Two party consent laws in California come down to a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and that has been worked out in the legal system over time to be pretty much any place with an open door or window, even a conference room inside a private business is fair game if the door is open to the hallway.

I’d recommend trying Ollama+OpenCode to DIY removals. It can at least help find the sites and their removal request pages, but then you’d need to solve captchas and do the requests.

–

Some of these PII removal companies go to great lengths to request removals on your behalf without providing ANY additional information that the data broker does not already have.

The problem is that nobody can tell which PII removal companies act responsibly and which ones are merely data brokers themselves.

Even the ones trying their best to not distribute more information about you need only to screw that up once, and that single incident of human error leads to a neverending cycle of leaks between downstream data brokers.

It’s the perfect industry for local AI agents to replace, but the only way to know you’re properly requesting removals without making matters worse is to do it yourself.

I don’t understand why protestors would even show up in Washington DC during the fascist parade like is being implied in the article.

The union protests and social unrest currently underway are not really related to Trump’s authoritarian birthday bash except for how the media paints them as a “warm up”.

Protesters would be better served popping up all over the country except in Washington DC during their synchronized goose stepping contest.

During one of the mass exodus events from Reddit to Lemmy, a lot of people started using these tools they would install to automatically scrub and obfuscate their Reddit comments and posts history. Often these tools would replace posts with random letters and even nonsense links because there was suspicion that outright deleted posts could be detected and then programmatically restored if Reddit really wanted to get that user content back.

I suspect these tools probably exist for Lemmy as well and you are seeing users with long comment histories use them because those also happen to be the users who have a lot of previous content to cover up/obfuscate to maintain/ensure their own privacy.