For anyone interested in Data Erasure requests.
I've been using the service Mine lately. It scans your mailbox to identify and prioritise businesses that you've dealt with who likely hold financial and other personally identifiable information on you.
You can then select the businesses you would like to forget about you and Mine will send pre-written emails on your behalf and monitor for replies.
The experience has been enlightening. This is what I've found after sending 50ish requests:
- A small number of businesses already have a process in place to deal with such requests and action immediately without further correspondence
- Others ask that you fill in a form (pdf or web) to start the process
- A large number won't get back to you for around a week or two and eventual responses appear to be written by a person
- A small number tell you the can delete some data but not all. e.g. Compare the Market. In the past I've used compare the market to purchase insurance products, that sale is linked to my personal details and so they can not delete. I'm not sure why this is the case. Maybe there are compliance reasons but it is a little worrying that these middle-men companies that live on commission either can't or won't erase my data.
The big one that's been mentioned in other HN threads on this is Car Rental companies. I made it a priority to deal with them first. They have all manner of sensitive information and their size, tenure and CX don't instill me with confidence.
Ideally, but I'm willing to trade... temporarily, only because it's not my primary, or even my personal inbox.
Why waste 100 hours of my own time, minimum, going through my hundreds of thousands of emails adhoc to find examples like receipts from 10 years ago from an obscure ecommerce site?
Yeah, I definitely see the appeal on that. I'd pay for this as an offline app that doesn't hand over all my emails to a random third party though. Pity it's only Goog/MS/Yahoo so far too. Really, it should be any IMAP server and offline only. Someday maybe?
You can then select the businesses you would like to forget about you and Mine will send pre-written emails on your behalf and monitor for replies.
The experience has been enlightening. This is what I've found after sending 50ish requests:
- A small number of businesses already have a process in place to deal with such requests and action immediately without further correspondence
- Others ask that you fill in a form (pdf or web) to start the process
- A large number won't get back to you for around a week or two and eventual responses appear to be written by a person
- A small number tell you the can delete some data but not all. e.g. Compare the Market. In the past I've used compare the market to purchase insurance products, that sale is linked to my personal details and so they can not delete. I'm not sure why this is the case. Maybe there are compliance reasons but it is a little worrying that these middle-men companies that live on commission either can't or won't erase my data.
The big one that's been mentioned in other HN threads on this is Car Rental companies. I made it a priority to deal with them first. They have all manner of sensitive information and their size, tenure and CX don't instill me with confidence.
[1] https://www.saymine.com/