The Future of Online Privacy Hinges on Thousands of New Jersey Cops

If he doesn’t win, the oft-derided data broker industry would have proved that it has a right under the First Amendment to publish people’s contact information. Websites could avoid further regulation, and no one in the US may ever be guaranteed by law to become less googleable. “I never thought we would have such a hard time, that it would turn into such a battle,” Adkisson says. “Just home address, phone number, remove it. One state. Twenty-thousand people.”

This is the first definitive account of how the fate of one of the country’s most intriguing privacy laws came to rest on the shoulders of Adkisson’s latest tech startup, Atlas.

Matt Adkisson is almost your prototypical lifelong entrepreneur. He quit high school at 16 to code video games and small-business websites. His parents insisted, though, that he audit classes across the street from their home, at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island. So he began learning about national security. One lesson he picked up: When judges live in fear and can’t rule impartially, democracies can wither.

But saving democracy wasn’t his passion. Making money was. He headed off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with designs on becoming a consultant or investment banker, but dropped out before senior year. Like so many other young people in the midst of the Web 2.0 frenzy, he had an entrepreneurial itch. Without telling them, Adkisson cashed out his parents’ tuition payment, and in 2006, he and a friend slept under office desks for a month before founding a company called FreeCause with Adkisson’s brother to develop marketing tools for Facebook games. Adkisson later bought shares of the nascent social media startup. Both bets paid millions. In 2009, FreeCause sold for about $30 million.

Adkisson upgraded to nights on a friend’s couch in San Francisco, where he used his wealth to invest in or start dozens of other software companies. As they sold, he became a comfortable multimillionaire. It was his last big deal, in 2018, that set him down the path of privacy crusader. He had sold Safer, which developed a Google Chrome competitor called Secure Browser, to antivirus maker Avast for about $10 million.

Adkisson and a cofounder recall that during a meeting over lakeside beers near offices in Friedrichshafen, Germany, after the deal closed, an Avast executive demanded they feed search activity from Secure Browser’s millions of users to Jumpshot, a sibling unit that was selling antivirus users’ browsing history to companies wanting to study consumer trends.

Adkisson stood to make millions of dollars in bonuses from the proposed integration. He refused. It was too intrusive to share that intimate data, he says, and a violation of trust. (Avast declined to comment on the episode. It shuttered Jumpshot, and this year agreed to pay $16.5 million to settle US government charges over the service’s allegedly deceptive data usage.)

Adkisson left Avast in December 2020 thinking he would keep adding to his portfolio of over 300 startup investments or pursue something in AI, like automating brushstrokes to create on-demand oil paintings. But he couldn’t shake the Friedrichshafen incident. For his web browsing, he started to use VPNs and the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. He tried to get websites to remove his new East Coast home address. Those efforts mostly failed; companies had no obligation to comply.

These websites that sell addresses or phone numbers typically get that data by buying voter or property records from governments, and user account details from companies willing to deal. The easy access to data enabled by the aggregators can be vital to services like identity verification or targeted advertising. But the customers also can include people who are looking for an old friend. Or investigating a crime. Or someone with a grudge against, say, a judge.

As Adkisson dug into the data broker industry in 2021, he read about how a law that went into effect the year before had given Californians a right to demand companies delete their personal information. So Adkisson and two cofounders launched a service they called RoundRobin, to help Californians do just that for a fee. Services like DeleteMe and Optery were already selling deletion assistance, but Adkisson felt they were more marketing spin than serious tech.

Photograph: Justin J Wee

RoundRobin joined the well-known startup accelerator Y Combinator in April 2021 and began developing software to simplify making requests. But the startup had no way to enforce the takedowns it wanted to charge customers for; only California’s attorney general could sue for violations of the nascent law. Data websites ignored RoundRobin.

Given Adkisson’s pedigree, investors held out hope. California privacy activist Tom Kemp, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and others invested about $2 million in RoundRobin that August. But the struggle continued. The cofounders renamed the company to the more serious-sounding Atlas Data Privacy in January 2022. It didn’t help. But then, a break. Just as Adkisson was considering giving up and his initial cofounders were pulling out, a relative of his in California who had worked in law enforcement mentioned Daniel Anderl’s murder—and the law it inspired in New Jersey. “Fate delivered the Garden State,” Adkisson says.

He soon reached out to law enforcement experts, including a former Boston police commissioner and a retired Navy rear admiral. The two told Adkisson stories about cops who were attacked in their homes. They urged him to press on.

