[bit_logic]

California has CCPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac... Could this be used to force these companies to delete all personal data? It would have to be done periodically since after deletion the data would accumulate again. It seems like there's a potential business idea here of automatically sending out CCPA deletion notices to companies on a schedule. While this wouldn't stop the collection of data, regularly interrupting them with deletion requests could make storing personal data costly enough to at least reduce whatever profits they would get from it.

EDIT: Looked at a few privacy policies and the CCPA link is often hard to find. Keywords to look for: "CCPA", "California Privacy", some examples of links I found:

https://www.honda.com/privacy/your-privacy-choices

https://www.tesla.com/legal/privacy#data-sharing

https://www.ford.com/help/privacy/ccpa/

https://ksupport.kiausa.com/ConsumerAffairs/PrivacyManagemen...

Something interesting I found is also this: https://www.honda.com/privacy/CCPA-Metrics which shows how many requests Honda received. It seems not many are aware of CCPA rights and this number of requests is not enough to deter companies from gathering personal information. These metrics need to be orders of magnitude higher to make a difference in company behavior. It seems like an automated service to send these requests and more public awareness of CCPA could help here.

EDIT2: A lot of these forms ask whether you're submitting the request for yourself or you're an authorized agent doing it for someone else. I found more details on "authorized agents" on the CCPA FAQ: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa. Maybe an organization like Mozilla or EFF could setup a service where you can authorize them to do this for you? Then you could just select a checkbox of companies that you want CCPA deletion requests for and it would be sent on a regular schedule (quarterly? yearly?). If such a service became popular, it could really disrupt the personal data gathering of companies.