Where I need help: The heuristic approach misses a lot. Many of the generic sites have unique flows the four generic strategies don't catch. I'm looking for people who want to:
- Verify which generic sites are actually succeeding vs. silently failing - Add explicit broker definitions for high-value sites that are currently on the generic path - Test on non-macOS (launchd scheduling is macOS-only; cron fallback would help Linux/Windows users) - Handle email verification flows (script submits the form but can't click confirmation links in your inbox) Repo: https://github.com/stephenlthorn/auto-identity-remove No personal data in the repo — setup script prompts for your info locally and keeps it gitignored.
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
1. It asks you to optionally sign up for a bunch of other services like Spokeo
2. It asks for access to your email via Apple's Mail app which I don't use
3. I got a lot of 404s anyway
4. Many sites require manual intervention to work
Assumption that people use Apple services by default is wild
Well my coworkers and I realized that the opt out form just needed an address. We contemplated pulling all known addresses for the entire country and automating submitting them all over several months to opt everyone out. I don’t think it ever materialized but we had a good chuckle about the emergency meeting the Yellow Pages web devs would have had and at what percentage of opt outs.
The delivery-people got overwhelmed and eventually just resorted to putting the stacks and stacks of phone books into piles and burning them. It took a long time until they got caught because nobody really misses a phone book.
i think we got a season pass to 6 flags out of it, but i'm not positive
Jokes aside, I unironically suspect the purpose of many opt-out forms is merely to record the up-to-date information.
How many require you to make an account or confirm your email address/phone?
Right, so my suspicion was correct: I'm the only one being inconvenienced by the same old captchas.
The reCAPTCHA v3 Enterprise version and MtCaptcha cost a whopping 3x as much ($3 per 1000 solves). Seems like they're the best CAPTCHAs to go for.
"Select stairs": okay, does that mean the railing too? And probably some percentage of people clicked rails, so now I have meta it and guess if that percentage is enough to throw off my guess.
"Select motorbike": okay, but you're showing me a bicycle. I'll click "skip". FAIL. TRY AGAIN. Sighs.. okay, I guess the average person is so dim-witted they will misidentify a bicycle for a motorbike.
Supporting Systemd should be easy. Not sure what windows uses.
For consumers, it's already available though! You can join 275K of your neighbors and sign up.
It feels like the system is rigged and we need a better answer
Does this work for anyone outside the US as well? e.g. Will it work for an Australian?
A few of these services ask you to go find your record among their lists first, so you can confirm which record you want removed using the URL of the record. So either it has to guess on that, or simply isn't doing it.
> Searches each data broker site for your name + state
Is this US only or would it also work for international profiles (and if so what would be the "state" equivalent)?
Would interesting to see the success rate for Claude Cowork or Codex’s equivalent feature.
I hate spam = the only reason I built it. No other intention behind it.
I posted here to get support on making it better so others can use it.
I'll take some of these comments and start iterating on them.
Feel free to submit anything directly to the repo or fork and make it better for your own set up.
Sometimes it feels like US-Americans have lost all faith in their government’s ability to improve their lives -i can understand it but at the same time where will this lead?
I would love to see a do-one-thing-well, open-source alternative to them. But IMO this alternative must be super understandable and secure. Maybe npm and a (for me) unknown API is the wrong choice for that.
But there are other times where I am wrong too and I even comment on threads with less upvotes because the topic is so interesting yet my comment just ends up being isolated.
It's really more like a 50/50.
Even the one post of mine which had reached the front page of Hackernews was something that I absolutely knew could reach front page but then there weren't much responses for a few days but then after a few days, I saw that it was re-uploaded (I think that Hn selects a few submissions which are interesting, I forgot how that mechanism worked) and then I reached the front page of Hackernews ;)
Either way, I think people should just make what they feel is interesting but I remember reading some article once which said a few things which this article follows:
1. I built XYZ... gets more frontpage than we built XYZ...
2. having (Open source) in the title increases the chances too
This article has both of them so its definitely interesting to see it on front page, either way its an really interesting project :-D
Do they even care if I'm not from their countries of origin?
This always felt like theater to me. They say "we deleted it, trust me bro" and we're supposed to believe it?
Requirements
macOS (uses launchd for scheduling and Messages for iMessage)
Node.js 18+
Playwright browsers installed
HN Launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30605010
Promo codes: https://www.optery.com/optery-promo-codes/