Starting Aug. 1, roughly 600 registered California data brokers must begin honoring deletion requests through the state's DROP platform. But every fine the CPPA has levied so far is for failing to register — not for ignoring a single deletion request.

Starting today, California's roughly 600 registered data brokers are supposed to start deleting you on request. Whether they actually do is a question the state won't be able to answer for at least 45 days.

Aug. 1 is the enforcement date built into the DELETE Act, the 2023 law (SB 362) that created the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform — DROP — administered by the California Privacy Protection Agency, the state body that brands itself Cal Privacy. The pitch is genuinely useful: instead of emailing hundreds of brokers one at a time, a California resident files a single request through the state's website, and every registered broker is obligated to honor it. Executive Director Tom Kemp told NBC's consumer unit that about 350,000 Californians have signed up since the platform opened Jan. 1 — a figure Cal Privacy provided and one worth reading as enrollments, not confirmed deletions.

Here is the part the announcement soft-pedals. Registered brokers now have 45 days to process a request, and that clock repeats for new ones; noncompliance carries a fine of $200 per day, per affected Californian, with no cure period. But the agency's enforcement record to date is entirely about a different obligation — simply registering. Cal Privacy says it has fined 12 brokers "tens of thousands of dollars each" for failing to sign up. The public actions bear that out: S&P Global drew a $62,600 penalty for 313 days unregistered; Rickenbacher Data, doing business as Datamasters, $45,000; ROR Partners, $56,600. None of those is a penalty for ignoring a deletion request, because until today there was no deletion request to ignore.

That is the gap to watch. A month ago I noted that California keeps writing tech rules faster than it enforces them; DROP is the same law caught mid-stride between the two. The 350,000 signups are real, the $200-a-day teeth are real on paper, and roughly 600 brokers are on the registry — though the count is self-reported and the agency's own public list briefly showed zero on July 29, an apparent glitch. The number that will actually measure this law — how many deletions get processed versus quietly declined — does not exist yet, and won't until mid-September at the earliest. Cal Privacy says a dedicated team is watching. The scoreboard is blank until it fills.