California's Data Broker Registry Exposes 603 Companies' Data Practices

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California's Delete Act (SB 362) requires data brokers to register annually with the California Privacy Protection Agency and disclose data collection practices, sales, and consumer request handling. A public registry snapshot from September 2026 lists 603 registered brokers — including people-search sites like TruthFinder and Whitepages — each responding to 77 standardized questions. The registry CSV file has been archived on GitHub to allow researchers to work from a consistent dataset without re-scraping the state website. A key technical pitfall in parsing the file is that 55 comment fields contain embedded line breaks, causing line-based tools like grep and Excel to miscount rows as 865 instead of the correct 603. Developers are advised to use a proper CSV parser and handle the file's UTF-8 BOM encoding to avoid silent key errors.

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