Category: Privacy News

If you’ve sent a deletion request through California’s DROP tool, you’ve probably seen a one-word result next to each data broker. It’s easy to read “Deleted” as “gone” and “Record not found” as “good news.” The state’s own explanations are a little more careful than that, so I went through them. Quick background: DROP is…

On Wednesday, October 21, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay the state a $25 billion civil penalty. The order followed a jury verdict from September that found Meta misled users about how their information was handled. Meta says it will appeal. I’m not a lawyer, and this one…

If you’ve followed the Flock Safety story, it’s easy to file it under “cameras are creepy.” I think the lawsuits point at something more specific, and it matters for anyone whose data sits in someone else’s database, which is nearly everyone. Here is what has been filed. Everything below is an allegation. None of these…

A question came up in the comments on one of my LinkedIn posts: “How would a B2B company know if it counts as a data broker?” It’s a good one, because the honest answer is that being B2B doesn’t get you out of it. Neither does being based somewhere other than California. I’m not a…

We’ve written twice now about California’s data broker crackdown — first about the DROP platform itself, then about CalPrivacy’s first combined CCPA-and-Delete-Act enforcement action against a broker that demanded a piece of your Social Security number just to let you opt out. Add a third name to that list, and it may be the one…

We wrote a few weeks ago about California’s DROP platform — the free, state-run tool that lets any California resident send one deletion request to every registered data broker at once. The pitch is simple: one request, every broker, done. What we didn’t dwell on then is what happens when a broker doesn’t play along.…

Two states passed major data broker laws this year: Connecticut in May and New Jersey in June. If you live in either one, you may have seen a headline calling it “sweeping” or citing eye-popping fines. What you probably didn’t see is that these two laws do almost opposite things. Only one of them is…