Act surprised! A new privacy study has found that data brokers and AI companies deliberately deceive consumers who attempt to opt out of the sale of their personal data. An audit of the opt-out processes of dozens of major data companies found that they employ a variety of underhand practices – including fake forms …
Data brokers buy personal information about individuals from a wide range of sources, including app developers and websites, as well as scraping the internet for publicly available data. They then package this information up to sell to companies who will use it to spam us.
Privacy researchers audited the opt-out processes of 38 major data-collecting companies, including data brokers, AI vendors and dating app developers. The study found that deceptive practices and even outright lies were common. Wired provided some examples.
Opt-out forms that don’t actually let users opt out of the sale of their data. Links that are buried in fine print and missing from homepages. Consumers routed through multiple separate forms to complete a single request. And requirements that users create accounts or pay for subscriptions before opting out at all, among others.
Companies guilty of these types of tactics aren’t just fly-by-night ones: they include Google, Meta, and OpenAI.
Major companies offering large language models, such as Google, Meta, and OpenAI, fail to clearly link their opt-out forms from their homepages or privacy policies, according to the report, 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 the removal of any underlying data.
OpenAI’s response appeared to be both denying and confirming it sells user data within the same response.
Shane Bauer, a spokesperson for OpenAI, says the company does not sell user data, though it does acknowledge sharing limited data with marketing partners for targeted and cross-context behavioral advertising.
People search brokers were among 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 offer a process for removing individual listings by URL, one at a time, with no commitment to stop selling that same person’s information in the future.
Data brokers are a form of business which quite simply shouldn’t be allowed to exist. This latest study just underlines the need for federal privacy protection laws in the US with the reach and bite of Europe’s GDPR.
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