Data brokers hide their selection pages from Google search
Are data brokers The California law is required to provide consumers with ways to eliminate their data. But good luck find them.
More than 30 companies, who collect and sell consumer personal information, have hidden their deletion instructions from Google in accordance with the Markup and Calmatters reviews of hundreds of broker websites. This creates another obstacle for consumers who want to remove their data.
Many pages containing instructions, listed in a formal government registry, use the code to say search engines to completely delete the page from the search results. Popular tools like Google and Bing respect the code by removing pages when answering users.
Data agents across the country must register in accordance with California Consumer Privacy Act, which allows California to delete their information, which is not sold, or they access it.
After reviewing the websites of all 499 data brokers registered in the state, we found that 35 have code to prevent specific pages display.
While these companies may meet the law by presenting a page that consumers can use to delete their data, it means that if these consumers fail to find the page, Matthew Schwartz says, a policy analyst in consumer reports that California’s law governed by agents and other privacy issues.
“It looks like a clever job for me to make it hard for consumers as much as possible,” Schwartz said.
After contacting the trademarks and Calmatters, the seven people said they would review the code on their websites or completely delete it, and the other two said they had independently deleted the code before calling. Markup and Calmatters confirmed that eight of the nine companies deleted the code.
The two companies said they deliberately added the code to prevent spam from recommending experts and not changing it. 24 other companies did not respond to the request. However, they removed the code three after the marking and the Calmatters contacted them.
(See our repo github data.)
Most companies that responded said they were unaware of this code on their pages.
“Presence [code] On our refusal page, it was not really intentional. As a standard method, all important pages-including selection and privacy pages-are indexed by default by default. “Signing and Calmatters confirmed that this code has been deleted from July 31.
Some companies that hid their privacy guidelines from search engines included a small link at the bottom of their homepage. Access to it often requires multiple page scroll, pop -ups for cookie licenses and register newsletters, then find a link that was a fraction of the other text on the page.
So consumers still faced a serious obstacle when trying to remove their information.
Use the simple selection form for the IPAPI, the service provided by Kloudnd and finds the physical locations of the Internet visitors based on their IP address. People can go to the company’s website to request that the company “sells” or “right to delete it” calls it, but they had trouble finding the form, because it contained the code excluding the search results. A spokesman for Kloudnd described the code as “monitoring” and said the page was visible to search engines. Marking and Calmatters confirmed that this code has been deleted from July 31.
