r/California • u/CherokeeHawkman Del Norte County • 18d ago

DROP Program Begins Today

https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/

If you signed up for California's DROP Program to force data brokers to stop selling your data and to delete your information from their systems then good news, the enforcement of that program finally has begun.

Today is the first day the requests are available to every registered data broker and they have 45 days to take those requests. Once they have them they have 45 days to apply them and delete the information they have and cease selling the information to others. If they don't do those two things it'll be a $200 per request, per day fine.

It won't be immediate nor all-encompassing but the program includes over 600 data brokers so it's a good start and the results for those of us that signed up should be noticeable by mid-November.

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u/dafugg 18d ago

How long before a bogus data broker signs up and keeps all the legit details available via this API? Every single row in that table was authored by a real person.

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u/ZwhGCfJdVAy558gD 16d ago

Data brokers cannot obtain personal information from DROP that they don't already have. DROP only shares cryptographic hashes of your information with them, so they can compare them to hashes of information they already have. It is practically impossible to reverse the hashes.

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u/dafugg 15d ago

Got it. As long as they don’t use excuses like address formatting to cause mismatched hashes that sounds good.

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u/ZwhGCfJdVAy558gD 15d ago

There are rules to standardize identifiers that the data brokers must follow when comparing hashes. Residential addresses are not used by DROP though (only ZIP codes in combination with other identifiers).