Tell Mastercard: Stop selling transaction data
The Nebraska privacy law gives you a bit of control over how businesses collect and use your personal data. Here's how to take advantage.
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Don't Sell My Data campaign intern
Director, Don't Sell My Data Campaign, U.S. PIRG Education Fund
The Nebraska privacy law – called the Nebraska Data Privacy Act– passed in April 2024. It goes into effect January 1, 2025.
The Nebraska Data Privacy Act is a consumer privacy law that gives you some basic rights regarding how businesses collect, use and sell your data. Exercising those rights requires some work on your part. Let’s take a look.
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The Nebraska privacy law gives you several rights regarding your personal information:
To access, correct or delete your data, you have to submit requests one at a time to individual companies. That means fully exercising your rights can be a pain. There are likely hundreds of third parties holding your information right now.
However, starting January 1 2025, Nebraska residents will gain an important protection: the ability to more easily opt-out of data collection and sales. You will be able to automatically tell websites you don’t want them to collect new personal data from you by downloading a tool called a universal opt-out mechanism.
A universal opt-out mechanism is a piece of technology that helps you automatically opt-out of data collection online. Once you’ve downloaded the tool, the mechanism will broadcast to every site you visit that you don’t want your data collected or sold. That way you don’t have to individually contact every website you visit to opt out.
You will, however, need to do a bit of work to get the tool working.
The Global Privacy Control is currently the most widely recognized version of universal opt-out mechanism. There are a number of tools available that incorporate the Global Privacy Control (GPC).
Find your web browser below for our recommendations of tools that include GPC signals.
To automatically opt-out of data collection on websites while using your Chrome browser, you need to download a special browser extension. You have a couple of options.
To automatically opt-out of data collection on websites in Safari, you need to download a special browser extension. Apple currently doesn’t allow our favorite tool – Privacy Badger – in Safari, but there is another option you can use.
To automatically opt-out of data collection on websites in Edge you’ll need to download a special browser extension. You have a couple of options:
Firefox is the only major browser that has a GPC signal built into it automatically, so you don’t have to download any special tools. But you do have to go turn it on.
The Global Privacy Control isn’t perfect, and it remains to be seen how well this part of the Nebraska Data Privacy Act is enforced. But it’s worth going ahead and downloading a universal opt-out mechanism now, even before companies are required to listen to opt-out signals in January 2025.
To exercise your other core rights – accessing, correcting or deleting the data a company has already collected on you – you must submit a request directly to each business. Companies must tell you how to send a request in their privacy policy.
Read: How to read a privacy policy
When looking at a privacy policy, search for a section titled “Your Privacy Rights,” “Your Rights and Choices,” or something similar. Use ctrl+f for the term “privacy”, “rights”, or “opt” to find this information more quickly. In this section, the business should give you instructions for how to access, correct, or delete your personal data. It will typically be a web form or an email address you need to send a request to.
There are lots of companies that likely have your data. The worst actors are shadowy companies called data brokers that specialize in collecting, buying, combining, and reselling data that it bundles into profiles about you. They get data from all kinds of places and sell it to practically whomever is looking to buy. They’re terrible for your personal security.
We recommend starting with some of the biggest data brokers below. You can submit an access request if you want to see what data they have on you, or jump straight to deleting your data and opting out of future data collection.
The Nebraska Data Privacy Act gives you some rights to ask companies to delete your data and the ability to use a browser tool to automatically opt-out of websites’ data collection. That’s good. It’d be even better, however, if less of the work of protecting your privacy was on you.
The best thing for consumers is to change how companies can collect and use data in the first place.
To maximally protect consumers, it should be on companies to only collect the data they need to deliver the service you’re expecting to get. There’s no good reason for your fast food loyalty app to be collecting your location 24/7 or your VR game app to be collecting your social security number. They plain don’t need it.
Companies should also be limited to only using the data they collect for what the consumer is expecting. There’s no good reason for your health app to turn around and sell your prescription information to advertisers or your child’s internet-enabled stuffed animals to be sending transcripts of your child’s conversations to third parties.
This matters for your personal security. The more data that companies collect, and the more companies they sell it to, the more likely it is that your personal information is going to be exposed in a breach or a hack and end up in the wrong hands. This makes it more likely you’ll be the victim of identity theft, financial fraud and hyper-targeted scams.
The Nebraska Data Privacy Act is a good start. But – like all of the state privacy laws on the books – it has room for improvement. Every state that has passed a law has the opportunity to make it stronger. Instituting stronger upfront rules on how companies can collect and use data would improve the privacy and security of Nebraska consumers.
We look forward to seeing how Nebraska continues to strengthen its protections in the future. And in the meantime, folks should take advantage of their new rights.
If you want to ensure that your data is as protected as possible, there are other steps you can take besides relying on your Nebraska data rights. We’ve got more simple ways you can boost your data security here.
See below for even more tips to put you more in control of your information online.
How to request and download your Facebook data
Right now, there are no rules stopping tech companies from monetizing the data of kids and teens.
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Don't Sell My Data campaign intern
R.J. focuses on data privacy issues and the commercialization of personal data in the digital age. Her work ranges from consumer harms like scams and data breaches, to manipulative targeted advertising, to keeping kids safe online. In her work at Frontier Group, she has authored research reports on government transparency, predatory auto lending and consumer debt. Her work has appeared in WIRED magazine, CBS Mornings and USA Today, among other outlets. When she’s not protecting the public interest, she is an avid reader, fiction writer and birder.