January 27, 2026
Dark patterns, darker comments
We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)
Privacy group dumps tricky opt-out forms; commenters cry 'email isn't proof'
TLDR: A privacy group refuses tricky web forms, saying email is faster and fairer for data requests. Commenters roasted the site’s downtime, blamed AI scrapers, and disputed that email proves identity—while others shared archive links—making the real battle about trust, verification, and how hard companies make privacy rights.
A privacy nonprofit says online opt-out forms are a maze of dark patterns and time sinks, pushing people to give extra info, wrangle CAPTCHAs, and still get downgraded to “do not sell” instead of full deletion. They claim email requests are faster and already verified by the sender’s account. The internet heard this—and promptly dunked on the site for… not loading. One commenter sneered, “that site doesn’t seem to support pages loading,” before launching into a rant about AI scrapers hammering sites at “thousands of requests per minute,” calling out Baidu and OpenAI by name. Meanwhile, the pedants arrived: “This is not how email works,” snapped a user, challenging the “email = verification” claim. Others bypassed the outage with classic Hacker News survival tools, dropping Wayback Machine links and archive.ph mirrors like they were passing around underground zines. The article’s stats—68.5% of sites with at least one dark pattern and even fines for illegal ID demands—had the crowd nodding, but the real heat was over whether email is actually safer or just lazier. Verdict: forms are friction by design, but the comments turned it into a fight over broken sites and broken assumptions.
Key Points
- •Conscious Digital refuses to redirect users to companies’ online opt-out forms and prefers email-based privacy requests.
- •The article documents common form issues: excessive verification data, fragmented requests, CAPTCHAs, reinterpretation of deletion requests, and data-location requirements.
- •A 2024 study found 68.5% of websites use at least one dark pattern in privacy request forms.
- •Studies report 11.2% of opt-out forms fail due to malfunction, offline steps, or login requirements; 10% of data brokers require government IDs or residency documents.
- •California fined a national retailer $345,178 for illegally requiring government identification in opt-out requests; email via YourDigitalRights.org is positioned as faster and simpler.