Alternatives
Products that do what RFC End Citizen Data Sales Act (California) does
The sale of personal information by the government is something that has always really bothered me. This is a bill I drafted that would stop the DMV, voter registration, property tax records, and the post office from selling or publishing without explicit user consent. It would also require personal information to be accompanied with the provenance of that data. This way, a user can track down who or what is publishing their data and take action to end their relationship with that company. I would appreciate any feedback, because I am sure I am missing some second and third order effects…
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- 2GL
I've long been into finding deals on government auction sites (seizures, surplus sales etc.) - right now for example San Diego DHS is selling 26 tons of lead shot, with bidding starting at $1,000 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It has historically been extremely tedious though: scanning dozens of janky sites which have interminable page loading times; back buttons take you all the way back to the homepage etc. The site I built - GovAuctions - lets you search every government surplus auction at once. You can filter by location, category, and price, save items to a watchlist, and get alerts when new auctions…
Apr 2026 · govauctions.app
- 3TT
Before starting, i posted about america pac's unethical data collection a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139801 Please read the linked cnbc's story, it explains almost everything there Long story short, america pac collects user data while lying and hiding its true intentions. Apparently, the data they collect might (and probably will be) used for door to door canvassing for donald trump. I find this deeply unethical and shady. I thought a nice idea to waste door to door canvasser's time was to pollute the database with fake names, fake emails... i've…
2024 · github.com
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- 5RT
The NSA metadata gathering and passive monitoring is quite upsetting, and we don't have much confidence in legal changes happening quickly, so we put together a really simple consumer VPN service. We're still cleaning up the UI and making the install process easier, but it should work for people now. Yes, it's based in the US, but there's a big difference between "will turn over data proactively" and "will push back on requests to the fullest extent of the law". Since we don't fall under CALEA, there's no requirement for us to have any monitoring infrastructure. We're focusing on the mobile…
2013
- 6
I signed up for a paid service to get my phone, addresses, and vehicles off the public internet. It didn’t work. So I built remove-your-data, an open-source repo that tells your agent exactly what to do to remove your personal information online.
8d ago · github.com
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- 8DY
Hi Hackernews, I've started a service which deletes your personal data from data resellers/traders which as a result stops you receiving sales or recruiter calls/emails.The service forces companies which sell your data to Sales teams and recruiters to delete it. This works via GDPR and CCPA. You probably have never heard of companies, like Cognism, VoilaNorbert, etc., which have received millions of dollars of investment selling your personal data without people knowing. Example data stored by these companies: Data about you: Full name, First name, Last Name, Email (verified),…
2021
- 9GS
While I love the EU's new data privacy regulation from a user's perspective, it's a nightmare for businesses to achieve compliance, because of the (sometimes intentionally) vague language of the law. And even if you pay an experienced lawyer to draft the policies and procedures required by GDPR, there's a very real residual risk of predatory law firms collecting penalties from mass-mailed cease-and-desist letters based on technicalities. Even if your business isn't located within the EU, you are required to comply with GDPR because the location of the user matters. I've built a tool that…
2018
- 10LP
I built the desktop app that detects and redacts personal data (or PII) locally without sending any text to server. It supports rule-based filtering and AI model-based redaction (eg openai privacy filter). It's open source and free. Please check out the repo and https://pii-gui.vercel.app/
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 11SH
Needed this in my own work, anonymizing PII/PHI and decided to build this because presidio didn't really cut it for our use-case. Try it and maybe let me know if you have any feedback :)
2025 · github.com
- 12PW
Over the weekend we built Parliament Wow. It's hacky, buggy and slightly broken but it does the job :) Parliament Wow makes it easy to find out what is going on in parliament and what it actually means for you and me. We know that nobody has the time to watch hours of debates, drown in legal paperwork or keep up with the implications of every vote. Not me or you and least of all your MPs. There is just too much data. So we made a solution. We paired some semantic search with every publicly accessible document, audio recording or transcript we could get our hands on + some generative models…
