"Use a loyalty card at a drug store, browse the web, post on social media, get married or do anything else most people do, and chances are companies called data brokers know about it - along with your email address, your phone number, where you live and virtually everywhere you go. But starting Jan. 1, under the state's first-in-the-nation Delete Act, Californians can reduce the information brokers can gather and sell."
"'So many people still don't realize that these companies even exist, or the scale of the marketplace - the number of these companies that sell information about us,' said Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. The companies build dossiers that are increasingly supercharged by artificial intelligence to draw conclusions about a person's interests, family, politics, lifestyle, finances, sexual orientation and health. They sell those dossiers to advertisers and marketers, and, in some cases, to criminals, governments, landlords and employers."
Data brokers collect extensive personal information from everyday activities and assemble dossiers tied to contact details and location history. Many dossiers are now enhanced by artificial intelligence to infer interests, family, politics, lifestyle, finances, sexual orientation and health, and are sold to advertisers as well as other actors including criminals, governments, landlords and employers. The Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP), run by CalPrivacy, goes live Jan. 1 and allows one request to target more than 500 registered brokers. Brokers were given six months to process initial requests and deletions are scheduled to begin in August. The law was authored by Sen. Josh Becker and signed in 2023.
Read at The Mercury News
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