"What changed was not the sudden arrival of a sweeping new law, but the scale and seriousness of enforcement. Regulators began enforcing privacy in volume and with meaningful financial consequences, signaling that these rules were no longer theoretical. Enforcement actions involving brands like Honda, Healthline , Sling and Todd Snyder clarified how privacy rules were meant to work in practice. Expectations around opt-outs, user experience and data handling became far more concrete."
"Enforcement made privacy operational The defining feature of 2025 was specificity. State regulators moved beyond asking whether companies offered privacy rights and began empirically testing how those rights functioned in practice. Opt-out mechanisms were clicked, timed and evaluated; public-facing language was reviewed for clarity and intent; and UX patterns were scrutinized for friction. Regulators probed the nature of the data leaving the browser and how it was repurposed downstream. The Healthline matter was a wake-up call."
Regulatory enforcement in 2025 moved from theoretical to operational, using volume and meaningful fines to clarify obligations. State regulators tested privacy rights empirically, clicking and timing opt-outs, reviewing public-facing language for clarity, and scrutinizing UX for friction. Investigations looked past collection to data flows after user choices, penalizing cases where opted-out data still fed audience creation, targeting models, or downstream analytics. Prominent enforcement actions involving brands such as Honda, Healthline, Sling, and Todd Snyder made expectations concrete. Cookie banners and transplanted GDPR consent models no longer satisfy US compliance, and 2026 will operate with far less ambiguity.
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