Opt-Out Obstacles: Concerning Practices by Registered Data Brokers and the Multi-Billion-Dollar Cost of Breaches

In July 2025, Joint Economic Committee Ranking Member Maggie Hassan (D-NH) launched a major initiative to investigate financial scams and push for new ways to address this growing threat from both the public and private sectors. Following Ranking Member Hassan’s requests, Comscore, Telesign, 6sense, and IQVIA took actions to make their opt-out options more accessible to consumers and other parties. These actions included removing “no index” code that had blocked opt-out pages from search engine results, adding opt-out links in more prominent locations, and publishing blog content explaining how people can exercise their privacy rights. Given the amount of personal information about consumers that data brokers hold, breaches of data broker companies can lead to massive amounts of personal data falling into the hands of scammers; this, in turn, results in major costs for American consumers. Identity theft stemming from just four large data broker breaches in recent years cost U.S. consumers more than $20 billion.