Like many people here, I’ve been uncomfortable for a long time with how much personal data is collected, sold, breached, and reused. Spam, robocalls, targeted ads, and data brokers I’ve never interacted with have become background noise most people just accept.

At some point I started digging into the newer state privacy laws (Texas, California, others) and realized that consumers technically have legal rights to opt out of data sales, request deletion, and limit certain uses of their data. I tried to actually exercise those rights myself.

What I ran into was a mess:

• Every company has a different process • Instructions are scattered across blogs, forums, PDFs, and privacy policies • Many companies bury where requests are supposed to be sent • Doing this at any real scale is tedious and easy to abandon • Opting out of a handful of companies doesn’t meaningfully change much

I tried managing it manually and eventually gave up.

So I kept pulling the thread and ended up building a small, free tool that aggregates what I personally found useful while trying to deal with this:

• A database of common data brokers and companies • Where privacy requests actually need to be sent • Step-by-step opt-out instructions tied to applicable laws • An option to either follow the instructions yourself or have requests sent on your behalf

There’s also a simple breach check, mainly as a way for people to see how exposed they already are before deciding whether to do anything at all.

I’m sharing this here mostly because people in this community already understand the problem better than most. I’m still unsure whether aggregating this information meaningfully reduces friction in practice, or whether efforts like this are inherently too manual to make a real difference.

Curious how others here handle opt-outs at scale, and whether centralizing this information actually helps, or just creates the illusion of progress.