Indeed. The CCPA is welcome, but this explicit opt-out just means that only broccoli of the technical caliber that frequents HN will realistically benefit from the law. This needs to go a step further and make opt-out the default for all to benefit. And it is the social duty of the technical broccoli that understand these things that need to push this for everyone's benefit.

As one of the technical broccoli like you, I think this is a good sentiment, but it would be much harder to legislate.

Are you willing to take a significant salary cut to benefit people?

All the big tech companies, Google, Meta, Netflix, etc make a huge amount of money by using Ads to push things people don't need onto them, brainwashing people. This brainwashing is massively more effective with data-collection.

If tech companies didn't hoard and sell people's data, the brainwashing would be less profitable, Google would pay lower salaries, and the entire industry's salaries would go down as a result.

Salaries in the US might drop from ~$500k to $250k for an average software engineer. Would you be willing to take that sort of cut?

You could also "vote with your feet" and move to europe where the GDPR protects everyone like you want, and your salary will drop to maybe $100k USD.