California’s DROP platform tops 242,000 sign‑ups; agency readies data‑broker processing in August

The California Privacy Protection Agency said on Feb. 27 that its new Delete Request and Opt‑Out Platform — known as DROP — successfully met statutory deadlines and has seen adoption far beyond early expectations.

Executive Director Tom Kemp told the board the agency met the Jan. 1, 2026 deadline and the system ‘‘has been highly available and whose adoption has exceeded everyone's expectations.’’ As of the meeting morning, staff reported more than 242,000 deletion requests and over 575 registered data brokers.

In an operational briefing, DROP’s chief of IT, Artem Andrusov, gave the board a closer look at product metrics from the first eight weeks. He said roughly 98% of users attempting automatic residency verification succeed, and the average time to complete a deletion request is about eight minutes. The system held roughly 1.2 million unique identifiers across submitted requests, Andrusov said, and the busiest hour produced 2,136 requests.

Assistant Deputy Director Marissa Rosenblatt described customer support and quality‑of‑service details. Since launch DROP has received about 6,500 support tickets, split roughly between general consumer questions and residency review requests for people who were not automatically verified. Rosenblatt said staff pulled personnel from across teams to handle the incoming volume and are building out more robust workflows and service‑level agreements.

Megan White, deputy director of public and external affairs, summarized outreach and earned media that contributed to the rapid uptake. She said more than 100 media outlets covered DROP and highlighted that one Instagram explainer about DROP reached roughly 2.7 million views; the agency also launched paid search Jan. 1 and planned to scale paid social and out‑of‑home ads in March. White told the board $2.5 million remains allocated for the paid campaign and must be spent by June.

Board members pressed staff on consumer messaging and next steps. Member McTaggart suggested the DROP status page be clearer about timing for when deletion processing will begin; staff said they will add more explicit timelines and user guidance. Liebert asked the agency to consider whether registration fees for data brokers should be graduated by company size to help smaller operators.

The board was told publishing of a public data‑broker registry is expected in March and that data brokers will be expected to begin processing deletion requests in August, per the Delete Act schedule. Staff also flagged upcoming work to publish API documentation and a sandbox to help brokers integrate with DROP ahead of the August processing start.

Kemp and staff framed the launch as an operational success but emphasized the agency still faces work in converting sign‑ups into processed deletions later this year and in educating both consumers and businesses about the program. "We successfully met the Jan. 1, 2026 deadline with a system that has been highly available," Kemp said.

What’s next: the agency will publish the data‑broker registry in March, continue its paid and earned media outreach through June, and complete backend work so broker‑side deletion processing can begin on Aug. 1. Staff told the board they will return with updates on registry publication, API documentation and integration progress.