FAQ

The California Consumer Privacy Act specifies a role for an authorized agent, which it defines as “a natural person or business entity registered with the Secretary of State to conduct business in California that a consumer has authorized to act on their behalf.”

Said otherwise, authorized agents are intermediaries with the authority to send data rights requests on behalf of a consumer. Permission Slip was designed to leverage California’s authorized agent provision, which is how the app is able to send data requests on your behalf. Since then, a handful of other states have passed authorized agent provisions as part of their privacy laws. Many companies choose to honor agent requests whether or not the consumer lives in a state with privacy laws that allow for them.

Permission Slip was originally designed around the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), which defined new data rights for residents of California. Since then, new states have passed privacy laws and we have adapted Permission Slip to be as effective as possible in these states. Permission Slip has also proven to be effective in states that don’t currently have privacy laws on the books, since many companies choose to show their commitment to consumer privacy by honoring data rights independent of the state the consumer comes from.

Anyone in the U.S. and territories can use Permission Slip. The success rate on your requests is likely to be higher if you live in a state that has a privacy law, particularly if your state’s privacy law contains an authorized agent provision. Permission Slip works best in the context of U.S. privacy laws. If you live outside the USA, you will likely have issues trying to sign up and send requests with Permission Slip. There may be better tools available in your country of residence.

If you’re having trouble using Permission Slip or have questions about the app, you can contact our support team via email at [email protected]. If you’re a company looking to get in touch with the Permission Slip team about request processing, you can email [email protected].

We’d like to hear what you think of the app! Please email any and all thoughts to [email protected] and a member of our Support team will get back to you. You can also submit feedback in the app via Menu → Feedback. To suggest specific companies you’d like to see in Permission Slip, you can use the Suggested Companies feature in the app or the two other methods outlined here to let us know.

Because Permission Slip sends requests for you, we need to make sure your contact information is up to date and accurate. If you need to edit your profile details, please email our support team to assist you via [email protected].

Navigate to the Requests screen in the Permission Slip app, and tap on the request you’d like to cancel. You’ll land on the request status page, where you’ll find a “Cancel request” button in the upper right corner. You can email support [email protected] for assistance, too.

If you miss the response window to complete a deletion request, please contact Permission Slip support ([email protected]) and our team will attempt to resubmit your request.

If it’s been a few days since Permission Slip submitted your request to the company and you haven’t heard from a company, we first recommend checking your spam folders and voicemail. Many companies require you to verify your identity before they can proceed with your request, and in these cases they usually email or call to confirm that you are who you say you are. After your identity is confirmed, companies generally have between 15 and 45 business days to fulfill your request, depending on what state you’re located in and what type of request you initiated.

If over two months have passed since Permission Slip submitted your request to the company and you haven’t heard anything from a company, it’s possible that the company had technical issues or ignored your request. Unfortunately, we at Permission Slip cannot control what other companies and organizations do. However, we do note internally which companies respect consumer privacy and which do not. We also advocate behind the scenes for companies to be more responsive to consumer data rights requests.

If you feel that a company is not cooperating with your request, you can email concerning responses or screenshots to Permission Slip’s support team [email protected]. We will do what we can to assist you. Depending on what state you’re coming from, the company may not be legally obligated to respond to your request or respond at all. Sometimes companies don’t have the information they need to locate your data in their systems – we recommend sharing your full legal name and all of the emails you use with Permission Slip to abate this. Companies’ communications also get sent to spam folders sometimes, so we advise checking spam regularly for information related to your requests. The Permission Slip team pays attention to how companies are behaving when we send requests on your behalf, and we do what we can to make the requests we send for you more successful.

Requests may not be resolved as quickly as you might like for a variety of reasons. Privacy laws vary from state to state and they don’t exist everywhere. What’s more, not all companies are bound by them. Companies have 45 days to comply with a request in most states, and they can also activate an extension on turning around your requests. These extensions often double the allowable response time to 90 days.

If you haven’t heard back from the company, we first recommend checking your spam folders and voicemail. Many companies require you to verify your identity before they can proceed with your request, and in these cases they usually email or call to confirm that you are who you say you are. Unfortunately, we do see some companies that do not reply to data requests despite their legal obligations. Sometimes they sideline these requests for a long time and are only responsive to multiple follow-ups from Permission Slip or after public accountability measures such as actions by state attorney generals’ offices.

One of the benefits of using Permission Slip is that we are able to look at aggregate data to see which companies are not complying with data requests on a large scale. We report that data out to our advocacy teams and others who can demand change.