22 Jan 2026 Search

California’s Delete request and opt-out platform (DROP) has launched.

You can tell data brokers to delete and not sell your personal information.

This is an excellent idea, the deletions are scheduled to start taking effect on August 1, and other states will be copying DROP soon. But what if they didn’t have to?

Right now, if you want to do a deletion, you have to go to the DROP site and do a whole workflow with web forms and verification and stuff. We will be helping people out with this at the Oakland Privacy booth at Southern California Linux Expo in March.

But if you think about it, that’s a lot of extra work, when the state government already has your info for other purposes. Why is DROP a whole separate site, when it could be a box you check on a tax form or a driver’s license application? Or enrolling in a community college?

Google doesn’t just have a site to switch web users to Google Chrome—they put a Chrome button every damn place they can. All the Big Tech companies cross-promote and tie everything to the point where it’s hard to avoid. DROP shouldn’t resort to deceptive UX or anything, but it’s a lot easier to select one option in a place where the state government already knows who you are than to make a whole extra account. And yes, California already has it figured out for Covered California and voter registration on the tax form, and for voter registration and organ donation on DMV forms.

Another problem for CalPrivacy is how to do opt-outs by Mobile Ad Identifier (MAID). It’s a pain for users to figure out what their device’s MAID is, but state-owned apps such as the CA DMV Wallet or California State Lottery app can grab it automatically. No fuss,In California, the DMV is pretty easy to deal with now. All the worst customer service experiences are in the private sector. just another place to add the checkbox and correlate the MAID on a device with the user who wants to delete their info.

States that are planning to copy California can save themselves a big web development project by putting the “tell data brokers to delete my info” functionality into existing forms that people already fill out. Someone still has to operate the data broker registry and the back end, and coordinate with the other agencies to run the right queries on their databases, but a lot of privacy labor would be saved.

Comprehending the tax on creepy stuff

The surveillance marketing industry is still having trouble with the concept. In Privacy Enforcement Crossed A Line In 2025 – And There’s No Going Back, Max Anderson writes,

Privacy choices can no longer live only in a browser or device. They must travel across identities, systems and workflows, and they must be provable. Auditability and traceability are becoming enforcement expectations….Privacy is a hard category, technically, operationally and commercially. As enforcement grows more sophisticated, it’s increasingly unrealistic to expect a single platform to master consent, rights, data mapping, assessments, governance and enforcement equally well.

Ouch. From the customer point of view, that looks like good news though. Privacy laws are acting as intended, as a tax on creepy stuff. So the right move is to substitute lower “tax” projects such as product and service improvements, right? Especially considering that surveillance marketing gets taxed both by the surveillance ad duopoly and by the “compliance” industry?

Not yet.

Buyers are already adjusting. Many are moving away from one-size-fits-all expectations and toward best-of-breed approaches that align tools to specific risk areas. Long term, privacy will likely find durable homes inside adjacent categories like security, governance and IT operations.

That’s one approach, but it means paying the compliance complex and the duopoly for creepy stuff, and paying more and more since the continued presence of creepy stuff will drive more privacy enforcement, regulations, and legislation. At some point it gets to be like the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, an environmental law that required more paperwork for hazardous materials. A lot of companies figured out how to save the cost of the paperwork by safely disposing of stashes of random hazmat and by re-formulating products. We’re not there yet on compliance taxes, but the cost of creepy stuff keeps going up. More: Triple taxation on surveillance marketing