I wish you the very best of success in your recovery efforts. It is a wise man who recognizes issues in his life, and takes steps to mitigate those issues. Much respect and solidarity. I am a recovering alcoholic of over two decades now. Sometimes when I’m at the store and wander by the alcohol isle, I think, ‘Gosh I sure am glad I don’t have to do that anymore.’ While I would never preclude anyone from consuming alcohol, the consumption of alcohol wasn’t my problem. It was that I allowed alcohol to consume me.

Onward and upward brother!

I understand the concern. I also imagine (I want to be optimistic here, maybe naively so) that most websites wants some form of analytics, probably does not code it themselves and instead of relying on aggregate data like a traffic counter of hits (maybe due to crawlers and other bad agents not respecting robots.txt) then went with somethings fancier. Maybe that fancier tool is trying to mitigate automated traffic with fingerprint detectors.

Well, one can understand and still disagree with it. I suggest contacting the administrator of such website with their concern BUT in the meantime, until they actually do act (which might be never) I suggest to start with self-defense and use dedicated tools e.g. Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection (you can use a non-Mozilla flavor of Firefox if you prefer) or even more specifically JShelter with its Fingerprint Detector.

I’m a country coordinator for a SMART Recovery country other than the US.

This is highly unlikely, but I will check this out.

I find the idea that SMART would sell your data highly unlikely. SMART is privacy focused. Nick names are encouraged, you can enter zoom meetings with camera and mic silenced. SMART definitely does not collect personal data, only attendance numbers for internal statistics. SMART accepts donations from recovery organizations, but does not have any obligations towards them.

As I said, I will follow up.

Much of IT is subcontracted, so there may be the origin, and it will be looked into.

BTW, SMART’s Financials are public. You are free to check if there is income from selling your data.

Mostly because rehab is very profitable and data brokers want that kind of info in your advertising profile just like any other trait that is easy for their customers to exploit for profit.

If a large employer is looking at a potential employee, they can and often do get detailed information from data brokers.

I think this is the only thing I disagree with. I’ve never heard of this happening, and I’ve worked at some very large companies that have very strict hiring practices. Even for them, they just pay a company to do a background check, which is basically just looking for a criminal record or sex offender registration. Maybe google their name and glance at their social media profiles.

If you’re concerned about this, I’d just use a separate browser for those sites, so that it’s not connected to the rest of your habits.

And once in a while I have decaf if I have a coffee craving in the evening. It still keeps me up a bit, but I think that’s just the placebo effect. Melatonin helps insomnia for me.