2024 · parliament-wow.threepointone.workers.dev
- 13WD
2013 · pastebin.com
- 14GT
2018 · dropbox.com
- 15SC
We are big fans of Netlify [1] (it powers our website and blog!) and we wanted to scratch our own itch to comply with GDPR, as well as various upcoming data security regulations [3]. So we, Very Good Security [2], just released an add-on that lets you securely collect sensitive data (e.g. payments, PII, SSNs, identification, etc.) via web forms on Netlify. With the new add-on, Netlify customers are shielded from data liability, breach risk and the compliance issues that come with holding sensitive data. So you can inherit PCI compliance from VGS (a level 1 service provider) and can…
2019
- 16CA
Hey HN I’ve been thinking a lot about barriers to civic participation. Most people don’t show up to town halls. They don’t respond to traditional surveys. And a lot of online political spaces feel loud, adversarial, or exhausting. So I started wondering what happens if you make participation radically lightweight. That’s where Civie comes in. Each day you answer one to three short civic questions. It takes under a minute. Responses are anonymous. Results are shown only in aggregate. Over time, those responses accumulate into an open dataset anyone can explore. This isn’t scientific polling,…
Feb 2026 · civie.org
- 17DN
Hello HN! A few days ago I saw a comment on reddit which proposed a service that allowed the user to spam a website's server logs with messages objecting to the presence of various anti-features like popups, noisy ads, and autoplaying content. The idea tickled my fancy, so I've put together a Chrome extension which detects if a page is using Google Analytics, and if so it injects a small script which sends bunk utm (urchin tracking module) data to the GA backend. It sets the traffic source to "DO NOT WANT!", and the campaign name to various things like "I do NOT want noisy ads!" Here's the…
2017
- 18HT
Step 1: Sign up for an account at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/loginClient.xhtml and sign into your account Step 2: Go to http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB786 Step 3: Click on the "Comments To Author" tab Step 4: Choose "Oppose" and write your comment. A suggested comment (improvised from Ron Garret's blog at http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/cutting-to-chase-repeal-california.html) might be: Dear Chairman Dickinson, I would like to have the following comments entered into the record for the March 11 hearing on the California Money…
2013
- 19DE
Hi HN! I built this after seeing several references to Election Truth Alliance on social media, and after reading their analysis, I just couldn't get the problems I saw in it out of my head. So I downloaded the data, and rebuilt their full analysis from scratch. Their critical error is a simple misunderstanding of the Law of Large Numbers: values collected in large samples converge to the true probability in the sample distribution. (not to be confused with the Law of Very Large Numbers: which states that unlikely things happen given enough time. That confused me too) Technical Details: - No…
2025 · sullivan.zip
- 20AF
Hi, I'm Robert Karl, a software engineer, cryptocurrency trader, and creator of CBR ( https://CostBasis.Report/ ). I wanted to report gains from trading to tax authorities, but found existing crypto-tax solutions were not great. There are some very fully featured tax solutions out there. I believe there is even a YC company that can solve this problem. However, I found that for my use case, which includes less than 100 trades, the existing sites would charge me between $150 and $800 for a handful of PDFs. I wasn't sure that made sense given the server-side costs to generate…
2019
- 21TM
Hi HN, I’ve been frustrated that I only find out how my representatives voted when the news cycle decides to cover it, so I built a simple script that texts me a digest instead. What it is: • Pick daily / weekly / bi-weekly / monthly • Get one SMS listing each vote cast by your House rep + both Senators • Messages include bill numbers, your rep’s “Yea/Nay/Present”, a one-sentence summary, and a link to congress.gov How to try it: 1. Open the link (above) 2. Fill the Google Form with name + phone 3. Text “YES” back to opt in (First month is free with code "PRODHUNT"…
2025 · sites.google.com
- 221C
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…
2011
- 23IM
Hi there! I've been working with data in one form or another, professionally, for about 5 years. I've been thinking about my own personal data and how it's used for at least twice that long. I've been sort of building something in my head for a while that solves my own problem and, in the beginning of this year, I found the opportunity to spend some time building it out. I'll leave the detailed explanation to the blog post but, in short, I built what amounts to an API crawler combined with a data processor to help you download your personal data from 3rd party services and work with it using…
2024 · joshcanhelp.com
- 24PA
Been working on data sovereignty recently and started this list. Hope you can contribute too.
2025 · github.com
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