Swipe Right on Privacy
Reading Time: 3 minutesProtecting Your Data Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. This App Makes It Easy., Permission Slip makes protecting your data as easy as using Tinder., Data privacy: Consumer Reports’ app Permission Slip asks companies to not collect or sell your data.
This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.
As a general rule, I don’t think too hard about my online data. I mindlessly click ‘Accept Cookies’ on every website I enter, and I occasionally fall victim to a targeted Instagram ad. I recognize the risk of throwing my info around online; consumer data can be used by law enforcement to help prosecute abortion cases or by political campaigns to micro-target their messaging. But at this point, I also know that the web of personal information I’ve spun in my years as an internet user is far too complex for me to untangle myself. As Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler says to Lizzie O’Leary on the Dec. 3 episode of MediaDownloader’s What Next: TBD, ‘once data is out there, it’s out there. You’re not in control of it anymore.’
That’s where Permission Slip comes in. The app, launched by Consumer Reports in 2022, and recently reviewed by Fowler for the Post, works a bit like a dating app for digital privacy. You swipe through a seemingly unending deck of cards representing companies that may be storing, using, and selling your data. On each card, you can click a button to see a summary of the specific types of data the company collects about its users and then choose how you want Permission Slip to help you. The app can ask a company to not sell your data to third parties, to delete your data, and/or to delete your account altogether. Once you decide what you want to do, Permission Slip takes over and begins working on your behalf—the app sends emails and can fill out company-specific privacy request forms, while tracking the progress of your request and following up with you once the request is processed.
Of course, in order for the app to actually be effective, you do have to give up some of your precious data to Permission Slip itself. One of the (many) ways companies try to dodge privacy requests is by asking for identity verification, so Permission Slip needs your email and phone number to tell those companies they have verified that you are who you say you are. (What the app doesn’t do—at least not yet—is collect scans of your ID, which some companies require to process the request. That could change if Consumer Reports wants to be exhaustive in the list of companies they cover, says Fowler.) Still, for the price of a very small chunk of our personal data, the app helps us take back control over a much bigger chunk.
Permission Slip works because Americans do, in fact, have some privacy rights, mostly thanks to a 2020 law known as the California Consumer Privacy Act. The CCPA gives consumers the right to ask corporations to delete our data and to prohibit them from selling that data to others—corporations have just become ‘expert at making it hard to figure out how to use those rights [and] what buttons to press,’ Fowler says. Ideally, federal privacy laws in America would be more explicit and comprehensive regarding what corporations can and cannot do with our data, but that is simply not the case for us right now—thanks Congress! Instead, Fowler says, ‘the onus falls on us as consumers to defend ourselves, to take action.’ Permission Slip makes taking action as easy as swiping on Tinder—and sets you up for a privacy-secured future for far longer than that Tinder relationship would have lasted.
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