The first organization to return Adkisson’s cold calls was the New Jersey State Policemen’s Benevolent Association, the state’s largest police union. They said a few of the organization’s 31,000 members needed help containing some inadvertently leaked contact information. Adkisson and a cofounder, J.P. Carlucci, took a stab. Despite limited success, union members were excited by Adkisson’s moxy. In July 2022, a union leadership group voted unanimously to offer Atlas’ service as a benefit to members with the intention of using Daniel’s Law to demand websites remove phone numbers and addresses. The cost, spread across all members paying for the union’s legal protection plan, was hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, Adkisson says.

In August 2022, with the deal signed and thousands of members soon enrolled, Atlas established headquarters in Jersey City, New Jersey, and set out to prove it could deliver better results than back in California. For that, it needed litigation power.

The first six law firms Adkisson called refused to take up the New Jersey cases. They worried about their financial return and the likelihood of success. Judges had discretion over the $1,000 payouts, plaintiffs had to prove physical harm, and to even bring a case, attorneys had to mobilize each plaintiff individually. It wasn’t a good equation.

Over seafood in San Francisco on the waterfront, one attorney sketched out for Adkisson revisions to Daniel’s Law that could make Atlas’ job easier. Adkisson took those suggestions back to the police union, which in turn used its weight in Trenton to push lawmakers to enact the changes. By December 2022, legislators introduced amendments requiring judges to impose financial penalties on websites that failed to honor removal requests, allowing those covered by the law to sue more liberally, and enabling attorneys to more easily bring big cases. In July 2023, just after the third anniversary of Daniel’s murder, the governor signed these amendments into law.

Atlas stayed focused on recruiting more users, from the police union and beyond. Newly hired staff—the company grew to a total of eight people—learned the lingo, like don’t refer to state troopers as “officers.” Adkisson let clients call him directly 24/7 for technical support. He drove his Jeep Cherokee more than 50,000 miles to every corner of the state. The Atlas team spent 18 hours on back-to-back days at a correctional facility to catch every shift, plying union guards with Crumbl Cookies and Shake Shack. “Word started to spread, like, ‘Who the hell are these people?’” Adkisson says. “That brought us credibility.”

Days before last Christmas, Atlas finished the software for users to select the companies to which they wanted to send emailed data removal requests. The tired team gathered over Zoom watching a tally rise as the emails landed in data brokers’ inboxes. Altogether, Atlas would deliver 40 million emails to 1,000 websites on behalf of roughly 20,000 people over the next five months.

Helping users with only the easy targets—the ad-supported websites that tend to pop up when googling someone’s name—“would have been a band-aid on a wound that needed much deeper treatment,” Adkisson says. To provide what it viewed as comprehensive support and more than what competitors offer, Atlas also was facilitating takedown requests to mainstream services such as Zillow and Twilio. They tend to supply data through fee-supported advanced tools that don’t pop up on a standard Google query.

Twilio denies that it provides data subject to Daniel’s Law. Zillow didn’t respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. Atlas, Adkisson says, spent about $1.3 million in labor and fees to verify websites it targeted were actually providing home addresses and phone numbers.

The startup got its first response on December 26. Red Violet, whose Forewarn data dossiers help real estate agents vet potential clients, was demanding Atlas cease and desist, erroneously claiming that Daniel’s Law applied only to government agencies and not private companies. Adkisson had expected the legal teeth of the updated Daniel’s Law to inspire widespread compliance. This was a rough start. “Demoralizing,” Adkisson says.

Photograph: Justin J Wee

Other companies responded with demands to see ID cards of Atlas clients, apparently suspicious that the startup was making up its customers or people demanding takedowns were pretending to work in law enforcement just to be covered by the law. Adkisson told one company they could call requestors to authenticate demands. After all, it had their numbers. Another company suggested that if Atlas clients wanted anonymity, they should have used an LLC to buy property instead of their own names.

Akisson says the most retaliatory response came from LexisNexis, which lets police and businesses search for people’s contact information and life history, typically for investigations and background checks. He alleges that instead of removing Atlas clients’ phone numbers and addresses from view, LexisNexis needlessly froze their entire files in its system, impeding credit checks some were undergoing for loan applications.

