Today's links

• A winning trade war strategy for Canada: Tech giants are also the enemy of American businesses.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Wikipedia v The Register; Jeff Koons v balloon dogs; Brewster Kahle on aaronsw; Chelsea Manning on aaronsw; Why diet research sucks; Bloomberg loves Bernie.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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A winning trade war strategy for Canada (permalink)

As the great Canadian philosopher Keanu Reeves averred in the 1994 public transportation documentary Speed, sometimes the winning move is to shoot the hostage.

That is: when your adversary has trapped you in a deadlock situation where neither of you can win, the winning move is to stop playing the game – rather, change the rules, and a bouquet of new moves will bloom.

Trump thinks he has Canada cornered, but we have a hell of a winning move. Unfortunately, we're not making it (yet).

Thus far, Canada's response to Trump's tariffs has been tit for tat: retaliatory tariffs. America smacked Canada's exports with tariffs, so Canada smacked the goods we import from the US with tariffs, too. This means that everything we buy in Canada is more expensive, which is certainly one way to punish Trump! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can and waiting for the downstairs neighbour to say "ouch!"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Not only are retaliatory tariffs bad for Canadians, they're also bad for the Americans who are also suffering under Trump. Rather than fostering an alliance with Americans against our common enemy – America's oligarchs and their god-king Trump – Canadians have declared war on all of our American cousins.

Take the decision to eschew delicious American bourbon and switch to Wayne Gretzky's undrinkable rye. Somewhere in a state that begins and ends with a vowel, there is a corn farmer who never did anything to hurt Canada who's suffering as a result of this decision. We get shitty booze, and he can't afford to make payments on his tractor. Everyone loses!

Now, it's a funny thing about that tractor. Chances are, it's made by John Deere, a rapacious ag-tech monopolist that bought out all its competitors and now screws farmers in every imaginable way. One particularly galling scam is how John Deere handles repair. Farmers typically repair their own tractors. After all, a tractor is a business-critical machine with a lot of moving parts that can fail in a million ways.

But after the farmer fixes their tractor, it will not work until they pay John Deere to send a technician to their farm to type an unlock code in the tractor's keyboard. This is a totally superfluous step, inserted solely to allow Deere to rip off their customers. Farmers have been fixing their own farm implements since the first plow – after all, when you need to bring the crops in and the storm is coming, you can't wait for a service call at the end of your lonely country road – but John Deere has declared the end of history. In John Deere's world, farmers can only use their tractors when an ag-tech monopolist says they can:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/15/deere-in-headlights/#doh-a-deere

No farmer wants this anti-feature in their tractor. In a normal world, someone would go into business selling farmers a kit to disable it. After all, this is all accomplished with software, and software is infinitely flexible. Every computable program can be executed on every computer. John Deere installed a 10-foot pile of shit in its tractor software, so someone else could go into business shipping 11-foot ladders made out of software that can be delivered instantaneously to anyone in the world with an internet connection and a payment method.

But we don't live in a normal world. We live in a fundamentally broken world. It's been broken since 1998, when Bill Clinton signed a law called the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" (DMCA). Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine, for anyone who "bypasses an access control" on a digital system. This means that if John Deere designs its tractors to ensure that incoming instructions were authorized by the company (say, a manufacturer's password that needs to be entered before you can update the software), then it is a felony to bypass that check. When John Deere puts one of these access controls in its tractor, it conjures up a new felony out of thin air, making it a literal crime for a farmer to modify their own tractor to work the way they want it to. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model."

The US isn't the only country with a law like this – far from it! At the very instant Bill Clinton signed the DMCA, the US Trade Rep sent officials all over the world to bully America's trading partners into enacting their own version of this law, threatening them with tariffs unless they changed their national laws to make it a crime to fix the broken technology America shipped around the globe.

Which brings me back to Canada's retaliatory tariffs, those self-punishing, indiscriminate, ally-alienating tits-for-tat.

Canada presented no more of a challenge for the bullying US Trade Rep than any of those other countries. In 2012, two of Stephen Harper's ministers, James Moore and Tony Clement, rammed a carbon copy of DMCA 1201 through Parliament: Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

C-11 was incredibly unpopular. Three earlier attempts to pass a law like this had failed, and in the end, Clement and Moore had to ignore their own consultation results and dismiss the thousands of respondents who wrote in to object to the bill as "babyish…radical extremists."

