If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free.
https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/115823137786391729
Note: aside from this thread, there is also further discussion in the linked Mastodon toot.
I appreciate your cynicism, but I’m not personally inclined towards it. I think what it will ultimately boil down to, which you alluded to, is how the law is enforced. If they get fined as a first measure but then get taken to court for a second failure by California’s attorney general and get subsequently bankrupted, it might stand as an example to others.
Or maybe they’ll still say the potential risk is still worth it. I dunno. We’ll just have to see how this goes, but it’s still better than the current options, which are:
None of those are great, so I’m hopeful this is the start of something better.
Earlier in the year I read an article claiming that something like 40% of the data brokers doing business here (ie collecting data on California citizens) don’t comply with elements of existing law, such as registering with the CA secretary of state. So the author wasn’t bullish on the idea that they’d suddenly start just because there’s a new law. They are sayign the AG will aggressively pursue violators, but we’ll see.
If nothing else, we’ll have one more data store to get hacked.