AI companies and data brokers even use fake forms to continue selling our data.

Be surprised! A new privacy study has found that data brokers and AI companies deliberately mislead consumers who try to opt out of the sale of their personal data. An audit of the opt-out processes of dozens of big data companies found that they employed a variety of devious practices, including fake forms…

Data brokers purchase personal information about individuals from a wide range of sources, including app developers and websites, and scrape publicly available data from the Internet. They then package this information to sell to companies who will use it to spam us.

Privacy researchers audited the opt-out processes of 38 major data collection companies, including data brokers, AI providers and dating app developers. The study found that deceptive practices, and even outright lies, were common. Wired provided some examples.

Opt-out forms that do not allow users to opt out of the sale of their data. Links buried in the fine print and missing from home pages. Consumers are redirected to several separate forms to complete a single request. And requirements that users create accounts or pay for subscriptions before unsubscribing, among other things.

Companies guilty of these types of tactics aren’t just careless companies: they include Google, Meta, and OpenAI.

According to the report, large companies with large language models, such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, fail to clearly link their opt-out forms to their home pages or privacy policies, and several require consumers to submit multiple separate forms to complete a single request. OpenAI’s form, when a consumer finds it, does not offer a way to opt out of the sale or transfer of personal data. What it offers instead is an option to “remove personal information from ChatGPT responses,” which EPIC says is a filter on the chatbot’s output, not removal of the underlying data.

OpenAI’s response appears to both deny and confirm that it sells user data in the same response.

Shane Bauer, a spokesperson for OpenAI, says the company does not sell user data, although it acknowledges sharing limited data with marketing partners for targeted, cross-context behavioral advertising.

The people brokers were some of the worst.

The people search brokers they audited (Spokeo, Whitepages, and National Public Data) do not offer consumers a way to opt out of the sale or transfer of their data at all. Instead, the companies provide a process to remove individual listings by URL, one at a time, with no commitment to stop selling that same person’s information in the future.

Take from 9to5Mac

Data brokers are a form of business that simply should not exist. This latest study only highlights the need for federal privacy laws in the United States, with the scope and rigor of the European GDPR.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash