And they will definitely actually totally for sure do it!
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
186 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
87417 readers
3849 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
they pinky promise 😂
the real question is; how will one be able to verify that the data has indeed been deleted?
"Would you like to check our database for your personal data? Please fill out this form with your personal data."
Reminds of that website some guy created where you had to type in your credit card details to find out if someone had your credit card details 🤔
Fucking genius.
I seriously doubt 75% of password strength checkers for that very reason.
It's absolutely worth requesting your data to be deleted regardless of where you live by claiming to live in California. I always provide the address of a post office in Cali as my address when requesting deletion.
I do think it's possible that some of them won't delete your data upon request, failing to comply with the law, but I also think a lot of people on the internet are unduly influenced by doomers who want you to feel powerless and do nothing.
It's absolutely worth requesting your data to be deleted regardless of where you live by claiming to live in California...
I do think it's possible that some of them won't delete your data upon request, failing to comply with the law
That's not failure to comply with the law if you don't actually live in California.
People have a legal location of residence in the US.
If you want to establish legal residency in a state, you're typically looking at doing something like spending the majority of the year there.
EDIT: I'd also be pretty confident, though the article doesn't talk about it, that California won't normally have jurisdiction for California state law unless a data broker is doing business in California, and that that will also be a constraining factor. Like, if a data broker company is only doing business in, say, Russia, the US will not enforce rulings against them regarding California state law in general.
I guess I should have said EVEN* failing to comply with the law, you caught me out on some pedantry, I admit it and concede
People have a legal location of residence in the US.
In California, if you're homeless, you typically have to set your mail up as "general delivery" to your nearest post office where you go to collect mail every few days. You probably don't have any other address.
Not sure how this interfaces with this specific law otherwise, but using a post office isn't a bad idea generally because it isn't a totally unexpected thing. A homeless person would probably list that as an address.
There's also a lot of mail services that will give you an address in that state and will open/scan received mail for you... not sure if California specifically has one, though. But yeah, this doesn't establish legal residency at all, but many entities don't look too closely either... might be worth a shot.
deleted is a column in a database
To be fair, having gone through a couple of GDPR transitions, deleted in reality is often a full row in the PII table. All your actions and behaviour are still logged, there’s just longer any way to tie your ID back to PII.
If you live anywhere, you can tell data brokers to delete your data. Will they, whether they're in California or not?
Yeah, it's not an accurate indication of what changed. As of Jan 2026, California has a new law and registry where residents can register with the State to have the state demand that the data brokers (those who bother to register with the CA Sec of State anyway) remove the California resident's data.
It's got a fairly slow compliance deadline, so it'll be a while before the whole rigamarole of some non-compliant broker actually getting fined, lawsuit, appeal, and an eventual majority opinion written by Associate Justice Butchug stating why California doesn't have the right to protect its citizens because of some bullshit application of the interstate commerce clause and how it will cause undue harm to the data brokers that have him on payroll.
It probably won't change much for the average person, but at least the lawyers finally get a win.
Hello fellow Californians
Please just link to the original source...