Escaping data brokers just got easier after the CalMatters investigation

from Colin LetcherCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

More data brokers have changed their practices in response to reports from The Markup and CalMatters, as well as a subsequent Senate investigation.

Data brokers — companies that collect and sell access to often sensitive information about consumers — are required to register with the state of California and provide a way for consumers to request that their data be deleted.

last year, investigation by The Markup and CalMatterspublished in collaboration with WIRED, showed that many of these companies placed code on web pages to perform those queries that prevented them from appearing in search results. The “no index” code tells search engines like Google not to catalog these pages, making it less likely that anyone will see them. Experts said it’s an obstacle for Californians who want to exercise their legal rights.

Last year’s investigation found 35 data brokers using the code, 12 of which soon removed it and allowed their pages to appear in search results.

Today, only eight of those 35 brokers still hide their scrap pages, according to another review done by The Markup and CalMatters this week. This includes five major data brokers that have been investigated by the Senate.

After The Markup and CalMatters published their report, the top minority Democrat on the Senate Joint Economic Committee, Sen. Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, sent letters to five data brokers questioning them about their practices.

Four of the companies—IQVIA Digital, Comscore, Telesign Corporation and 6sense Insights—committed to the Senate committee about their practices and agreed to make their pages visible in search, according to a report that the committee later published. The report also estimates that consumers have lost more than $20 billion to fraud and identity theft related to broker data breaches.

c addition to their initial findings published last week, the commission said the fifth company facing questioning, Findem, also belatedly removed its no-index code, making its deletion pages visible to search engines.

One of the data brokers that no longer hides its opt-out page, BrightCheck, has a broken opt-out page and no longer appears on the California Broker Registry.

Of the eight brokers still hiding their takedown pages, only one, a company called Fideo, responded to a request for comment on whether they would continue to use the code on their pages.

Jason Soni, a spokesman for Fideo, which uses data for crime and fraud prevention purposes, said the company intentionally “chose not to show the app page itself in Google search results for technical and user experience reasons.” Users, he said, can make requests starting “from our homepage and public privacy resources that provide the right context, routing and instructions for privacy requests,” rather than starting from the app’s page.

“Americans deserve a choice about whether or not their personal data is collected, used and sold for profit,” Hassan said in a statement released alongside the redacted report. “Data brokers like Findem have a responsibility to ensure this choice with clear, user-friendly opt-out features and clear privacy policies.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.