What the data broker industry is doing with your personal information — new privacy laws, enforcement actions, breaches, and plain-language explainers, as well as online privacy tips.
Privacy Law
If you type radaris.com into a browser today you get a court notice, not a people-search site. On August 27, 2026, the Superior Court of New Jersey entered a final default judgment against Radaris.com, Rehold.com and Trustoria.com for violating Daniel's Law, and ordered the radaris.com domain handed to the plaintiff, Atlas Data Privacy Corporation.
On June 30, 2026, Governor Mikie Sherrill signed A.5328, now P.L.2026, c.25, and the New Jersey data broker law it creates does something most state broker laws don't. It bans the sale or licensing of ten categories of sensitive personal data outright, rather than requiring brokers to disclose the sale and let you opt out.
Filed under Privacy LawCalifornia's data broker fines are the ones everyone quotes, and most of the pages explaining them get the history wrong. Search for the SB 361 California data broker fine and you'll find vendor blogs saying SB 361 doubled the registration penalty from $100 to $200 a day and invented a second fine for ignored deletion requests.
Filed under Privacy LawOn January 1, 2026, three states switched on new comprehensive privacy laws at once: the Kentucky Consumer Data Protection Act (KCDPA), the Rhode Island Data Transparency and Privacy Protection Act (RIDTPPA) and the Indiana Consumer Data Protection Act (ICDPA).
Filed under Privacy LawGovernor Ned Lamont signed SB 4 on May 27, 2026, and the headlines made it sound like Connecticut had just got its own version of California's Delete Act. It didn't, not yet. The Connecticut data broker law, now Public Act 26-64, is real, it's broad, and it does eventually build a one-stop deletion mechanism modelled on California's DROP.
Filed under Privacy LawOn August 13, 2026, the California Privacy Protection Agency (which now calls itself CalPrivacy) fined Cybba, Inc. $52,400 for selling Californians' personal information without ever registering as a data broker.
Filed under Privacy LawThe California Delete Act DROP platform stopped being a paperwork exercise on August 1, 2026. That is the date every registered data broker had to start checking DROP (the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform, the thing most people type into a search box as "DROP California" or "CA DROP") at least once every 45 days and processing whatever was waiting in...
Filed under Privacy LawOn February 27, 2026, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Ranking Member of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, released a report on data brokers, scams and the losses that connect them. It puts a figure on that connection for the first time: identity theft flowing from just four data broker breaches has cost U.S. consumers more than $20 billion.
Filed under Privacy LawOn February 9, 2026, the FTC sent PADFAA data broker warning letters to 13 companies, reminding them of their obligations under the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act. The agency published a template of the letter and said nothing about who received one.
Filed under Privacy LawThe clearest FTC location data broker ruling on the books is the January 2025 order against Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel. It bans two companies from selling something almost nobody remembers agreeing to sell: a record of where their phone has been, precise enough to show a visit to a clinic, a church or a shelter.
Filed under Privacy LawNothing here matches that search.