Without your true consent, when you buy a banana, brake hard in your car, download a fitness app or read news online, a company might pass on data about you to other businesses.
Privacy laws in some states, notably California, give people the right to tell most businesses not to sell or share information they collect or in some cases to delete data about you. Some companies apply California’s privacy protections to everyone.
To take advantage of those privacy rights, though, you often must fill out complicated forms with dozens of companies. Hardly anyone does. The opt-out rights give you power in principle, but not in practice.
If you use the Firefox web browser, go to Settings → Privacy & Security → and click the box that says, “Tell websites not to sell or share my data.”
The Brave browser automatically tells websites not to sell or share your data. So does Privacy Badger, software you can download from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that works with Google Chrome, Firefox or the Microsoft Edge browser.
If you choose one of these options, your order not to sell or share your data is legally binding or will be soon in at least nine states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas and Montana.
In California, the attorney general and privacy watchdog, the California Privacy Protection Agency, can verify that businesses are complying, or sue.
Caption from article by Shira Ovida.
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