The CA DROP Deadline Is August 1 — Here's What It Actually Costs to Miss It

SB 362 launched the DROP portal in January. August 1 is the day data brokers must start processing centralized deletion requests — $200 per request, per day for every one they miss.

That number sounds abstract until you do the math. A mid-sized data broker processing 500 deletion requests and dragging on 10% of them is looking at $10,000 a day in penalties. No grace period. No warning letter. The request clock starts ticking the moment a consumer submits.

Most people writing about DROP are focused on the broker compliance side. Here's what the consumer side actually looks like and why the deadline creates a window right now.

What DROP Actually Does (and Doesn't Do)

DROP — the Data Removal Opt-out Platform — is a centralized deletion hub run by the California Privacy Protection Agency. One submission triggers deletion requests across every registered data broker simultaneously.

What it doesn't do: it doesn't delete you from non-registered brokers, people-search engines operating offshore, or aggregators that aren't yet on the CPPA registry. That registry is growing fast, but as of the August 1 cutover it covers 40+ major brokers — the ones with the most indexed personal data.

The 45-day response window per CCPA violation also applies here. A broker that delays past 45 days on a DROP request is simultaneously violating DROP and CCPA — stacked penalties.

The Gap DROP Doesn't Close

DROP handles the registered-broker layer. Everything below that — legacy data brokers, reputation sites, white-pages aggregators — requires either manual opt-out submissions or automated tooling that monitors re-listing.

Re-listing is the part most one-time deletion services skip. Data brokers re-index from public records within 30-90 days. A consumer who opts out in August is back on most major brokers by November.

The services that actually work combine:

• Initial sweep across 40+ registered brokers (the DROP-covered layer)
• Ongoing monitoring to catch re-listing
• Automated re-removal when a broker re-adds your record

BizSuite's data-removal service does exactly that — $497 upfront for the initial sweep, $49/month for continuous monitoring against the same 48 brokers. Built-in CA Delete Act compliance (SB 362) with the monitoring cadence set to catch the 90-day re-list cycle. Details at https://getbizsuite.com/data-removal.html.

August 1 Creates the Urgency, but Monitoring Is the Recurring Value

The deadline is real and it's close. But the business case for ongoing removal isn't the deadline — it's the re-list cycle. People who clean up before August 1 will see their data reappear by Q4 without ongoing monitoring.

That's the part worth communicating to anyone asking about DROP right now: the portal handles the one-time request, but it doesn't protect you from the crawlers that run every quarter.