Proposed California initiative would toughen and lock in consumer privacy rules

26 September 2019 by Steve Blum
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The man behind California’s new privacy law doesn’t like what lobbyists are trying to do to it in Sacramento, and plans on taking his case directly voters. In 2018, Alastair Mactaggart and his organisation – Californians for Consumer Privacy – collected enough signatures to get a tough privacy law on the ballot, but withdrew the initiative after a deal with was cut with lawmakers to enact most of its provisions. But anything the legislature can do, it can also undo, so Mactaggart is going back to the voters. According to the initiative’s text, filed with the California attorney general’s office yesterday…

Even before the [California Consumer Privacy Act] had gone into effect, however, businesses began to try to weaken the law. In the 2019–20 legislative session alone, members of the Legislature proposed more than a dozen bills to amend the CCPA, and it appears that business will continue to push for modifications that weaken the law. Unless California voters take action, the hard-fought rights consumers have won could be undermined by big business.

If enough valid signatures are collected and it’s approved by Collected voters, the initiative would generally tighten restrictions on the kind of personal information that businesses can collect from consumers and required them to disclose, in advance, “the specific purposes” for which the data will collected or used, and to go back and notify consumers if they want use the information for other reasons. It would ban the collection of personal information from children less than 13 years old without parental permission, and from teenagers between 13 and 16 without their permission. Consumers all ages would gain the right to demand that a business delete or correct personal information, within limits, even if it was collected with permission.

The initiative would also create the “California Privacy Protection Agency”, with an initial budget of $5 million a year. It would be run by a five person, politically appointed board, and have the “power to audit a business’s compliance” with the new privacy law, including the authority to subpoena “books, papers, records or other items”. The agency could issue fines for violations.

If passed, the California legislature’s ability to water down the initiative’s provisions would be severely limited. Mactaggart needs signatures from more than 600,000 registered voters to get it on the 2020 ballot.