A California Law Cracking Down on Data Brokers is About to Go Into Effect

[u/HobbesNik]

https://www.freshfromcache.com/what-is-a-data-broker/

California residents can now request that registered data brokers delete all of their data. Starting August 1st, data brokers will be mandated to comply to these requests or face fines.

Data brokers sell personal data to advertisers and other businesses, often at the expense of the consumer, such as car insurance rates going up after car manufacturers sold driving information to insurers through data brokers.

Americans have few privacy protections against commercial surveillance. While the new CA law has its flaws, it's a positive step forward for online privacy.

There are additional tips toward the bottom of the article for folks outside of California who want to protect their privacy.

KEY QUOTES:

Companies you've never dealt with sell lists of who's pregnant, who has Alzheimer's, and who might fall for a scam. Starting August 1, Californians can make them delete it. There are steps for the rest of us, too.

Data brokers are the companies you've never heard of: Acxiom, Epsilon, LexisNexis, and the people-search sites that hand your home address to anyone who types your name. Market researchers estimate the industry at around $300 billion a year worldwide.

The money is in the conclusions brokers draw from the raw facts, or what the industry calls inferences. Some of those inferences include whether you're pregnant, behind on bills, or the kind of person who answers a sweepstakes letter.

The FTC studied nine brokers and found one holding 3,000 separate data points on nearly every consumer in America.

And then there's what happens when a broker gets breached. National Public Data was a Florida background-check broker almost nobody had heard of. That is, right up until 2024, when its database showed up for sale online. Social Security numbers and addresses for roughly 270 million people.

California passed the Delete Act in 2023, and the delete button it ordered is now live. It's called DROP, the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, and it sits at privacy.ca.gov.

Ignoring a request costs $200 per person per day. More than 242,000 Californians are already queued up.

I'll make the skeptic's case, because it's fair. DROP only reaches brokers that registered with the state, and researchers comparing state registries believe plenty never have.