California residents can use new tool to demand brokers delete their personal data:

While state residents have had the right to demand that a company stop collecting and selling their data since 2020, doing so required a laborious process of opting out with each individual company. The Delete Act, passed in 2023, was supposed to simplify things, allowing residents to make a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers delete their information.

Now the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (DROP) actually gives residents the ability to make that request. Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state.

I signed up for this, despite it being a red-flag factory. It makes sense that to tell data brokers to fuck entirely off, you would have to identify yourself to them, but giving information to the enemy still goes against my every instinct.

The most ridiculous part was logging in. You have to use either id.me (which obviously I would never do) or login.gov (which I thought I had already signed up with at some point, but apparently not.)

Again, it makes me twitch to ever upload a photo of my ID, but I guess sending the ID to the same government that issued it should be fine? But signing up for login.gov is a complete shitshow.

You can’t just upload a photo of your ID: desktop browsers are “not supported”. You have to take the photo in-browser on a phone, and it took me literally 15 times to succeed at that, because iOS Safari kept crashing so hard that I had to kill the app. Repeatedly. Sometimes it would crash at the front scan, sometimes at the back, but restarting meant you had to start over with the front again. Also it somehow drained 40% of my battery in 15 minutes. Amazing technology. Great work everybody.

And you have to consent to “something something AI something something” and there was also some “binding arbitration” nonsense in there too. (I could hear Cory’s head exploding from here.)

“Powered by Socure” who I guess are the AI-blah-blah also-ran trying to get whatever government contracts id.me didn’t already get. Apparently they are burrowed in to Docusign as well (“your second most favorite source of phishing emails!”)

I guess people who don’t have iOS or Android are expected to go to the post office to do this in person. I was seriously considering it.

At least they didn’t demand that I give them a facial.

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