Data brokers hide their subscription cancellation pages from Google Search

Data brokers are California law requests it to provide consumers to request deleting their data. But good luck finding them.

More than 30 companies, which collect and sell personal information to consumers, hide their Google deletion instructions, according to a review by Markup and Calmatters for hundreds of mediator sites. This creates another obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data.

Many pages containing instructions, listed in the official country record, use software instructions To tell search engines to Remove the entire page Of the search results. Popular tools such as Google and Bun Respect the symbol by excluding the pages when responding to users.

Data brokers across the country must register in California under the state Consumer privacy lawWhich allows California to ask to remove their information, not to be sold, or they get access to it.

After reviewing web sites from all 499 data brokers registered With the state, we found that 35 have a symbol to prevent some pages from appearing in searches.

Although these companies may fulfill the letter of law by providing a page that consumers can use to delete their data, this means little if these consumers are not able to find the page, according to Matio Schwartz, a policy analyst in consumer reports who study California who rules data brokers and other privacy issues.

“This seems to me as a smart work to make it as difficult as possible for consumers to find it,” Schwartz said.

After calling the microbes and calm, they said to the mediators, seven said they would review the code on their websites or remove it completely, and two others said they deleted the symbol independently before contacting it. Eight nine companies have confirmed coding and calm to remove the code.

Two companies said that it added the code intentionally to avoid random mail based on a recommendation from experts and would not change it. The other 24 companies did not respond to the comment request; However, three removed the code after calling them and calm.

((See the data on Repo GitHub))

Most of the companies that responded said they were not aware that the code was on its pages.

“The presence of (the code) on our subscription cancellation page was already supervised, not intended,” said May Haddad, a fourth spokesman, in an e -mail response. “Our team corrected the problem immediately when knowing it. As a standard practice, all critical pages-in that, aim to cancel the subscription and privacy-until it is indexed by default to ensure the maximum vision and accessibility.” Coding and calm confirmed that the code has been removed from July 31.

Some companies whose privacy instructions from search engines included a small link at the bottom of their main page. Often, access to that multiple scroll requires, rejecting pop -ups of cookies and letters of news, then finding a link was a small part of another text on the page.

So consumers still face a serious obstacle when trying to delete their information.

Take Simple subscription cancellation form to IPAPIKlouding service that finds the physical sites for Internet visitors based on their IP addresses. People can move to the company’s website for the company’s request “Don’t sell” their personal data or call their “right to delete” – but they were having difficulty finding the model, since it contains a symbol except for the search results. A spokesman for Kloudand described the code as “supervision” and said that the page has been changed to be visible to search engines; Coding and calm confirmed that the code has been removed from July 31.