California launches DROP: one request wipes your data from hundreds of brokers

California has offered its residents a new way to push back against the harvesting of personal data. As of August 1, 2026, data brokers registered in the state are required to honor requests submitted through the government platform DROP (Delete Request Opt-out Platform).

The point of the service is to spare people from having to contact every company individually. Instead of corresponding with roughly 600 registered brokers, a Californian files a single request through the DROP website, and it applies to all of them at once. Since January 1, about 350,000 residents of the state have used the platform.

How it works

Once a broker receives a request, it must process it within 45 days; for each new request that clock starts over. Companies that ignore the requirement risk a fine of $200 a day for every affected California resident.

The regulator has already shown it is willing to impose penalties. According to the Cal Privacy agency, twelve data brokers were fined tens of thousands of dollars each — for failing to register with the DROP system at all.

“Our data is oil”

Cal Privacy executive director Tom Kemp describes what is happening without any illusions: in the digital economy, personal information has become a raw material, and the user has become a product. Every online purchase, every stream watched, or plain everyday surfing leaves traces that get collected, packaged into “digital dossiers,” and sold.

Kemp illustrates the familiar upshot of this trade with a picture everyone knows: search for a pair of red shoes just once, and they will chase you around in ads for another three weeks. But it is not only marketers who are interested in the data — so are bad actors. Kemp speaks about the coming cleanup in vivid terms: soon, he says, everyone will hear a “giant sucking sound” of information leaving the brokers' databases. Going through 600 companies by hand, he notes, is simply unrealistic: “Who has time for that?”

The agency is a reminder of the tool's limits. Only California residents can use DROP, and deleting data held by brokers does not erase all the information that has already spread across the internet. Staying wary of scammers and taking other measures to protect personal data still rest on the user's own shoulders.

Source: Hacker News