Harper, Clement and Moore whipped C-11 through Parliament because the US trade rep threatened them with tariffs unless the did so, and promised them tariff-free access to the US if they toed the line. Now that Trump has whacked Canada with tariffs, Canada should wipe this law off its books.

There's so many good domestic reasons to do this. Without C-11, Canadian companies could defend their fellow Canadians from American data-theft and cash ripoffs by making alternative clients, jailbreaks, and other add-ons that disenshittified America's defective tech:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/#carney-found-a-spine

But today, I want to focus on how repealing C-11 would benefit America. You see, America's businesses – large and small – are victims of Big Tech's extraction. The Big Five publishers get screwed by Amazon, as do all the little indie publishers. Every games company gets screwed by Apple and Google, who suck 30 cents out of every dollar their customers spend in an app. Same goes for console games companies, who pay a 30% tax on every dollar they make on Xbox, Nintendo or Playstations (the exception, of course, is the games companies owned by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, who don't pay the 30% tax and can therefore always outcompete the independents).

Merchants who sell on Amazon pay a 50-60% junk fee tax. Businesses large and small are locked into cloud products from Microsoft, Oracle, and Google who are training their AIs on their corporate customers' proprietary data. Health providers are locked into Epic, the giant electronic health record monopolist, whose abuses are the stuff of legend:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/02/upcoded-to-death/#thanks-obama

Many (if not all) of these scams could be mitigated with new code. For example, anyone stuck paying the app taxes could offer mobile phone and console owners jailbreaks that install third-party app stores, and then offer discounts to anyone who uses them – if you're saving 30% on every payment, you can split those savings with your customers.

Merchants could list their products for sale directly on Amazon through app and website plugins, and get paid and fulfill them themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

Performers and content creators could encourage their audiences to escape the platforms' inscrutable algorithms and install jailbroken apps that let users control their recommendations:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

Social media startups could offer alt clients that let users who sign up see the messages posted by their friends on legacy platforms like Twitter and Facebook, and push replies to them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Mechanics, farmers and repair depots who are locked out of diagnostics, who can't use generic parts, and can't initialize OEM parts without paying for a license could jailbreak their customers' devices for them and offer independent repair:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently

So think back to that corn farmer, currently wondering how to make tractor payments because Canadians are drinking Gretzky's shitty rye instead of delicious bourbon. Rather than pauperizing that blameless farmer, Canada could go into business selling him the tools to escape John Deere's rent-collecting repair racket, to extract all the soil condition data needed for precision agriculture, and to make use of competitors' front-ends (accessories that turn a tractor into a thresher or some other machine).

That farmer is getting screwed by Trump, just like Canadians. He's not a shareholder in Big Tech. He's not gonna be pissed off when Canada turns Big Tech's trillions into Canadian billions – not if he gets lower prices and more reliable technology as a result.

When I talk to Canadians about retaliating against the Trump tariffs by repealing our anti-jailbreaking law, they often express concern that this will make Trump even angrier at us. I mean, of course it will: literally anything that works will make Trump angry. I don't think that means we should only respond to the Trump tariffs with useless gestures.

If Canada goes into business rescuing Americans from their own tech companies, they will become our allies. If those companies depend on selling to the Canadian market to remain profitable, they will become our allies.

Trump is an autocrat, but he's not omnipotent. He's an old, sick man with white matter disease dementia who can't stay awake through a 10-minute briefing or remember what he was talking about from minute to minute. To pursue his agenda, he needs to hold his coalition together, and that's something he's getting progressively worse at as he slides towards his incipient death/permanent incapacity.

All Canada will get if it sticks with its current response to the tariffs is Gretzky's undrinkable novelty booze and the permanent enmity of American businesses. On the other hand, if Canada repeals its anti-circumvention law, we can make billions of dollars, destroy the profits of America's most important technological allies, liberate ourselves from America's defective technology, and forge a durable, powerful anti-Trump alliance with American firms who are preyed upon just as surely as Canadians are.

