I don't know if anybody here uses Optery - a service for removing your personal data from Google and various data brokers and giving you a report on what they found and had removed - but this is quite a head-desk moment. The conversation at the company must have gone something like this:
A: How can we improve our service?
B: Well, some people are concerned about the amount of personal data they have to give us for the higher priced services. Any way we could reduce how much information we ask for?
A: Not sure and that would take a lot of time and research. Anybody have an easier idea for the short term?
C: I think we can reduce the time and workload of generating the removal reports and make them seem more tailored and less generic.
A: You have my attention.
C: We take all the data we have on the person and the deletion results... and send them to OpenAI to generate the report for us.
B: Wait, what?
A: I like it. Faster results and a more personal feel.
B: But... I already mentioned our customers are paranoid about privacy and have some trust issues with our service!
A: That's OK. We'll give them the ability to opt out.
B: You mean to opt in, right?
A: Let's get moving on this.
B: Opt in, right??
I thought everyone knew that these services are essentially a scam? They can't do anything more than you can do, and by the time you've provided them with all the info to go on, you could've done it all yourself.
I don't know if anybody here uses Optery - a service for removing your personal data from Google and various data brokers and giving you a report on what they found and had removed - but this is quite a head-desk moment. The conversation at the company must have gone something like this:
A: How can we improve our service?
B: Well, some people are concerned about the amount of personal data they have to give us for the higher priced services. Any way we could reduce how much information we ask for?
A: Not sure and that would take a lot of time and research. Anybody have an easier idea for the short term?
C: I think we can reduce the time and workload of generating the removal reports and make them seem more tailored and less generic.
A: You have my attention.
C: We take all the data we have on the person and the deletion results... and send them to OpenAI to generate the report for us.
B: Wait, what?
A: I like it. Faster results and a more personal feel.
B: But... I already mentioned our customers are paranoid about privacy and have some trust issues with our service!
A: That's OK. We'll give them the ability to opt out.
B: You mean to opt in, right?
A: Let's get moving on this.
B: Opt in, right??
One user's account of the story