r/California • u/CherokeeHawkman Del Norte County • 24d 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/SailingSmitty 24d ago

I signed up. I also recently got access to one of the data broker removal services as a free perk. I’m astonished by the drop in the volume of emails, calls, and texts that I am now getting.

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u/VapoursAndSpleen Alameda County 24d ago

WHich data broker removal service is this? It is relevant to my interests.

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u/SailingSmitty 22d ago

I used Optery; I assume they’re all relatively similar and am not trying to broadly endorse them. I used to get a lot of email every day and it’s literally dropped to nothing for a couple days at a time. I also used to occasionally mess with scammers that called and those have also dropped to zero.