Data Privacy

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California has enacted three new laws governing employer use of artificial intelligence and automated tools in layoffs, workplace monitoring, discipline, and termination. These laws are separate from the California Consumer Privacy Act’s automated decisionmaking technology (ADMT) rules and apply more broadly to employers and public entities that are not covered by the CCPA. CCPA covered employers may need to integrate compliance with ADMT and Risk Assessment requirements (for sensitive personal information processing activities and automated decisionmaking technology).

Updates to Cal/WARN and workplace-surveillance requirements take effect January 1, 2027. The rules for automated discipline and termination decisions take effect July 1, 2027. Employers should use the remainder of 2026 to identify covered systems, assign responsibility, and update their processes and notices.

1. Cal/WARN Notices for AI-Related Job Displacement

Effective January 1, 2027, SB 951 adds disclosure requirements to the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (Cal/WARN). Cal/WARN generally requires 60 days’ advance notice of a covered mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment. Violations may result in civil penalties of up to $500 per day, in addition to other remedies. If AI or automation causes all or a substantial part of a covered event by replacing or automating positions, the employer must add specified information to the notices to affected employees and the Employment Development Department (EDD).

Continue Reading California Just Expanded Regulation of Workplace AI Beyond CCPA ADMT

The Pentagon wants commercial AI, and AI companies want the Pentagon’s business. But the terms that make or break these deals are often about data, security, and rights, not algorithms.  That demand runs deep across U.S. defense customers and the defense industrial base, and AI companies are increasingly eager to supply it, directly or through…

California has shut down one increasingly popular theory of website-tracking liability. With Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature, SB 690 amends the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”) and eliminates the private right of action under Section 638.51 for pen-register and trap-and-trace claims involving websites, online applications, and mobile applications. Enforcement of Section 638.51 will now rest…

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If you weren’t quite sure about the EU Cyber Resilience Act, this is what it does:

The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) Regulation establishes mandatory cybersecurity requirements for “products with digital elements” (PDEs) that are placed on the EU market, in the course of commercial activity, whether in return for payment or free of charge. The stated objectives are: 1) ensuring that manufacturers improve the security of PDEs; 2) a coherent cybersecurity framework for hardware and software producers; 3) enhancing transparency; and 4) enabling businesses and consumers to use products with digital elements securely.

What are PDEs?

PDEs are software or hardware products and their remote data processing solutions, including software or hardware components being placed on the market separately. Remote data processing  is processing at a distance for which the software is designed and developed by the manufacturer, or under the responsibility of the manufacturer, and the absence of which would prevent the PDE from performing one of its functions.

The scope is intended to cover products that have the ability to exchange digital information (not just respond or activate in response to a signal) and therefore may put it at risk. Further, software downloaded and installed or supplied to the user and that executes on the user’s system (e.g., a browser extension or mobile app downloaded from an app store) is in scope. Hardware and software provided by the same manufacturer in order for a product to function (e.g., drivers or interface apps), are together a PDE, even if supplied separately. But software that executes remotely and is only accessed by the user, is not necessarily a PDE (e.g., websites, unless they support the functionality of a PDE through remote processing).

From last Friday,  manufacturers of PDEs must report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe security incidents using ENISA’s Single Reporting Platform. This is effectively first CRA deadline for manufacturers. The essential cybersecurity requirements — the ones most compliance programs are built around — don’t arrive until December 11, 2027, so we will not bore you with those here.

Continue Reading The EU Cyber Resilience Act’s Reporting Started last Friday, September 11. Here’s a Very, Very Brief Primer
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California lawmakers have sent Senate Bill 690 to Governor Gavin Newsom, teeing up a narrowing of website-tracking litigation under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA), who has until September 30 to sign or veto the legislation. If signed, the bill would eliminate private lawsuits asserting website-based “pen register” and “trap and trace” claims under Section 638.51 of CIPA. For businesses that have received demand letters or are defending lawsuits premised on routine website technologies—such as cookies, pixels, analytics tools, or similar tracking technology—the bill would offer relief from certain types of claims asserted under CIPA. Additionally, the bill would apply retroactively to pending claims in actions commenced within two years before its operative date, which is expected to be January 1, 2027, if the bill becomes law. 

The Impetus

The legislation responds to a surge of CIPA claims built on a statute originally designed for telephone-era wiretapping, not modern website traffic. Because CIPA carries statutory damages that can reach at least $5,000 per violation without proof of actual harm, even ordinary commercial web practices have created substantial litigation leverage for plaintiffs to demand large sums from website owners. SB 690 targets that specific theory by removing the private right of action for Section 638.51 claims.

Continue Reading California SB690 – A Bill That Significantly Narrows Website Tracking Claims – Sent to Governor’s Desk
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The California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, has issued its tentative ruling in Variety Media, LLC v. Superior Court, the closely watched writ proceeding that asks whether the pen register provisions of the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”) apply to common website tracking technologies. The tentative decision would grant Variety’s petition in part and direct the trial court to sustain Variety’s demurrer with leave to amend. The court’s reasoning cuts in both directions. The panel would hold that CIPA’s pen register statute reaches internet communications, rejecting the threshold defense that has anchored many motions to dismiss. But it would also hold that a pen register captures only metadata identifying the destination of an outgoing communication, and that a website visitor’s IP address identifies the source of a communication rather than its destination. Under that construction, the complaint before the court fails to state a claim.

