Thursday · January 8, 2026

CalPrivacy Fines Data Brokers Datamasters $45,000 and S&P Global $62,600 for Registration Failures

confirmed Importance 5/10 ~2 min read 1 source 1 actor

The California Privacy Protection Agency (CalPrivacy) Board issued two decisions on January 8, 2026, both for failure to register as a data broker under the Delete Act, but with sharply different fact patterns and remedies. Rickenbacher Data LLC, doing business as Datamasters (Texas), was fined $45,000 and ordered to stop selling all Californians’ personal information outright — effectively a market exit — after CalPrivacy found it had, without registering, bought and resold in 2024 the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of millions of people with Alzheimer’s disease, drug addiction, bladder incontinence, and other health conditions, plus lists segmented by age, perceived race (“Senior Lists,” “Hispanic Lists”), political views, grocery purchases, banking activity, and health-related purchases. Separately, S&P Global, Inc. (New York) was fined $62,600 for failing to register, which CalPrivacy’s release attributes to “an administrative error” rather than evasion; its remedy is procedural — adopting registration and compliance-auditing procedures — with no market-exit order.

Why This Event Matters

Predates the August 2026 LocateSmarter/Cybba/SalesIntel Research cluster by seven months, establishing that registration-failure enforcement was already CalPrivacy’s standing practice before DROP’s August 1, 2026 deletion-processing deadline activated. The Datamasters case also shows CalPrivacy escalating beyond a fine to a full California sales ban when the underlying data categories are sensitive (health conditions, protected-class proxies) — a harsher remedy than any of the three registration-failure cases in the task’s core cluster received.

Research Gaps

  • Whether Datamasters’ California sales ban remains in effect as of this entry’s writing.

Sources & Citations

[1] CalPrivacy Brings New Round of Enforcement Actions Against Data Brokers — California Privacy Protection Agency · Jan 8, 2026 Tier 1
Tiers Tier 1 court records & gov docs · Tier 2 established outlets · Tier 3 regional & specialty press · Tier 4 opinion or single-source. Methodology →
Cite this entry
The Cascade Ledger. “CalPrivacy Fines Data Brokers Datamasters $45,000 and S&P Global $62,600 for Registration Failures.” The Capture Cascade Timeline, January 8, 2026. https://capturecascade.org/event/2026-01-08--calprivacy-datamasters-sp-global-data-broker-registration-fines/