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Show HN: 1-click opt-out from websites selling your personal information

9 points by useflyer ↗ HN
We're huge privacy advocates; when we saw a post last week discussing how to opt-out from background checks and services selling your personal information, we knew we could add our support. The process of manually opting-out is arduous, time consuming, and serpentine. Some websites offer to do it for you (for up to $500 a year) but don't tell you what they're doing, where, and how.

MELONCARD.com is our contribution. You upload your information once, and then click the opt-out button for the services of your choice. We send the emails, faxes, and forms where possible, and email you pre-formatted and addressed letters for the rest. When you're done, you purge all of your data from our system. It takes 2 minutes, and its totally free.

We'd love your feedback and for you to use our system; visit http://meloncard.com and help us increase privacy for all

6 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] thread
sorbus
That looks pretty great. I love the look of your front page - the only thing that doesn't fit is the line of social network buttons, but those are easily forgiven. Your privacy policy is very much to-the-point, which is nice, but (as a geek), it would be nice to know what you're doing to keep the information protected. Your Terms of Service are using the same style as the privacy policy, which squeezes it down and makes it much harder to read (no, I wasn't reading through all of it, I was just looking at that page), so you might want to change that.

Anyways, moving on to actually trying the service. Using Facebook login, it works pretty well, though slowly - graph.facebook.com hangs for quite a while. It would be nice if you could pull more information than my email address from Facebook, since all of the other things you ask for could be present in that profile. Not sure if their API allows that, though. And I continue to love the visual style.

The electronic opt-outs are completely painless, which is awesome.

So yeah; great service, completely painless, one that I will probably recommend to anyone who wants to opt-out from marketing.

useflyer
Thanks for the great feedback; we've fixed the styling on the privacy policy and TOS to make it much more legible. We're a little nervous about pre-populating information from Facebook as we want to err on the side of caution regarding personal info but will seriously consider this. We're adding new services by the day so check back soon and we'll have more to opt-out from!
PonyGumbo
How do you guys plan to monetize this?
useflyer
right now its free and on a donation system; currently competitors offer services which do less, aren't transparent, and are mostly faux benefit for hundreds of dollars, so we know there's value.

we can easily expand this to other services such as opting out of credit offers, etc, and begin charging a one-time fee down the road

MrMike
You're probably aware, but 12:35pm 8/22 - site is down.