At last! California residents can block data brokers selling personal info

Data brokers scrape together your most personal information—including where you’ve lived in the past and who belongs to your family, both immediate and extended—and then sell it openly on the web. As you might guess, that can be a hazard not just for online privacy and security, but also for your real-world safety. But this danger may soon ease, thanks to California’s Delete Act (SB 362), which is now going into full effect.

Passed in 2023, the law requires a system for residents to remove themselves from all data broker sites with a single request, beginning in 2026. (A previous California law mandates that data brokers must register with the state.) Currently, that covers over 500 data brokers.

Now that January 1 has arrived, so too has the state’s new DROP site (“Delete Request and Opt-out Platform”), which can be found at https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/. To use the opt-out tool, California residents must take three steps:

1. Confirm their California residency.
2. Create a profile that contains basic personal information.
3. File the DROP request, which will then be sent to all 545 brokers currently registered in California.

DROP requests became available at the start of January 2026. Data brokers must begin honoring the requests on August 1, 2026, at which time they have 90 days to remove all of your information. Afterward, they must delete data every 45 days.

Think of this as similar to the United States’ national Do Not Call Registry, which lets you put in a single request to block all telemarketing calls. The difference? Right now, this only applies to California residents. But consumer protection laws in California often spread to other states, either through direct influence or because accommodating such legislation will change businesses’ standard operations.

For example: Credit freezes started in California, and eventually spread to other states with slight variations. The 2017 Equifax hack then caused them to become standardized (and free) across the U.S., after Congress took up the matter.

What makes the Delete Act so exciting is that until now, removing your info from data broker sites was like playing whack-a-mole. You’d get it purged from some people-finder sites, only for the same data (or even fresh data) to appear on new ones. It was a never-ending task. Now you only have to put in the request once.

Here’s to hoping residents of other states get to enjoy the same simplicity, too.