Business groups, police union spar over data privacy law

Yahoo

18-04-2025

A law intended to protect law enforcement by shielding their home addresses and phone numbers from disclosure has sparked several legal challenges, but police are defending the law. (Photo by New Jersey Monitor)
A coalition of businesses and the state's biggest police union are sparring over a New Jersey law meant to protect prosecutors, judges, and cops by shielding their home addresses and phone numbers from disclosure.
Businesses that use data for things like real estate, lending, fraud detection, background checks, and credit reporting say changes legislators made in 2023 to strengthen the law instead allowed data privacy companies to profit by suing and seeking damages from companies that don't remove personal information from the internet. The businesses recently formed the Public Safety Information Protection Coalition to fight the state statute, known as Daniel's Law.
The businesses asked a federal judge last June to declare Daniel's Law an unconstitutional, impermissibly broad violation of the First Amendment. The judge rejected that challenge, and last month the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review the judge's ruling.
John Molinelli, a former Bergen County prosecutor, is the coalition's spokesman.
'Daniel's Law serves a noble purpose, but the law is broken,' Molinelli said in a statement last week.
The New Jersey State Policemen's Benevolent Association wrote an open letter Wednesday to Molinelli, accusing him of falling prey to 'the data industry's latest ploy to avoid accountability for putting public servants in harm's way.' The letter, signed by state PBA President Peter Andreyev and 43 leaders of other PBA chapters statewide, said members of the data business coalition 'pretend to be advocates for Daniel's Law while secretly seeking to undermine and weaken it.'
'They would rather spend millions of dollars spreading misinformation and lies than simply comply with a law meant to keep us and our families safe,' the letter says.
New Jersey enacted Daniel's Law in 2020. It's named after federal Judge Esther Salas' son, Daniel Anderl, who was slain at the judge's home that year by a gunman who wanted to harm Salas. Since state legislators passed the law soon after Anderl's death, they have expanded it several times to protect additional public workers, including child welfare investigators.
Lawmakers amended it in 2023 to establish mandatory monetary damages for violations, among other things. The following year, Atlas Data Privacy Corp. filed 118 class-action lawsuits on behalf of law enforcement officers against data brokers accused of ignoring requests to remove the officers' data from various websites.
Molinelli had called such lawsuits predatory, accusing Atlas of 'engineering' the 2023 legislative amendments so that it could sue violators and reap the profits.
The PBA officials defended the lawsuits, saying the data brokers and businesses Molinelli represents continue to violate Daniel's Law by selling law enforcement officers' private information despite the ongoing litigation and officers' pleas to them to stop.
'What you call 'predatory lawsuits' we call a fight to protect ourselves and our families from predators who seek to cause us harm,' the PBA officials wrote.
PBA officials have cited a leaked conference call, first reported by Politico earlier this month, during which data brokers and industry groups plotted how to weaken the law.
Molinelli, in a statement from a spokesman, said the PBA's letter fails to address how best to protect public officials who do not want their personal information published.
'Many of those who signed this letter are friends of mine and I respect them greatly for what they do. Their misplaced efforts to attack me for wanting Daniel's Law to work as intended are regrettably shrouded by the financial plans of Atlas Data Privacy Corporation,' he said.
Daniel's Law has inspired similar legislation in other states, even though it has prompted several legal challenges here.
Still, legislators aim to expand it further.
One bill now in the Statehouse pipeline would extend privacy protections under Daniel's Law to court administrators and deputy court administrators, while another would allow people protected under the law to use a post office box or address other than their home address on their driver's license or other official identification cards.
Salas has recently said judges and their families have received unsolicited pizza deliveries from unknown persons — a signal, she says, that the people know where the judges live — and some of them are sent using her late son's name.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX