Public Safety Information Protection Coalition
Restoring New Jersey’s Daniel’s Law and protecting its public servants.
Save Daniel’s Law. Save Lives.
Passed in 2020, Daniel’s Law was designed to protect judges and other public servants by allowing them to stop online disclosure of their home addresses and telephone numbers.
But in 2023, a company called Atlas Data Privacy Corporation (“Atlas”) pushed through amendments that have made New Jersey’s public servants less safe.
The changes to Daniel’s Law bogged down the nondisclosure process, transferred public servants’ rights to third parties, like Atlas itself, and opened the door to predatory lawsuits, including from Atlas. That has made compliance nearly impossible for businesses acting in good faith and allowed Daniel’s Law to be exploited by those scheming to line their own pockets at the expense of protecting the public servants they claimed to represent.
Daniel’s Law serves a noble purpose. But Daniel’s Law is broken. The Public Safety Information Protection Coalition, a group of civic-minded businesses, seeks to comply with and uphold the true original intent of Daniel’s Law. This Coalition is dedicated to fixing the law so that it can better protect public safety.
To protect New Jersey’s public servants, Daniel’s Law must be restored to its original form.
Daniel's Law and Past Compliance
Daniel’s Law honors U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl, who was tragically murdered in an attack on the family home where Judge Salas was the intended target.
The law, as passed in 2020, gave judges and law enforcement officers the right to ask businesses to remove home addresses and unlisted telephone numbers from public disclosure, including online. The goal was to put that information further out of reach of criminals like Daniel’s killer.
The Public Safety Information Protection Coalition shares this laudable goal and has great respect for New Jersey’s public servants. Its members stood ready and able to comply with Daniel’s Law, not just philosophically, but technologically.
In fact, many Coalition members have simple and easy-to-use tools to remove a person’s information—often with just the click of a button—and have been using these tools to remove the data of judges, law enforcement officers, and countless other Americans for years, even before Daniel’s Law existed. Their goal is to continue to do so, without disruption by predatory actors like Atlas.
2023 Amendments Undermine Daniel’s Law and its Protections
The 2023 amendments to Daniel’s Law were promoted as facilitating removal of more public safety officials’ information, but the opposite has occurred.
Atlas actively lobbied for these amendments, which altered the law in four main ways:
- Changed the law to prohibit not only the disclosure, but even possession, of public servants’ addresses and phone numbers
- Eliminated the role of the New Jersey Office of Information Privacy to verify the identities of requestors and distinguish between people with the same name or address, but failed to identify any other agency to perform that important function
- Mandated steep money damages for violations, removing judges’ discretion to waive damages based on a business’ good faith efforts to comply with the law
- Allowed public servants to transfer their legal rights to third parties, like Atlas, which could then sue and collect money damages for themselves after first flooding companies with requests with which they could not possibly comply
The end result is that any business (or individual) could be subject to hefty, mandatory money damages simply for possessing (but not disclosing) information and despite good faith efforts to comply with even massive and unworkable nondisclosure requests. Moreover, Atlas (and other third parties) could do the suing and seek the damages for themselves as opposed to the public servants they purportedly represent—all while making it more difficult to protect those public servants’ personal information.
Predatory Lawsuits Seek Billions, at the Expense of Public Servants’ Safety
The ink was barely dry on the amendments when Atlas began lining up lawsuits.
Almost immediately after the amendments went into effect last summer, Atlas began soliciting covered persons to transfer their rights to Atlas. Atlas then waited six months until late December 2023 and early January 2024, at which time it sent tens of thousands of Daniel’s Law requests to hundreds of businesses, many of them small and family owned, demanding they comply within 10 days.
Burying businesses under a mountain of requests made compliance virtually impossible – as Atlas intended. The requests were sent during the weeks of Christmas and New Year’s (even at midnight New Year’s Day) when businesses predictably were either shut down or operating with reduced holiday staffs. The requests were emailed instead of utilizing the businesses’ existing removal tools. Some requests were sent to defunct or unmonitored email addresses. Others crashed companies’ IT systems or triggered SPAM filters that interpreted the massive requests as cyberattacks, completely blocking their transmission. The requests that did get through often lacked proper identifying information, making it impossible to properly identify the correct covered officials behind the requests.
Other companies received the spammed requests but required and sought basic assistance from Atlas to correctly process the requests. Atlas ignored such calls for basic assistance. Instead, weeks later, it filed over 140 lawsuits, demanding over $2.5 billion in damages regardless of whether the companies had received, attempted to or in fact complied with the nondisclosure requests.
If Atlas’ intentions were to protect law enforcement officers’ personal information from disclosure, it could have provided businesses with a reasonable opportunity to remove that information, including by using their existing removal tools, or responded to businesses’ requests for verifying data.
Even after the lawsuits were filed, Atlas continued to hinder compliance with the requests, refusing—until ordered by a judge—to provide copies of the requests to businesses that had not received them or identifying information to businesses that could not verify the requests without that information.
Because of Atlas’ blatant interference and attempts to undermine companies’ ability to comply with their requests, the information of thousands of public servants remained exposed for months instead of being protected.
The result of Atlas’ actions and their amendments to Daniel’s Law: Judges and law enforcement officers in New Jersey are less safe.
Unintended Consequences of The Misguided Changes to the Law
The 2023 amendments to Daniel’s Law have opened the floodgates to abusive lawsuits that jeopardize the ability of many businesses that rely on data to operate – even small businesses that do not disclose personal information on the internet. The result could cause immeasurable societal and economic harm. In addition to making it more challenging to protect New Jersey’s public servants, it inevitably will be…
More Difficult
For small businesses to stay open
To secure an auto, home or
student loan
To secure
veterans’ benefits
To complete required background checks to buy a gun, coach youth sports or become a teacher
To track down parents ducking child support
To protect individuals from identity theft
And more …
Restoring and Saving Daniel’s Law
The Public Safety Information Coalition seeks to roll back the 2023 amendments and restore the original intent of Daniel’s Law—indeed, to save the law.
The amendments expose Daniel’s Law to constitutional challenges surrounding important issues of free speech and government accountability—challenges that, if successful, could void the entire law.
The amendments also make it highly difficult and, in many cases, impossible for well-intentioned businesses to verify requests and comply within the 10-day period. As a result, businesses acting in good faith are led to unintentionally violate the law, incentivizing civil lawsuits by predatory actors seeking to line their own pockets rather than protect individuals’ privacy.
Eliminating these excessively broad provisions in the statute that make it ripe for abuse and nearly impossible to satisfy will enhance compliance, protect public servants, and restore the legitimate and important purpose of Daniel’s Law.
About Us
The Public Safety Information Protection Coalition represents the interests of individuals, small businesses and companies in real estate, lending, credit reporting, background checks, fraud detection, legal services, identity protection and verification, veterans’ services, social services agencies, nonprofits, consumer reporting, B2B marketing, data services, and other industries that rely on data in order to operate in an increasingly digital economy.
Commitment to Public Safety
The Public Safety Information Coalition and its members have great respect for America’s judges, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, and other public servants. Indeed, law enforcement agencies are frequent customers of many Coalition members, who provide useful tools and information to combat crime. Even before Daniel’s Law was passed, Coalition members honored legitimate requests to remove the personal information of judicial officers, law enforcement agents, and others from their offerings. These commitments remain unchanged to this day. We support protecting individuals’ privacy with clear and stable procedures to ensure compliance while fostering consumer trust.
Contact Us
Public Safety Information Protection Coalition
222 West State Street
Trenton, NJ 08608
© 2024