In the period of just a week, California passed a bold new privacy law — the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. This law was hurried through the legislative process to avoid a proposed ballot initiative with the same name. The ballot initiative was the creation of Alastair Mactaggart, a real estate developer who spent millions to bring the initiative to the ballot. Mactaggart indicated that he would withdraw the initiative if the legislature were to pass a similar law, and this is what prompted the rush to pass the new Act, as the deadline to withdraw the initiative was looming.
The text of the California Consumer Privacy Act is here. The law becomes effective on January 1, 2020.
There are others who summarize the law extensively, so I will avoid duplicating those efforts. Instead, I will highlight a few aspects of the law that I find to be notable:
(1) The Act creates greater transparency about the personal information businesses collect, use, and share.
(2) The Act provides consumers with a right to opt out of the sale of personal information to third parties and it attempts to restrict penalizing people who exercise this right. Businesses can’t deny goods or services or charge different prices by discounting those who don’t opt out or provide a “different level or quality of goods or services to the consumer.” However, businesses can do these things if they are “reasonably related to the value provided to the consumer by the consumer’s data.” This is a potentially large exception depending upon how it is interpreted.
(3) The Act allows businesses to “offer financial incentives, including payments to consumers as compensation,” for collecting and selling their personal information. Financial incentive practices cannot be “unjust, unreasonable, coercive, or usurious in nature.” I wonder whether this provision will undercut the restriction on offering different pricing or levels of service in exchange for people allowing for the collection and sale of their information. Through some clever adjustments, businesses that were enticing consumers to allow the collection and sale of their personal data through different prices or discounts can now restructure these into “financial incentives.”
