Delete your digital history from dozens of companies with this app

Americans finally have some privacy rights. Permission Slip makes telling companies to delete or not sell your data simple. Really.

Analysis by Geoffrey A. Fowler
Columnist
Updated October 3, 2023 at 11:11 a.m. EDT | Published October 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

Note: The surge of interest in the Permission Slip app has caused technical difficulties for Consumer Reports. If you can’t get on it right away, try again later today.

Sick of companies grabbing and selling your address, birth date, location, online activity, dog food brand and even adult-film preferences? Oh boy, do I have some good news. ... A new iPhone and Android app called Permission Slip makes it super simple to order companies to delete your personal information and secrets. Trying it saved me about 76 hours of work telling Ticketmaster, United, AT&T, CVS and 35 other companies to knock it off.

Did I mention Permission Slip is free? And it’s made by an organization you can trust: the nonprofit Consumer Reports. I had a few hiccups testing it, but I’m telling everyone I know to use it. This is the privacy app all those snooping companies don’t want you to know about. ... Here’s how it works: Following California in 2020, a dozen states passed laws that finally gave Americans some digital privacy rights. They empower us to tell companies to stop selling and delete our data, but the truth is they’re pretty painful to take advantage of. You have to jump through hoops, going to each and every company that might have your data to fill out forms.

Until now. Permission Slip acts behind the scenes as a legally “authorized agent” — kind of like your own privacy butler. You tell the app your name, email address(es) and phone number, and it does most of the work, sending emails and filling out paperwork on your behalf after it has verified your information. Even if your state isn’t one of the ones with a privacy law, most national companies respect these sorts of data privacy requests from all Americans. ... After using Permission Slip, most people notice a decrease in creepy targeted ads, says Ginny Fahs, who has been working on the app for the past three years at the Innovation Lab, a division of Consumer Reports.

So how do you get started? Permission Slip opens up to a series of cards you swipe through, each representing a company that collects and possibly sells your data. Tap on a company card, and up pops a summary of data the company knows and your options to take action, depending on whether you have an account. At the bottom, you usually get two options: “Do Not Sell My Data” or “Delete My Account.” Tap one and Permission Slip starts the process.

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By Geoffrey A. Fowler
Geoffrey A. Fowler is The Washington Post’s technology columnist based in San Francisco. He joined The Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal. He won the 2020 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. Twitter https://twitter.com/geoffreyfowler