LexisNexis spokesperson Paul Eckloff disputes that freezing was an overreach. The company deemed that step as necessary to honor the requests submitted by Atlas users to not disclose their data. “This company couldn’t be more dedicated to supporting law enforcement,” he says. “We would support common sense protections.” But he described Daniel’s Law as overly punitive.

To Adkisson, the people being punished were the cops, judges, and other government workers he had met on his Jeep excursions through New Jersey. Among them were police officers Justyna Maloney, 38, and her husband, Sergeant Scott Maloney, 46, who work in Rahway, a tiny city along the border with New York City.

In April 2023, Justyna was filmed by a YouTuber who runs the channel Long Island Audit, which has over 842,000 subscribers. He often films himself trying to goad police into misbehavior, and Justyna asking him to leave a government office became his newest viral hit. Followers inundated the Rahway Police’s Facebook page with about 6,500 comments, including death threats, slurs, and links to the Maloneys’ address and phone numbers on SearchPeopleFREE.com and Whitepages. Scott says Facebook wouldn’t remove the comments linking to the contact information. Neither would the police department, citing First Amendment concerns. Tensions boiled.

In August 2023, Scott received texts demanding $3,000 or “your family will be responsible for paying me in blood.” The texts listed his sister’s name and address. An hour later, the same number sent a video of two ski-masked individuals bearing guns inside an unknown location. Atlas wasn’t up and running yet, so Scott, determined to delete all his family’s contact data online, sat on his lagoonside deck every evening for weeks, crushing Michelob Ultras to stay calm as he navigated takedown forms. He put in so many requests to Whitepages for his family that it barred him from making more.

The Facebook comments linking to the Maloneys’ address only came down after they sued their bosses last November for violating Daniel’s Law. This past January, a state judge ruled that the risk to the couple “far outweighs” potential harm to the police department from censorship complaints.

As Adkisson looked to sue noncompliant data websites, he had no trouble signing up the Maloneys as plaintiffs. And because Daniel’s law now made it possible, thanks to Atlas and the police union’s lobbying, to collect guaranteed penalties from data websites, Adkisson had been able to secure five law firms, including prominent national firms Boies Schiller Flexner and Morgan & Morgan, and some attorneys who personally knew the Daniel of “Daniel’s Law.”

On February 6, Atlas and the legal team began filing lawsuits, naming the Maloneys and about 20,000 other clients as plaintiffs. In state court, 110 cases remain unresolved across five different counties. Thirty-six lawsuits are being contested in federal court before Judge Harvey Bartle III, who is based in Philadelphia but commutes across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, because judges based in the state were conflicted out by virtue of being eligible for Daniel’s Law protections.

Eight defendants quickly filed motions to dismiss in state court, but they were all denied. At the federal level, most companies are arguing together that the New Jersey statute violates their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. It’s an argument that’s allowed personal information to stay online before. Federal courts have given leeway to publication of lawmakers’ contact information and actors’ birthdates, leaving doubts over whether cops and judges and their homes and phones would fare any better.

Defendants have told Bartle to consider a US Supreme Court decision in 2011 that found a law in Vermont that protected doctors’ privacy unreasonably singled out data use by drugmakers. Atlas’ foes view Daniel’s Law as similarly arbitrary because it holds New Jersey agencies to different standards than their companies when it comes to keeping data private. They also say it’s unfair that they must remove numbers that cops still list on personal websites.

Some companies fighting the lawsuits note that the $1,000 penalty that the law guarantees may lead to companies acting out of fear and removing more data than needed, or honoring requests that are actually invalid. What’s more, these defendants say that Atlas’ true motivation is money. They claim that instead of trying to quickly protect those already signed up when last year’s amendments passed, Atlas sought out more users to run up the potential monetary judgment and duped them into paying for protections they could exercise for free themselves.

Adkisson disputes the accusations. He says Atlas needed time to finish its platform and ensure it was able to properly log usage, so that judges wouldn’t dismiss cases based on technicalities like takedown requests ending up in spam folders. The startup also won’t be profiting from the lawsuit, he says. Two-thirds of any proceeds will go to the users represented; anything he and Atlas are left with after covering the costs of bringing the lawsuits would be donated to law enforcement charities and privacy advocacy groups through Atlas’ nonprofit arm, Coalition for Data Privacy and Security. Privacy is “a very real, tactical, and visceral need,” Adkisson says.

