California’s Free Data Deletion Program Is Now Working

How (and Why) to Remove Yourself From Data Miners Tracking You, Using California's New Privacy Website

Data brokers sell everything they know about you—browsing history, pregnancies, Social Security numbers—to organizations like ICE and CBP, under a recent LexisNexis contract worth up to $22.1 million. The post How (and Why) to Remove Yourself From Data Miners Tracking You, Using California’s New Privacy Website appeared first on L.A. TACO.

Why California just gave the Delete Act real teeth

Registered data brokers were required to begin accessing the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform on Aug. 1.

California’s free data deletion program is now working

It’s no secret our personal information is all over the internet. “[It's a] $300, $400 billion industry, and you and I are the product,” said Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, also known as CalPrivacy. Data brokers are a big part of that industry. “Data brokers are companies that you and [...]

California's single deletion request now reaches more than 600 registered data brokers at once, and the best-known independent test of removal methods found that even manual opt-out, the top performer in that study, cleared only about 70 percent of the profiles researchers had found

Tension: California has built the first deletion mechanism that treats data removal as a standing obligation rather than a single transaction, and the only rigorous field test of manual removal suggests roughly a third of what researchers found stayed put. Noise: Coverage has treated August 1 as a launch date, when consumer requests opened seven months earlier — what changed this month is that brokers became legally obliged to act on requests al…