Privacy Without Remedy: An Assessment of Data Broker Compliance with California Privacy Law

This repository contains the data and code for the paper "Privacy Without Remedy: An Assessment of Data Broker Compliance with California Privacy Law" published in FAccT 2026.

Data & Code

Data and code relevant to RQ 1:

• metrics-prejuly1.csv : Request metrics of consumer requests exercising their rights obtained from manual review of data broker policies pre-July 1st 2025
• transparency-metrics-2025-final.csv : Request metrics of consumer requests exercising their rights obtained from manual review of data broker policies at least 45 days after July 1st 2025
• Analysis is ran in broker-2025-eda-final.R

Data relevant to RQ 2:

• friction-identification-results.csv : Contains the amount of features identified across 250 data broker websites using our codebook (found in paper appendix)
• Analysis is ran in broker-2025-eda-final.R

Data relevant to RQ 3:

• matched-234-binned.csv : Income, employee, and subsidiary data obtained for a subset of data brokers. We use the exact data in our analysis, however, we cannot release these publicly. Instead, we include income_bin and employee_bin to provide a broader range to represent the income and employee size of a broker.
• All aforementioned datasets used in analysis, as well
• Analysis is ran in rq3-descriptive-analysis-final.R

Post study follow up research

This repository also contains two California data broker analysis subprojects conducted after our initial research:

• databrokers-index/: broker scoring and ranking work based on compliance/friction and sensitivity indicators.
• databrokers-registry/: comparisons between the hand-coded broker dataset and the official California Data Broker Registry 2026.

Citation