20,000 New Jersey officers sue 118 data brokers under Daniel's Law (2024)

What happened

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

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

Within about ten days of the first filings, the count had passed 130 lawsuits. By 2025 Atlas had filed more than 140. In November 2024, a federal judge in New Jersey rejected the brokers' First Amendment challenge and let the cases proceed, a major procedural win but not a final judgment. The question was not settled: in August 2025, a federal court in West Virginia struck down that state's version of the law on First Amendment grounds, and by late 2025 the constitutionality of New Jersey's statute was before the New Jersey Supreme Court, still unresolved. The suits themselves remain largely pending, with no damages finally awarded while that question is decided.

How it started

Daniel's Law was passed in 2020 after Daniel Anderl was shot and killed at his family's home by a man who had located the address of his mother, US District Judge Esther Salas. The law was named for him. Its 2023 amendment added the assignable private claim and the $1,000 statutory-damages minimum that made the 2024 class actions financially viable. Before that amendment, an individual covered person had little practical leverage when a broker ignored a removal demand.

Atlas Data Privacy Corporation sends nondisclosure demands on behalf of covered people. It gathered evidence that the demands were being ignored or circumvented. The class actions were the first large-scale public test of whether brokers were complying with one of the strongest broker-removal statutes then on the books.

Why this case matters

The New Jersey class actions are a large, documented measurement of whether the broker-removal system works at scale. The finding on the public record is that even a strong removal statute does not clear addresses reliably without repeated enforcement.

The other incidents documented on this site rely on the same address-by-name lookup. The New Jersey filings show that even after about 20,000 covered people sent written demands under the law, the lookup often kept returning a home address. That is the basis for treating broker removal as ongoing work rather than a one-time request.

What this means for you

If you are a covered person under Daniel's Law or a similar statute in another state, the law gives you the grounds to demand removal. The grounds do not remove the address by themselves. Someone has to send the demands, track which brokers complied, send them again when the address reappears, and add new brokers as they surface.

The federal Lieu Act for federal judges has the same gap between the legal right and the day-to-day result. Frontline Privacy does this work for first responders: we scan for your exposed information, file removals, and keep checking for it to come back.

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