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You can opt out, but it's a grueling, site-by-site process and they don't make it easy - often you have to do it several times. See https://inteltechniques.com/book7.html for some strategies. It's tortuous and should not be this way - we should really have national privacy legislation, but all the companies who are based on (or just get extra profit from) surveillance capitalism will fight such a thing tooth and nail.

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> You can opt out, but it's a grueling, site-by-site process and they don't make it easy - often you have to do it several times. See https://inteltechniques.com/book7.html for some strategies. It's tortuous and should not be this way

I totally agree with you about how unreasonably burdensome the process is (it probably took at least a solid 40 hours of effort for me to get my results mostly scrubbed from publicly accessible sites a few years ago).

However, I think you have to put an asterisk next to "opt-out." In a lot of cases, your data might still be accessible in premium or specialized products (like those for law enforcement). I know of no law besides the California-specific CCPA that actually regulates opting-out, and a lot of these sites like like they're operated by sketchy people.

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