California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”)

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On October 10, 2019, the California Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, announced at a press conference that his office has released proposed implementing regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”). The text of the proposed regulations is available here.

As background, the CCPA is a California privacy law that seeks to give California consumers the rights to know about and control the personal information that businesses collect about them. For a detailed discussion of the CCPA, please see our previous posts (available here and here).  

Effective tomorrow, October 1, 2019, the existing Nevada Privacy of Information Collected on the Internet from Consumers Act will be amended to include a consumer right to opt out from the sale of personal information and to impose verification requirements on “Operators” covered by the law. The existing law requires such covered entities to post privacy notices. The new consumer opt-out right was added through Senate Bill 220 (“SB 220”), which was signed into law earlier this summer. While this addition to Nevada’s privacy framework draws comparisons to consumer rights afforded under the California Consumer Privacy Act (the “CCPA”), the act, as amended by SB 220, applies to a much narrower category of businesses and is limited to certain types of “Covered Information” that are transferred as part of a “Sale” of data.  

In an effort to give consumers more control over the data businesses collect from and about them, the California legislature passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2018 (and amended it a few months later). The CCPA gives consumers the right to know about and have deleted…

Businesses and California consumers are one step closer to understanding what their respective obligations and rights are under the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (the “CCPA”). The CCPA is California’s landmark legislation that seeks to give California consumers the rights to learn about and control certain aspects of how a business handles the personal information that a business collects about them.  It achieves this by requiring businesses to implement certain measures that enable consumers to exercise these rights. For an in-depth discussion of the CCPA more generally, please read our previous posts (here and here).   

California already has some of the strongest data privacy laws in the United States, but within the past week state legislators, with the backing of the California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, have proposed two new bills that would strengthen California’s data privacy laws even more. One bill (SB 561) would amend key sections of the California Consumer Privacy Act (the “CCPA”), which we have previously blogged about when it was first enacted and when it was subsequently amended, and the other bill (AB 1130) would expand the definition of “personal information” under California’s data breach notification law to include biometric information and government-issued ID numbers (e.g., passport numbers).

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a major new state law poised to affect the privacy landscape not just in California, but in the U.S. as a whole. (For a detailed overview of the CCPA, read our previous post.) On August 31, the California legislature passed several amendments to the CCPA that will have a significant impact on its implementation.

This has been a big year in the data protection world, with the headline-grabbing General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) occupying most of the spotlight with its plethora of privacy-related requirements and potential for high fines for violators. While companies (justifiably) may be focused on the GDPR at the moment, it’s also important to keep an eye on new privacy laws on the horizon in order to avoid last-minute scrambles for compliance as effective dates near. Foremost among these new laws is the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. The Act was introduced and signed quickly in order to prevent voters from facing a similar ballot initiative in the November election. This post provides an overview of the new law, which will go into effect beginning January 1, 2020.