Photograph: Justin J Wee

He was reminded of that this past May when he took WIRED in his Jeep to meet with Peter Andreyev, a cop in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, and president of the statewide Policemen’s Benevolent Association. Around dusk that day, Adkisson handed Andreyev a search result for his name on DataTree.com, a website that sells property records. Andreyev slipped on his black-rimmed glasses and brought his linebacker figure toward a conference table to review the page. It took him just two seconds to tense up. “Oh shit,” he said.

He stared at a street-view image of his home, and a birds-eye shot with his address overlaid. The square footage was in there too, for good measure. His head visibly rattling and legs restless, Andreyev pounded the table. “I—I’m pretty infuriated by this.”

Like many law enforcement officers, the 51-year-old rarely goes a day without nightmares about some known thug or detractor attacking him and his family. The DataTree printout reinforced for him that it would take just a few clicks for anyone to target him in the vulnerability of his own home. WIRED pulled up Andreyev’s report from DataTree with just a free trial.

As Andreyev continued to study the page, Adkisson pointed out something he viewed as particularly galling. In February, Atlas had sued First American, the $6 billion title insurance company that operates DataTree, for allegedly not complying with removal requests. Andreyev had been listed as one of the lead plaintiffs, alongside the Maloneys. In the following weeks, DataTree removed Andreyev’s address from one section of the search result for his name but left it up on the map that Andreyev was now staring at. “That’s no way compliant,” Andreyev said. “Fuck, it pisses me off.” First American declined to comment. As the legal battle plays out, Andreyev says he’s left to continue looking over his shoulder—even at home.

The antidote of making officers more difficult to find could require greater creativity from those investigating or advertising to them, says Neil Richards, a Washington University School of Law professor and author of Why Privacy Matters. But it doesn’t make the work impossible. Richards, who isn’t involved in the Atlas litigation, says courts need to recognize that “privacy protections are a fundamental First Amendment concern, and one that’s even more important than a company’s ability to make money trafficking in phone numbers and home addresses.”

In the coming months, Judge Bartle will decide whether cops and judges living in fear imperils public safety. If so, he’ll have to settle whether Daniel’s Law is the least onerous solution. A loss for Atlas and its clients would effectively be treating “anything done with information” as free expression, Richards says, and stymie further attempts to regulate the digital world.

On the other hand, a victory for Atlas could be a boon for its business. Adkisson says tens of thousands of people across the country have joined the company’s waiting list: prison nurses, paramedics, teachers. All of them, he adds, anticipating someday gaining the same removal power as New Jerseyans. Since the beginning of 2023, at least seven states have passed similar measures to Daniel’s Law. None of those, however, include the monetary penalty that gets lawyers interested in pursuing enforcement. “Step one is, win here,” Adkisson says, referring to New Jersey.

After the dispiriting start, he thinks momentum is swinging in Atlas’ favor. In August, the startup raised its first funding since 2021, about $8.5 million in litigation financing and equity investment.

Adkisson says compliance with more recent removal requests is increasing, and a few defendants are settling. In September, a state judge approved the first deal, in which NJParcels.com owner Areaplot admitted to 28,230 violations of Daniel’s Law and accepted five years of oversight. PogoData, a revenue-less website that had made property owners’ names searchable, settled this month. Bill Wetzel, its 79-year-old hobbyist owner, would owe $20 million for breaching the deal but he says he supports removing names of officers in harm’s way.

Then again, against the better-funded defendants with more at stake and unpredictable courts, Adkisson recognizes that a broader victory for privacy and Atlas is uncertain. In telling his story, he wants to ensure there’s opportunity for people to learn from any missteps if Atlas fails. But his advisers, including former boss Steve Avalone, don’t expect Adkisson to give up easy. They describe him as the ultimate gadfly—unorthodox, tenacious, and wealthy. “There’s few people with that horsepower and that charisma,” Avalone says.

For his part, Adkisson says he’s driven by a sad truth. The tragedies, fueled in part by contact information online, that judge Salas wanted to bring an end to after her son’s murder haven’t stopped. Last October, a man allegedly shot to death Andrew Wilkinson, a Maryland state judge, who hours earlier had denied the man custody of his child. The National Center for State Courts said it was the third targeted shooting of a state judge in as many years.

Maryland investigators say they believe the now-deceased assailant found Wilkinson’s address online, though they never recovered definitive evidence beyond a search query for the judge’s name. When he heard about the murder the day it happened, Adkisson immediately googled Wilkinson. His address was right there.