What they're not telling you: California's . Data -markup-investigation-congress-finds-data-brokersfollowingfollowingBrokers Built Trap Doors Into Their Own Compliance Pages—. And It Took Journalists to Force Them Open The California Consumer Privacy Act promised residents a right they had never possessed before: the ability to demand that companies delete the personal data collected and sold about them. But 35 data brokers built a technological trap door into that promise, and state regulators did nothing about it until The Markup's newsroom exposed the scheme. Between 2024 and early 2025, The Markup and CalMatters conducted a systematic review of how data brokers were implementing California's deletion requirements.
What the Documents Show
Their reporters examined the websites of companies required by state law to provide deletion mechanisms. What they discovered was methodical obstruction disguised in code. Thirty-five separate data brokers had embedded "no-index" HTML directives into their deletion request pages—technical instructions that told Google and other search engines not to catalog those pages. The effect was precisely calculated: Californians searching for how to delete their data from IQVIA Digital, Comscore, Telesign Corporation, 6sense Insights, and dozens of other brokers would find nothing. The legal right existed.
Follow the Money
But the pathway to exercise that right had been engineered to be invisible. This was not a technical accident or an oversight by IT departments. Data brokers operate in an industry built on the monetization of obscurity—the less consumers know they are being tracked, the easier it is to buy and sell their information. Hiding deletion pages served that core business interest with surgical precision. When The Markup's journalists contacted the companies for comment in 2025, something remarkable happened: 27 of the 35 companies immediately removed the obstruction code. They had been caught.
What Else We Know
By May 2026, only eight brokers remained non-compliant. The pattern of which companies changed is instructive. Four of the five that faced the most sustained pressure—those contacted by New Hampshire Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan's Senate Joint Economic Committee—agreed to make their deletion pages searchable. IQVIA Digital, Comscore, Telesign Corporation, and 6sense Insights all capitulated once federal legislative scrutiny entered the picture. What remains unaddressed is the institutional silence that preceded the journalism. The California Attorney General's office, which enforces the Consumer Privacy Act, did not catch this systematic obstruction despite having been charged with that explicit responsibility.
Primary Sources
- Source: The Markup
- Category: True Crime
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