Who's Selling My Info?

This is an open-source extension created by swow2015, swoconnor2, and 2br-2b. A link to the Github repo is https://github.com/swow2015/Who-sSellingMyInfo-.

Who's Selling My Info?

Firefox and Chromium Extension to detect pages with a California Consumer Privacy Act-mandated "Do Not Sell My Personal Information" link and notify users with a banner through which they can access the opt-out.

Background

What do Hulu, Walmart, and CNN have in common? You may not have noticed, but there's a new link on their website, along with 35.8% of the top 500 US websites.

As of July 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act mandates that websites which sell users' information post a link on their page allowing them to opt-out from this practice. The act requires this link to be "clear and conspicuous" as well as to be specifically titled "Do Not Sell My Personal Information"; however, a study revealed that most of these links are anything but. Companies use every trick in the book to hide the opt-out link in places that it won't be seen so that they can continue to sell users' information without them knowing it's even happening, let alone that there is a way to opt out.

The reason this law is so impactful is that it expands the definition of "personal information" beyond the scope of what's been considered as such in the past. While previous privacy laws like the GDPR focused on information identifying users by name, in the age of big data, companies don't need your name in order to identify who you are. As data brokers hold profiles containing thousands of pieces of information on nearly every US consumer, it takes as little as an identifying number stored in a cookie on your computer, your IP address, or even your browsing history for them to match your activity to a profile with your name and other personal information.

In an increasingly ubiquitous manner, such information is used to track more and more of our activity across the web, potentially revealing sensitive information about us like health conditions, sexual orientation, and political beliefs. An alarming number of websites sell the ability to track such activity to third parties without our knowledge or control. And once sold, it's impossible to say whose hands our information will eventually end up in, and how it will be used.