How to delete personal information from California data brokers
lapublicpress.org
California has deployed a new service that allows you to ask data brokers in the state to stop selling your personal information.
    • sunbeam60@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      19 hours ago

      To be fair, having gone through a couple of GDPR transitions, deleted in reality is often a full row in the PII table. All your actions and behaviour are still logged, there’s just longer any way to tie your ID back to PII.

  • EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.appEnglish
    17·
    1 day ago

    It’s absolutely worth requesting your data to be deleted regardless of where you live by claiming to live in California. I always provide the address of a post office in Cali as my address when requesting deletion.

    I do think it’s possible that some of them won’t delete your data upon request, failing to comply with the law, but I also think a lot of people on the internet are unduly influenced by doomers who want you to feel powerless and do nothing.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      12·
      1 day ago

      It’s absolutely worth requesting your data to be deleted regardless of where you live by claiming to live in California…

      I do think it’s possible that some of them won’t delete your data upon request, failing to comply with the law

      That’s not failure to comply with the law if you don’t actually live in California.

      People have a legal location of residence in the US.

      If you want to establish legal residency in a state, you’re typically looking at doing something like spending the majority of the year there.

      EDIT: I’d also be pretty confident, though the article doesn’t talk about it, that California won’t normally have jurisdiction for California state law unless a data broker is doing business in California, and that that will also be a constraining factor. Like, if a data broker company is only doing business in, say, Russia, the US will not enforce rulings against them regarding California state law in general.

      • huey_m@piefed.socialEnglish
        3·
        19 hours ago

        People have a legal location of residence in the US.

        In California, if you’re homeless, you typically have to set your mail up as “general delivery” to your nearest post office where you go to collect mail every few days. You probably don’t have any other address.

        Not sure how this interfaces with this specific law otherwise, but using a post office isn’t a bad idea generally because it isn’t a totally unexpected thing. A homeless person would probably list that as an address.

        There’s also a lot of mail services that will give you an address in that state and will open/scan received mail for you… not sure if California specifically has one, though. But yeah, this doesn’t establish legal residency at all, but many entities don’t look too closely either… might be worth a shot.

      • EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.appEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        I guess I should have said EVEN* failing to comply with the law, you caught me out on some pedantry, I admit it and concede

    • chillpanzee@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      23 hours ago

      Yeah, it’s not an accurate indication of what changed. As of Jan 2026, California has a new law and registry where residents can register with the State to have the state demand that the data brokers (those who bother to register with the CA Sec of State anyway) remove the California resident’s data.

      It’s got a fairly slow compliance deadline, so it’ll be a while before the whole rigamarole of some non-compliant broker actually getting fined, lawsuit, appeal, and an eventual majority opinion written by Associate Justice Butchug stating why California doesn’t have the right to protect its citizens because of some bullshit application of the interstate commerce clause and how it will cause undue harm to the data brokers that have him on payroll.

      It probably won’t change much for the average person, but at least the lawyers finally get a win.