Tennessee data privacy and data broker removal

Tennessee has a comprehensive privacy law that gives you the right to access, delete, and control your personal data. Here is how those rights work in practice, and how to get yourself off data broker sites.

Your rights in Tennessee

Tennessee residents are protected by the Tennessee Information Protection Act (TIPA). It gives you eight core rights:

• Right to access and know. Request a copy of the personal information a company holds about you.
• Right to correct. Request corrections to inaccurate personal information.
• Right to delete. Ask a company to delete your personal information.
• Right to data portability. Get your data in a portable format you can take to another service.
• Right to opt out of sale. Tell a company to stop selling your personal information.
• Right to opt out of targeted advertising. Stop companies from targeting you with ads based on your personal data.
• Right to opt out of profiling. Stop companies from building a behavioral profile about you.
• Right to appeal. Challenge a company's decision to deny your privacy request.

Does this cover the company that has my data?

TIPA has a narrower reach than most state privacy laws. A company is covered only if it does business in Tennessee (or targets Tennessee residents), earns more than $25 million a year, and meets one of these thresholds:

• It processes the personal information of at least 175,000 Tennessee consumers, or
• It processes data on at least 25,000 consumers and makes more than half its revenue from selling personal information.

A business under $25 million in annual revenue falls outside the law no matter how much data it holds.

How to get off data broker sites in Tennessee

Your state law gives you the right to request deletion, but exercising it site by site takes real effort. Here are the most effective steps, in order.

1. Enable Global Privacy Control

Global Privacy Control is a free browser setting that tells every website you visit not to sell or share your data. It takes two minutes to turn on and works quietly in the background on every site. Tennessee does not mandate it yet, but most major companies honor it voluntarily because they must comply with California's law anyway.

2. Submit direct opt-out requests

You can send requests to brokers directly. Look for the "Do not sell my personal information" link in a company's website footer, or submit an access, deletion, or correction request through its privacy policy page.

Under Tennessee's law, covered companies must respond within the statutory deadline. If they don't, you have grounds to file a complaint with the Tennessee Attorney General.

3. Keep it from coming back

Here is the part nobody tells you: even after you finish every step above, brokers re-ingest your information from public records, data-sharing networks, and commercial databases. Within a few months, your profiles reappear. Staying off these sites is not a one-time task. It is ongoing work most people cannot keep up with by hand.

Tennessee's data broker law: what it means for you

Tennessee does not have a dedicated data-broker registry. Most national data brokers are registered in California and honor opt-out requests from residents of any state, but without a Tennessee-specific law requiring it, you have little legal recourse if a broker ignores your request. Delist handles this across sites in one place.

Other privacy protections in Tennessee

Beyond the comprehensive privacy law, Tennessee has additional protections that may apply to you:

• Safe at Home. An Address Confidentiality Program run by the Tennessee Secretary of State that shields the addresses of domestic violence and stalking survivors.
• Biometric data. Tennessee has no standalone biometric-privacy statute, but biometric data is treated as sensitive data under TIPA, so companies need your consent to collect it.
• Affirmative defense. TIPA lets companies raise a defense if they follow a recognized NIST privacy framework, which is unusual among state privacy laws.

How to file a privacy complaint in Tennessee

Tennessee Attorney General, Consumer Protection: tn.gov/attorneygeneral

Most state agencies enforce privacy laws in the aggregate. They investigate patterns of violations rather than resolving individual disputes. Filing a complaint still matters: it creates a record that helps trigger enforcement action.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• capitol.tn.gov
• tn.gov
• huschblackwell.com