Background

Penal Code section 638.51 prohibits installing or using a pen register without a court order or the user’s consent. Over the past three years, plaintiffs and pro se litigants have filed hundreds (if not thousands) of lawsuits, arbitration demands, and pre-suit letters alleging that cookies, pixels, analytics tools, and similar technologies are unlawful pen registers because they collect visitors’ IP addresses and device information. Trial courts have divided on whether the statute, enacted with telephone surveillance in mind, reaches these tools at all. No California appellate court has answered the question in a published decision.

Continue Reading California Court of Appeal Tentatively Holds That Collecting a Website Visitor’s IP Address Alone Does Not Constitute Pen Register Activity Under CIPA

On August 11, 2026, the Colorado Department of Law released a single set of proposed rules  substantially building out two 2026 statutes: the Automated Decision-Making Technology Act (“ADMT Act”) and the Conversational Artificial Intelligence Service Operator Requirements (the “Chatbot Safety Act”). Both laws take effect January 1, 2027, and the proposed rules would become effective the same day. The Rules are not yet final – for covered organizations and interested parties the weeks until September 4 are the time to submit comments to be considered for a redraft – and there is a specific ask to help shape the definition of covered ADMT.

The Automated Decision-Making Technology & Conversational Artificial Intelligence Services Rules (“Rules”) clarify open terms and add operational obligations, and they signal that Colorado’s revised AI framework may demand significantly more compliance infrastructure than the statutes alone suggest.

Continue Reading Colorado Releases Proposed Rules for Its AI and Chatbot Safety Laws: These Create More Operational Work than the Statutes Suggest
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Senior United States District Judge William H. Orrick, sitting in the Northern District of California, denied a motion to dismiss last week in an Automated License Plate Recognition (“ALPR”) matter, McGinty v. Reimagined Parking LLC, d/b/a Imperial Parking.[1] Judge Orrick held that the plaintiff plausibly alleged actionable harm based on his “right to know” about the use of ALPR systems in two garages. The order follows Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts, Inc.[2] and the guidance of Mata v. Digital Recognition Network, Inc.,[3] concluding that the California Supreme Court would likely recognize violation of a consumer’s “right to know” as actionable harm under California’s ALPR law if presented with the question.

The decision is significant because it marks the first time a federal judge adopted the state-court trajectory created in Bartholomew and Mata. Bartholomew treated the alleged failure to make required ALPR disclosures in an ALPR Privacy Policy as an actionable injury to a consumer’s right to know under the law. Though Mata did not deal with the failure to present an ALPR Privacy Policy, the decision in Mata did offer further guidance on how courts should analyze asserted ALPR harms.

Continue Reading Federal Court Follows Bartholomew Reasoning in Denying Motion to Dismiss ALPR Lawsuit
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Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology is facing increasing legal scrutiny as courts, regulators and individuals attempt to examine and expose the various ways in which license plate data is captured, collected, shared and used. Recent disputes over ALPR technology have shifted away from issues of public safety and toward whether the private sector businesses and governmental organizations, among others, that utilize ALPR adequately disclose its use and sharing, as well as implement proper safeguards around this potentially sensitive, location-based personal information.

1. Private Sector’s Failure to Disclose Use of ALPR Technology Can Be Sufficient to Constitute Harm to Consumers

The private sector’s use of ALPR technology is facing challenges and possible legal exposure. In February of this year, California’s First Appellate District addressed the requirements imposed by the state’s ALPR Law in Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts, Inc., and in particular addressed what constitutes sufficient “harm” under the law to state a claim.1,2 In that matter, the plaintiff alleged that a parking garage owned and operated by Parking Concepts collected his license plate data without making a privacy policy regarding the collection publicly available. First, the Court determined that the parking garage camera system constituted a ALPR system under the law – that is, that it was “a searchable computerized database resulting from the operation of one or more mobile or fixed cameras combined with computer algorithms to read and convert images of registration plates and the characters they contain into computer-readable data.” But more importantly, the Court concluded that using ALPR technology without a publicly disclosed privacy policy stating when and how ALPR is collected and used violates an individual’s “right to know” of the activity, which is sufficient to allege harm under the law.

Continue Reading Automated License Plate Reader Technology Raises Concerns Over Private Sector Compliance and Government Overreach

When Colorado enacted the first comprehensive state AI law in 2024, it imported the conceptual architecture of the EU AI Act: a risk-based regime built on duties of care, risk management programs, and impact assessments. Two years later, and within a matter of weeks, the state has dismantled that legislation. On May 14, 2026, Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 26-189, which repeals SB 24-205 and replaces it with a disclosure-and-rights framework focused on automated decision-making technology (“ADMT”). The new framework takes effect January 1, 2027.

The substance of the rewrite has been well-covered already. Less examined is how Colorado got here, and what the speed and direction of the pivot signal for the rest of the state AI regulatory landscape. The new bill was introduced and signed within two weeks of its introduction. The Governor’s AI Policy Working Group did the heavy lift in advance: roughly six months of stakeholder consultation produced the draft framework released on March 17, 2026. But the final two-week sprint reflects pressure to land the rewrite before the original AI Act’s June 30, 2026 effective date and amid escalating federal headwinds.

Continue Reading Colorado’s AI Reset: Two Weeks, a White House Callout, and a Pivot Away from the EU Model