Let's shoot the hostage. Let's change the rules of the game. Let's break the deadlock. It's what Keanu would tell us to do.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Zohran Mamdani Has Quickly Gotten Down to Business https://jacobin.com/2026/01/mamdani-executive-orders-housing-childcare/

• Nichols & May: Monitor Radio 1962-1967 https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2026/01/nichols-may-monitor-radio-1962-1967.html

• State of the World 2026 with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky https://user.well.com/engaged.cgi?t=561&c=inkwell.vue&f=0

• How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

• Scenes from O’Reilly ETCon 2002 https://www.globalnerdy.com/2026/01/11/scenes-from-oreilly-etcon-2002/

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Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Indie labels give free MP3s to customers who buy vinyl https://web.archive.org/web/20060111215100/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004313.php

#20yrsago Hollywood’s Canadian politico lies about her approach to lawmaking https://web.archive.org/web/20110425163053/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1071

#20yrsago Correcting the Record: Wikipedia vs The Register https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/11/correcting-the-record-wikipedia-vs-the-register/

#20yrsago Hollywood’s MP denounces “users,” “EFF members” — video https://web.archive.org/web/20060323035434/http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/1/12/1659162.html

#20yrsago My short-short story “Printcrime” in this week’s Nature magazine https://craphound.com/stories/2006/01/12/printcrime/#more

#15yrsago HOWTO teach your small children to swordfight https://reactormag.com/spec-fic-parenting-this-my-son-is-a-sword/

#15yrsago HOWTO make a secure, decentralized, human-readable name system http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko

#15yrsago Demon rug https://www.flickr.com/photos/missmonstermel/5346690831/in/photostream/

#15yrsago Jeff Koons claims to own all balloon dogs https://www.designboom.com/art/jeff-koons-can-one-copyright-a-balloon-animal/

#10yrsago Brewster Kahle remembers Aaron Swartz: “an open source life” https://www.aaronswartzday.org/brewster-sf-memorial/

#10yrsago Sympathetic Bernie Sanders profile in Bloomberg Businessweek https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-bernie-sanders-fundraising/

#10yrsago Internal documents from breathalyzer company Lifesaver dumped online https://web.archive.org/web/20160113075611/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/car-breathalyzer-company-gets-hacked-internal-docs-dumped-on-dark-web

#10yrsago How fraudsters’ call centers work https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/01/a-look-inside-cybercriminal-call-centers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KrebsOnSecurity+(Krebs+on+Security)

#10yrsago Why all scientific diet research turns out to be bullshit https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/?ex_cid=story-facebook

#10yrsago NSA says it will take four years to answer questions about its kids’ coloring book https://web.archive.org/web/20160114074709/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-nsa-told-me-it-needs-4-years-to-answer-a-foia-about-a-coloring-book

#10yrsago Bowie, Eno and serendipity https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_how_frustration_can_make_us_more_creative

#10yrsago Chelsea Manning reviews book of Aaron Swartz’s writing https://medium.com/@xychelsea/remembering-aaron-swartz-94d204b9e190#.5fcfs5mby

#10yrsago WATCH: documentary on Walt Disney, the futurist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwLznNpJz2I

#10yrsago Guns filled with guts: Anatomy of War https://www.noahscalin.com/#/anatomyofwar1/

#10yrsago Book says Daddy Koch built Nazi oil refinery & hired a Nazi nanny for his boys, who blackmailed their gay brother https://web.archive.org/web/20160114081716/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/01/11/new-book-father-of-politically-active-koch-brothers-built-a-refinery-for-the-nazis/

#10yrsago Rich Americans are embarrassed by Donald Trump https://web.archive.org/web/20160115052314/https://gawker.com/donald-trumps-personal-brand-is-slowly-excruciatingly-1752374812?utm_source=recirculation&utm_medium=recirculation&utm_campaign=tuesdayAM

#10yrsago New US law says kids can walk to school by themselves https://www.fastcompany.com/3055107/federal-law-now-says-kids-can-walk-to-school-alone

#10yrsago Toronto’s mayor demands an end to competition for fast, affordable broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/01/why-mayors-john-tory-and-jim-watson-are-against-competition-for-access-to-affordable-fast-broadband/

#10yrsago Your smartwatch knows your ATM and phone PIN https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.05616v1

