?

Maybe we could power a big Chinese city just by getting ourselves deleted from gym mailing lists (weirdly a gym in Cardiff sends me spam mail -- I have never been to Cardiff???).

I bought something on Ebay and the Ebay seller has been spamming me with offers ever since. I didn't sign up to any newsletter. I was not aware that such thing would even be possible with Ebay.

Now they sent me a message telling me that I should sign up again on their website to continue getting their messages. No thanks.

I will be interested to see if the same companies do actually stop emailing me and delete my information after I ignore their request to opt in!

I'm sure there are plenty of bad actors who will keep spamming regardless. Thankfully those ones seldom get through my spam filter - so barely trouble my consciousness.

Yes same for me, and I think it's a great thing because my information leakage risk will shrink significantly in the next weeks due to companies deleting data they have from me that they should've deleted long ago in many cases.

I got a mail from a sports club I'm pretty sure I've never visited asking me to please reply to remain subscribed. That was weird, wonder if I visited their stadium once for a concert or if someone just misstyped their mail.

I have the same experience. All those forgotten accounts. Now I can just go on and delete them.

Super basic stuff.

I have a lot of companies emailing me saying I can opt-out, I thought that was the opposite of what the law is saying? Eg. If you continue using our service after 23th of May you automatically agree to the new terms. Huh?

The GDPR requires affirmative consent for each specific use of your data. If the company had previously asked you "Please tick this box if you would like to receive marketing messages from us in the future", they don't need to ask for your consent again but they do need to offer an opt-out. If the opt-in was pre-ticked, vaguely worded or mandatory to submit the form, then that consent is no longer valid and they'll need to ask you to opt-in. If you didn't specifically opt-in but were getting marketing messages because you had done business with them, they need an opt-in to keep sending those messages.

I'm also deluged with them. And have to go looking for half of them in the Spam folder. Deep joy.

The reason being that in the past I've picked up some really nice contracts from recruitment agencies phoning or emailing me out of the blue, so I want to remain contactable.

So, yeah. Great. Thanks for the massive proxy unsubscribe request.

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