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Comment by summitsummit | Hacker News Reader

be careful you guys. these are awful people collecting this data, and i'm pretty suspicious that they will use the additional data they gather form you when you opt out ("for proof its you") and use it against you in their other databases. for instance, i confirmed my phone and email info in order to opt out of one but another clone site now says my information is "Verified".

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You have no idea how sketchy these companies are.

ZoomInfo (public company) for example provides a free plugin for sales people which is scanning email for all the email signatures and then they sell all that data to their customers. Even crazier is they take data from their customer’s CRM systems.

DiscoverOrg is buying data from third parties without really knowing how they got the data.

There are a bunch of apps and browser plugins that read your emails or contacts and then those companies sell that data to third parties like these data brokers. I use very few browser plugins because of this threat.

If you have somehow acquired a list of contacts you can get a lot of these companies to purchase it with very few questions.

I used to operate a dozen or so small web sites. A spammer once offered me a crazy amount of money for the mailing lists. When I declined, he offered an even crazier amount of money to buy all the web sites, in their entirety, including mailing lists and social media accounts.

I ended up selling him the one web site that didn't have a mailing list and only rudimentary social media presences. I bought a new car and moved to a better city with the money.

that sounds like a really cool story

I bet a blog post about your story would get a lot of votes here. I'd read it.

I’m sure in some countries that would make them liable. It’s a shame the US probably isn’t one of them, our litigative culture would put an end to that stupidity very quickly.

Just fill out the forms on your next trip to Europe?

Being on vacation in europe doesn't make you a resident

Where does GDPR require you to be a resident? Tourists have plenty of rights, and I doubt their right to privacy is any less than anyone else’s once on the territory.

The EU says individuals, and I've always understood it to be anyone in the EU countries plus EU citizens anywhere.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

> individuals in the EU

I don't think it applies to EU citizens overseas IMO. At least I haven't signed up for anything that asked if I was an EU citizen or not.

Would get really messy because there are lots of EU citizens out there that don't know it through jus sanguinis.

Meanwhile a lot of financial institutions do ask if you're a US citizen because it ups their reporting requirements.

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