#10yrsago Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical https://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/12/keep-your-scythe-the-real-green-future-is-high-tech-democratic-and-radical/

#10yrsago Will the W3C strike a bargain to save the Web from DRM? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/you-cant-destroy-village-save-it-w3c-vs-drm-round-two

#5yrsago Bunkered, infectious, maskless Republicans infected Congress https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/12/maskholio/#maskholes

#5yrsago Awful voting-machine demands silence https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#ess

#5yrsago Weaponing and monetizing apophenia https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#woo

#5yrsago DC's security theater panned https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/11/seeing-things/#curtain-call

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Denver: Enshittification at Tattered Cover Colfax, Jan 22
  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-live-at-tattered-cover-colfax-tickets-1976644174937

• Colorado Springs: Guest of Honor at COSine, Jan 23-25
  https://www.firstfridayfandom.org/cosine/

• Ottawa: Enshittification at Perfect Books, Jan 28
  https://www.instagram.com/p/DS2nGiHiNUh/

• Toronto: Enshittification and the Age of Extraction with Tim Wu, Jan 30
  https://nowtoronto.com/event/cory-doctorow-and-tim-wu-enshittification-and-extraction/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Berlin: Re:publical, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

r

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (39c3)
  https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

• "can't make Big Tech better; make them less powerful" (Get Subversive)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1EzM9_6eLE

• The Enshitification Life Cycle with David Dayen (Organized Money)
  https://www.buzzsprout.com/2412334/episodes/18399894

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Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America ( words today, total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

The boy grew up in a happy neighborhood, among good friends. People shared what they had, and looked after one another. When a neighbor needed a hand with a chore, others

were there to help. If someone wanted to borrow a tool, or anything else, it was readily provided. The boy never knew anything else.

The boy liked to greet the mailman, and he took an interest in stamps. One of his neighbors, a teenager, invited the boy to come look at his own collection. The boy was delighted. “Here,” said the teenager, handing the boy the album, “borrow for it as long as you like.” And so the boy took it home. He kept it for years, for decades. As the boy and the teenager grew into manhood, the borrowed stamp collection was a sign of friendship.

As the boy aged, however, his interest in stamps grew into an obsession. He ceased to enjoy the stamps, to think about their beauty and their history. He simply wanted to possess them. He began to say puzzling things to the neighbor about the collection. Rather than seeing the loan as a sign of friendship, he seemed resent that the neighbor had any claim on the stamps at all.

One night he broke into his neighbor’s house with a gun. When the neighbor awoke, he pointed the gun and said: “You see that I can invade your house. If the stamp collection had been here instead of in my house, I could have stolen it. From now on that stamp collection is mine, and you have to admit it.”

What had the mad stamp collector done? He has the stamp collection, but of course he had it before. He wants everyone to say that now it is his possession, but no one does, least of all his neighbor. He has lost the neighborhood, and all the more important forms of cooperation. He sits at home and turns pages of the album. He writes his name in big letters on its cover.

Though the stamp collector is too mad to see it, he has destroyed the foundations of his own life. Until the night of the break-in, he could have borrowed anything he wanted from that neighbor, or from anyone on the block. Now every house is closed to him, and he no longer has friends, nor will ever have any. He has nothing except for his madness.

Subscribe now

•••

The fable of the mad stamp collector is the story of American foreign policy. It expresses the president’s approach to Greenland, Denmark, and our allies in general. There is nothing in Greenland, or for that matter on the territory of other American allies, that we could not have, if we asked. That is the nature of old, trusting relationships, and the order represented by the NATO alliance.

As matters stand right now, the United States has the use of the territory of Greenland. We have had a military base at Pituffik for decades. We now station about two hundred troops there; if we wanted to station thousands instead of hundreds, we could do so. We did during the cold war. If American companies are interested in the Greenland’s natural resources, they can sign contracts.

If we believe, as the president and vice-president keep saying, that there is a Russian or Chinese threat to the island, then we could station more troops there, or invite the Danes or any other ally to do so. Or we could ask the Danes to build another base on another part of the island. Or we could do something meaningful about Arctic security, instead of denying global warming and letting Russia build all the icebreakers.

