Have you ever wanted to see a list of every company that holds your personal data like your email address, name, date of birth and even your exact location? The internet is exploding in its growth and it seems like everyone has their own way of collecting data about you these days.
I was watching Mrwhosetheboss on Youtube (his videos are addicting!) and he mentioned an app called Say Mine, which I checked out. To my surprise, this is one of those gems that is actually worth an ad spot on the platform, so I’d like to share it with you all today. As a reminder, this is not a sponsored article and I am talking about it out of personal interest.
Say Mine is similar to my favorite data control web app, Unroll.me, which lets you see a list of every company that has your email address and unsubscribe from them all en masse. The only difference is that Say Mine lets you see a list of about 90% of the companies that keep your personal information on their servers and automates the data erasure request. Forget about EU or state data destruction laws that online sites must comply with.
Now, since each person lives in a different location, I’m not that interested in what happens to each user, but what I do know is that over the past week, several websites have responded to my automated requests. My data was, in fact, removed from their servers! Of course, it’s hit or miss depending on who you’re asking to forget you, as the law says (at least GDPR) for purposes related to helping you exercise your freedom of expression and right to information. With legal judgments or obligations, and requests sent from Say Mine may be rejected.
What I find particularly exciting is that the app’s dashboard shows the number of companies that hold your data, how many companies you’ve already retrieved your information from, and a total ‘Data Ownership Progress’ bar as seen below.
Billing itself as the ‘future of data ownership’, Say Mine works by scanning only the subject lines of your emails to compile a list. Yes, this means you log in with your email address and give Say Mine your data, but doing so should be a personal choice. The group says they want to be the ‘poster child for data privacy measures’ and if you don’t feel like it, you can always delete your data and account on Say Mine.
Coming soon is the ability to see how the company handles deletion requests before sending these recoveries, so you can make more informed decisions. Before sending a request, you can already see a bar or risk meter for each company that shows the probability of being hacked in the preview window, which is one of my favorite features, although admittedly, I’m not sure how it’s calculated.