20,000 New Jersey officers vs. 118 data brokers — the Daniel's Law class actions (2024)

What happened

On February 13, 2024, Atlas Data Privacy Corporation filed 118 class-action lawsuits in Bergen County Superior Court, New Jersey. The plaintiffs were more than 20,000 active and retired police officers, state troopers, prosecutors, judges, and corrections officers — and their immediate family members. The defendants were data brokers, ranging from household-name aggregators like LexisNexis Risk Solutions to mid-tier people-search sites.

The suits alleged that after the plaintiffs served written nondisclosure demands under Daniel's Law, the brokers had either ignored the demands, removed the data and then re-listed it, or sold the data to other brokers who continued listing it.

By 2025, the litigation had grown to more than 130 separate cases and was producing ongoing court rulings on the constitutional and statutory questions, including First Amendment defenses raised by some brokers. A federal court struck down a similar West Virginia statute on First Amendment grounds in 2025; the New Jersey statute survived equivalent challenges in early rulings.

How it started

Daniel's Law was passed in 2020 after the killing of Daniel Anderl at the home of US District Judge Esther Salas. The 2023 amendment added the private right of action and the statutory-damages minimum that made the 2024 class actions financially viable. Before that amendment, individual covered persons had limited practical leverage when a broker ignored a removal demand.

Atlas Data Privacy Corporation, a service that sends nondisclosure demands on behalf of covered persons, accumulated evidence that demands were being ignored or routinely circumvented. The class-action filings were the first large-scale public test of whether the brokers were actually complying with the strongest version of a broker-removal statute then on the books.

Why this case matters

The NJ Daniel's Law class actions are not an attack and they are not a single-victim story. They are the structural data point that the existing broker-removal regime, even at its strongest, does not work without continuous enforcement.

Every other case on this site — the Anderl attack, the Hortman shooting, the Willis doxxing, the Salas family targeting, the Boyer stalking — depends on the same address-by-name lookup. The NJ class actions are the receipt showing that even after 20,000 covered persons sent written demands under the law that exists, the lookup mostly kept returning the answer.

That receipt is what justifies treating broker removal as continuous operational work, not a one-time filing.

What this means for you

If you're a covered person under Daniel's Law or one of its analogs in other states: the legal mechanism gives you grounds. The grounds do not by themselves remove the address from the broker pages. Someone has to send the demands, track which brokers complied, send them again when the address reappears, and add new brokers to the list as they show up.

That's the day-to-day mechanic. The federal Lieu Act for federal judges has a similar gap between the legal mechanism and the operational result. The work that makes either law actually deliver protection is the same: continuous removal, continuous re-removal.

For more on the broker chain and which sites matter most, see /data-brokers.

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