Hank Asher turned Americans’ private information into a business

ozan42

https://archive.ph/uFN1R (without a paywall)

pizzafeelsright

I worked with a gentleman who worked with Asher. I learned a lot about databases and people's data through those conversations.

I think the solution to data privacy is to require companies to provide the receipts of where they obtained the data. Know my age? I didn't tell you. You bought it? From whom? Follow up with them. No receipt? Fine paid directly to the individual. Make PII data property.

jonas21

The New York Times buys information from similar databases and uses it to determine the articles that are recommended to you on their site (among other things) [1]. Ironically, that may be the reason the submitter saw this article in the first place.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/privacy

cobertos

I always wonder how this sort of data ends up escaping into the wild en-masse. Everytime I've come up against wanting public records they're not public by way of API public. They're always public with no easy way to get at them yourself en-masse, and no one is willing to write any code to get at them en-masse. Seems like the big players have cornered it

Court records for instance

jazzyjackson

> They influence [...] how long I wait on hold when I call a customer-service line.

say what?!

shortcake27

Good for him. Now it’s time to make it illegal to gather and/or sell personal information without explicit consent.

ds

A huge part of what we are building at https://redact.dev is a unified software suite for managing all data about you and that you created.. To date, that has mostly been data you create yourself ( tweets, fb posts, discord DM's, emails, etc.. ) but the bigger challenge is creating a simple interface that allows people to manage all this data about you thats floating out there that you DIDNT create.

Its not just data broker removals- Its alexa recordings, youtube search history, your mailing preferences, and like 9999 other things. Data brokers are just one part of it.

I enjoy the work we do but it also sucks having to do it. Each endpoint is its own challenge and doing something as simple as automating removal from one database can take days of a developers time. It will be a beautiful day when this stuff gets outlawed eventually.

paulpauper

$100s of millions of dollar of pre-ipo wealth. one step below paper wealth. It would seem like in the late 90s wealth was fleeting like that, not like today where ppl in tech seem to get rich and stay rich (like Stipe, Coinbbase, Dorpbox, and others). Riches to rags stories seemed more common 2-3 decades ago compared to today.

Mistletoe

The privacy Antichrist, I guess I should have known one must exist somewhere.

xtc283

How does one uncover a LexID?

envsubst

The credit card industry existed for decades before this.

ako

Thought this would be about mark zuckerberg….

dventimi

[dead]

thedudeabides5

[flagged]

29athrowaway

How to be happier: Add these to your /etc/hosts to prevent gratitious anxiety

    127.0.0.1 nytimes.com
    127.0.0.1 wsj.com
    127.0.0.1 washingtonpost.com
    127.0.0.1 cnn.com
    127.0.0.1 foxnews.com