The Danes have been among the closest allies of the United States for three quarters of a century. The base at Pituffik is a sign of that friendship. When the Americans realized in 1951 that they had urgent need of that site of Greenland for nuclear defense, the Danes readily agreed. This was one of the crucial moments in the history of NATO, the alliance that both nations had helped to found two years before.

It is the NATO alliance that enables the American presence on Greenland, and it is the NATO alliance that the United States threatens when it threatens its ally Denmark. So long as the United States and Denmark are promised to defend one another from attack, Greenland is defended by both of them, and indeed by all of the other NATO allies. If the NATO alliance ceases to exist, then Greenland immediately becomes much less secure -- and, for that matter, so does every other member of the alliance, including the United States. Nothing could strengthen Russia and China more than the end of NATO.

Trump, the mad stamp collector, has everything he could possibly want, except the ability to appreciate any of it, or be appreciative of the work that others do to create it. He can gain nothing for the United States by insisting on owning Greenland, but he can lose everything which has helped to make Americans safer and more prosperous. He can lose the neighborhood.

It might seem odd to describe all of this as a fable -- and I am sorry to Greenlanders for having compared their island to stamp collection. But the fabular form is far more honest than pretending that Trump has a notion of the United States and its interests. He just wants to see a flag in the snow. He just wants his name on the album. There is nothing more than the madness, and that is where we must begin.

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On resistance see On Tyranny

For positive solutions see On Freedom

Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE. Abolish ICE.

Tags: crime · Jamelle Bouie · murder · USA · video

The California Privacy Protection Agency kicked off 2026 by launching a tool that state residents can use to make data brokers delete and stop selling their personal information. 

The system, known as the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, or DROP, has been in the works for years, mandated by a 2023 law known as the Delete Act. Under it and previous laws, data brokers must register with the state and enable consumers to tell brokers to stop tracking them and selling their information. 

Until now, those instructions had to be delivered to each data broker individually — not an easy feat, given that more than 500 brokers were registered in the state as of the end of last year. Making things even more difficult, some brokers obscured their opt-out forms from search results, as The Markup and CalMatters revealed in August. 

The new system delivers privacy instructions to every registered broker at once. Launched on January 1, it is open to all California residents. By law, the hundreds of data brokers registered with the state must begin processing those requests in August.

Here’s how to take advantage of it.

Finding your advertising IDs

DROP asks you to provide some basic information — your name, email address, phone number, and zip code — so data brokers can find you in their systems. You can submit the form with just this information, but if you’d like a more thorough deletion, you can also provide your mobile advertising IDs from your phones, smart TVs, and vehicles. Including these IDs can help brokers match more of your data, but you have to take the time to collect them. 

Click here to jump ahead if you want to provide basic information only, or continue reading for instructions on providing mobile advertising IDs for:

• Android phones and tablets
• Apple iPhones and iPads
• Vehicle ID numbers and smart TVs
• Personal computers

Android phones and tablets

The steps below may vary slightly depending on your device and operating system version, but the general process is the same:

• Open Settings.
• At the top of the Settings screen, select the menu option with your name, followed by “Google services and preferences.”
• Select the All services tab.
• Scroll to the Privacy & Security section, and select Ads. Scroll to the bottom of that screen to get your advertising ID, which will look like a string of random numbers and letters separated by four hyphens. Save that ID for the DROP form.

• On the same screen, you can find options to reset or delete your advertising ID. The CCPA suggests resetting your ID “because it breaks the persistent tracking link that advertisers, data brokers, and apps use to build long-term behavioral profiles of your device.” Alternatively, deleting the ID should prevent ID-based data tracking from happening at all.

Apple iPhones and iPads

Apple doesn’t provide a way for iOS users to see their mobile advertising ID, which it calls the Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA. But it does provide a way for users to prevent trackers from accessing these IDs.

To turn off tracking, first, adjust your Screen Time settings:

• Open Settings. 
• Scroll down and select Screen Time. 
• Scroll down and select Content & Privacy Restrictions. 
• Scroll down and select Allow Apps to Request to Track.
• Select Don’t Allow Changes. 

Then, adjust your Tracking settings:

• Open Settings. 
• Scroll down and select Privacy & Security. 
• Select Tracking.
• Toggle OFF the option to Allow Apps to Request to Track.

