If you live in California you can now tell data brokers to delete your personal information. Here’s how to do it

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https://lapublicpress.org/2026/07/data-broker-california-drop/

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the real question is; how will one be able to verify that the data has indeed been deleted?

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“Would you like to check our database for your personal data? Please fill out this form with your personal data.”

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Reminds of that website some guy created where you had to type in your credit card details to find out if someone had your credit card details 🤔

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Fucking genius.

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I seriously doubt 75% of password strength checkers for that very reason.

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And they will definitely actually totally for sure do it!

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they pinky promise 😂

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she/her/hers

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.

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deleted is a column in a database

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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.

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If you live anywhere, you can tell data brokers to delete your data. Will they, whether they’re in California or not?

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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.

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Hello fellow Californians

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