BY JEFF JOHN ROBERTS

In January, a new law gave consumers the power to stop companies collecting their personal information. The law, known as the California Consumer Privacy Act (or the CCPA), can be a powerful tool for privacy, but it comes with a catch: Consumers who want to exercise their CCPA rights must contact every data broker individually, and there are more than a hundred of them. But now they have an easier option.

On Thursday, a startup called DoNotPay unveiled a service it calls Digital Health that automates the data-deletion process. Priced at $3 a month, the service will contact more than 100 data brokers on your behalf and demand they delete your and your family’s personal information. It will also show you the types of data the brokers have collected—such as phone number or location info—and even initiate legal proceedings if the firms fail to comply. The monthly fee also gives subscribers access to DoNotPay’s other automated avenging services, like appealing parking tickets in any city, claiming compensation for poor in-flight Wi-Fi, and Robo Revenge, which sues robocallers.

The data deletion service is the latest brainchild of Joshua Browder, who launched DoNotPay as a way to fight parking tickets when he was a 19-year-old at Stanford University. The startup has been hailed in the media as a time-saving “robot lawyer” and has reportedly saved consumers over $4 million in fines.

The technology that underlies DoNotPay’s parking ticket and CCPA services are the same: bots. The bots send emails on customers’ behalf and also reply to any follow-up requests companies might send back.

In the case of companies who receive a CCPA data deletion request, they might ask for additional information such as a photo or a birthdate. In such cases, DoNotPay’s bots will contact the customer for the additional data, and then use the new information to respond to any other data brokers that make similar requests. And while the CCPA is a state law that technically only covers California residents, many companies are acting as if it applies country-wide—and, in any case, Browder says DoNotPay uses a California P.O. Box when it reaches out to companies.

Browder also emphasizes that DoNotPay will never sell consumer data itself, and that the company’s own terms of service allow it to be sued if it ever does. He also believes data brokers do no good for consumers.

“There’s no reason an average person wants one of these privacy brokers to have their data,” he says.

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In the summer of 2015, Stanford-bound high school grad Josh Browder spent his nights coding and developing an automated program that would help people contest parking tickets. The native Londoner had recently gotten his driver’s license, and had himself assembled a respectable collection of fines, some of which he felt were unjustly rewarded. 

About three weeks later, Browder already had a product called DoNotPay which he shared with his friends. A blogger from Reddit picked up on it, and almost overnight, DoNotPay went from meager 10 people using it to whopping 50,000 users. 

Today, the company announced it closed a $12 million Series A at an $80 million valuation. Coatue led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures. All had previously invested in the company’s $4.6 million seed round. 

DoNotPay, which Browder likes to call the “world’s first robot lawyer,” has gone from helping people with their parking tickets to assisting with over 100 different areas of consumer rights. “In the crisis times that we live in, lots of big companies are using consumers as a lifeline,” Browder, who’s the company’s founder and CEO, says. “You see this with airlines as they refuse to refund people and instead they issue them a travel credit, just because they know they can get away with it.”

The platform offers automated legal help with customer service disputes like airline flight compensation or cancelling subscriptions (during Covid-19 the usage of this category has increased by over 30 times), suing companies in small claims courts, jumping customer service phone queues, or analyzing accounts and finding hidden money (such as bank or overdraft fees).

For example, after fitness chain 24 Hour Fitness filed for bankruptcy, over 1,000 users had sent cancellation requests through DoNotPay in just one day. Bowder says that DoNotPay hit its millionth filed case last month, the number of subscribers is in the high five figures, and the company is break even. It operates in the United States and the United Kingdom, with 90% of the users located in the U.S.

The way the platform makes money is by charging users $3 per month. Browder says that the company doesn’t take a percentage of what they save and has no ads or selling data business. Though Browder isn’t a lawyer by trait, he says that the platform works with lawyers and specifically with the American Bar Association, which in January honored DoNotPay with its ABA Award Brown Award for its “commitment to increasing legal services to those of modest means.”  

Browder says that the money that DoNotPay helps users save would otherwise end up lost in government bureaucracy or in the pockets of Fortune 500 corporations, which according to him “have a business strategy of being as tough as possible to the consumer.” “What we try to do is give the ordinary people the same power in the legal system as large companies,” Browder says. 

In 2017, Browder, the age of 21 made the Forbes’ European 30 Under 30 law and policy list. Today, his San Francisco-based company, which hires eight people, has raised a total of $16.6 million.

by Igor Bosilkovski courtsey Forbes.