Apple has its own ads system that doesn’t use an IDFA. To disable that: 

• Open Settings. 
• Scroll down and select Privacy & Security. 
• Scroll down and select Apple Advertising.
• Toggle OFF the Personalized Ads option.

A quick note for our technically savvy readers: If you’ve already turned tracking off, you might be tempted to turn it back on to look up your advertising ID using a third-party app, but it’s unnecessary. Re-enabling tracking will reset the ID, limiting its usefulness to data brokers — they can’t continue tracking data or delivering personalized ads using a device ID that no longer exists. 

Vehicle ID numbers and smart TVs

Vehicles can track their owners in surprisingly invasive ways, and you can provide a vehicle’s identification number, or VIN, in case data brokers have that information. Where your VIN is will depend on the vehicle, but common places include on the dash on the driver’s side, or on a sticker in the jamb of the front passenger door. Your vehicle registration documents should also have your VIN listed.

Smart TVs also use advertising IDs. Here’s a guide that provides some settings for common brands. If the guide doesn’t cover your smart TV, try checking under its privacy or advertising settings. But be aware that this is different from numbers like the model code and serial number.

Personal computers

Laptop and desktop computers use unique identifiers to share data, but these are harder to find than mobile advertising IDs. Instead, you can turn off tracking, which will delete those IDs. (Turning tracking on again will generally reset the IDs.)

• On computers running Windows, you can turn off your advertising ID by going to Settings. Depending on your OS version, select Privacy or Privacy & security. Then select General, and adjust your settings there.
• On Mac computers, navigate to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising. Then, toggle off Personalized Ads.

The California Privacy Protection Agency also provides some of its own guidance on finding advertising IDs. 

Verify your identity

Go to the DROP website. You’ll be asked to accept the terms of use and be directed to a page that asks you to prove you’re a California resident. There are two ways to do so, and you can’t change methods once you’ve selected one of them. 

1. The system allows you to verify your identity using personal information through a system called the California Identity Gateway. 
   
   If you select this option, you’ll be asked to provide some basic personal information, like a phone number, email address, California address, or your social security number. The gateway will use this information to attempt to verify your residency directly with the state. This option should be quick if you have an email address and phone number.
   
2. Alternatively, you can verify your identity to DROP using login.gov, a system that some federal and state agencies in the United States have adopted to allow residents to interact with government services. 
   
   To sign up for a login.gov account, you’ll be asked to provide an email address, create a password, and provide photos of government-issued identification. After signing up and verifying your identity, you should be able to move on to the next step. This option might take a little more effort than the first option, since ID is required, but might be faster if you’ve already signed up for an account for other purposes.

Fill out and submit the DROP form

After verifying your identity, you’ll get to a form where you can submit multiple versions of your name, up to three zip codes, up to three email addresses, up to three phone numbers, advertising IDs from your mobile devices and smart TVs, and VINs for your vehicles. You’ll be asked to verify your email addresses and phone numbers with single-use codes before submitting. (The agency notes there may be delays with some verification codes due to high volume.)

Once you submit the form, you’ll get a unique DROP ID to check the status of your request.

What happens now?

Sit back and wait. While the window for making DROP requests has opened, data brokers registered with the state aren’t required to handle them just yet. On August 1, brokers will begin processing the requests.

Starting then, companies have 45 days to process requests and 90 days to report back on how they handled requests. If they fail to do so, the companies can face financial penalties. 

In the meantime, you can monitor the status of your request with your DROP ID. At some point later in the year, when you log in the system should tell you whether your data was successfully deleted, whether records on you weren’t found, or whether companies believed the data was exempt from deletion under the law, which provides some limited ways for brokers to hold on to data.  

If you find more information while you’re waiting for your request to be processed, like a new mobile advertising ID, you can update your request with that information, increasing the odds you’ll successfully get your data deleted. 

It’s funny how close this competition seemed just a couple weeks ago:

That was then, 2025.

For 2026, the guy on the left is taking an early lead that’s will be hard to beat.

There’s a lot more that could be said here but I will give the last words to Hidden Door’s CEO and Co-founder Hilary Mason.

And, no, you won’t find me posting on X anymore.

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