> Searches each data broker site for your name + state
Is this US only or would it also work for international profiles (and if so what would be the "state" equivalent)?
Jokes aside, I unironically suspect the purpose of many opt-out forms is merely to record the up-to-date information.
How many require you to make an account or confirm your email address/phone?
I’m not in the business of fixing their mistakes for free.
I will click the unsubscribe link and that’s it.
They already know your email, I don’t see why getting it again would sell it to a new vendor. Clicking an unsubscribe link already verifies you are a real person.
Does this work for anyone outside the US as well? e.g. Will it work for an Australian?
Requirements
macOS (uses launchd for scheduling and Messages for iMessage)
Node.js 18+
Playwright browsers installed
Right, so my suspicion was correct: I'm the only one being inconvenienced by the same old captchas.
Supporting Systemd should be easy. Not sure what windows uses.
Well my coworkers and I realized that the opt out form just needed an address. We contemplated pulling all known addresses for the entire country and automating submitting them all over several months to opt everyone out. I don’t think it ever materialized but we had a good chuckle about the emergency meeting the Yellow Pages web devs would have had and at what percentage of opt outs.
The delivery-people got overwhelmed and eventually just resorted to putting the stacks and stacks of phone books into piles and burning them. It took a long time until they got caught because nobody really misses a phone book.
But there are other times where I am wrong too and I even comment on threads with less upvotes because the topic is so interesting yet my comment just ends up being isolated.
It's really more like a 50/50.
Even the one post of mine which had reached the front page of Hackernews was something that I absolutely knew could reach front page but then there weren't much responses for a few days but then after a few days, I saw that it was re-uploaded (I think that Hn selects a few submissions which are interesting, I forgot how that mechanism worked) and then I reached the front page of Hackernews ;)
Either way, I think people should just make what they feel is interesting but I remember reading some article once which said a few things which this article follows:
1. I built XYZ... gets more frontpage than we built XYZ...
2. having (Open source) in the title increases the chances too
This article has both of them so its definitely interesting to see it on front page, either way its an really interesting project :-D
1. It asks you to optionally sign up for a bunch of other services like Spokeo
2. It asks for access to your email via Apple's Mail app which I don't use
3. I got a lot of 404s anyway
4. Many sites require manual intervention to work
Assumption that people use Apple services by default is wild
stephenlthorn•1h ago
Where I need help: The heuristic approach misses a lot. Many of the generic sites have unique flows the four generic strategies don't catch. I'm looking for people who want to:
- Verify which generic sites are actually succeeding vs. silently failing - Add explicit broker definitions for high-value sites that are currently on the generic path - Test on non-macOS (launchd scheduling is macOS-only; cron fallback would help Linux/Windows users) - Handle email verification flows (script submits the form but can't click confirmation links in your inbox) Repo: https://github.com/stephenlthorn/auto-identity-remove No personal data in the repo — setup script prompts for your info locally and keeps it gitignored.
lolpython•15m ago
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated