So would anyone pay for a service like this that acts like an attorney and actively contacts companies for insight into the information they store on you and requests for removal? Included in the service would be class-action suits and other litigative measures. We could introduce a free tier to find out if X companies store anything and a service if you want to clean up. Like legal insurance but then only for data.
Just from personal experience I’ve spent time opting out of these collections in the past. To include, people search websites only to find my information resurface months later. I think this may take constant monitoring. I’m not sure the mechinism that is used for data to be added after asking for opt out/deletion
If you can get judges to rule on costs in favor of the plaintiff (quite usual in my EU jurisdiction) then there quickly arises an incentive for cooperation. All you need is a few high profile wins. Those companies would probably start sharing by default and / or taking opt-out more seriously after that. "It's your data. Fight it!" (How's that for a slogan. And I know it's not grammatically correct.)
It's analogous to the operation of those lawyers asking a few thousand euros for unlicensed use of pictures. That's legit as well here. Legal reverse GDPR extortion. Gives us insight into these customers, who've given us power of attorney or we sue. Lose and pay our bills. Win and we are done and the customers pay a much smaller fee (a person, but hopefully adding up to a reasonable fee).
> judges to rule on costs in favor of the plaintiff (quite usual in my EU jurisdiction)
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I think your costs are broader, include attorneys fees, and are therefore different from US costs. In US courts the prevailing party defaults to including costs when preparing the judgment order (parties do almost all of the drafting in US courts) but "costs" is taken to literally mean court costs as in filing fees and a very limited menu of closely related expenses such as costs pertaining to service of process, court clerk photocopying charges, and the like.
Yup, broader costs. Losers often pay quite a substantial part of the legal fees of the winner. A comparatively extreme example: in liability cases with injuries, the judge will often allow quite broad legal costs (about 25% of total claims is legal costs). It's an extreme example since registered attorneys cannot work on that basis, but goes to show that substantial costs to the loser does happen.
Isn't the problem that the ad network(s) would have to extract a fairly high price from us to sell such an opt-out? More than they'd estimate they could make from us... I'd bet it would have to be calculated based on what they've got on you already (so in that sense having been using an adblocker might make you less valuable and thus cheaper for you buy your opt-out).
I would pay a third party opt-out enforcement service, but I would not give a single thin dime to actual advertising companies in exchange for an opt-out, nor would I pay a third party service if they're going to pay such advertisers.
But a lot of them have opt-outs already, which are presumably free. I think we're talking about the just the convenience cost of exercising all of them on my behalf.
I would pay for this, and I'd be willing to pay something approaching professional fees for individual attention, followed by a maintenance/insurance fee like you describe.
Things I'd need (as someone protected by GDPR):
1. strong privacy guarantees on your side
2. transparency about the process and techniques used
3. regular feedback
4. attention to data brokers, but also to anywhere else my pii might be on the internet, which could include shutting down e.g. old accounts on random shops
5. visibility into hacked data dumps (like haveibeenpwned, but for arbitrary information)
I'm pretty sure my information is spread all over at this point, but I'd like to get a handle on how big that spread is and to contain it wherever possible. I'd like to have an idea of how hard it would be for someone with some partial info e.g. a phone number, to determine my name or address.
This kind of service is something that I'm looking for now. I suspect that something like this already exists in "reputation management".
I would, provided I trusted your service to both deliver on its promise and to not itself keep my data (which it requires to opt me out).
I'm surprised some privacy-focused angel (they must exist) hasn't already done this. If I have $10M to play with this would be a great way to spend it for the public good.
