US Privacy Law

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The rush for California to get all of the “rules of the road” ready for next year has seemed to cause a bit of confusion with California’s privacy law. Draft regulations were published the same day the Governor signed into law a series of amendments to the underlying law. It is all a bit confusing, However, now that the Governor has signed the last raft of amendments, and the dust has somewhat settled, the question on everyone’s mind is: What changed in the California Consumer Protection Act (“CCPA”)? How does this effect the draft regulations that the Attorney General published?

Fortunately, there are a number of significant changes which help clarify the CCPA, as well as materially change the scope of the CCPA – even if the AG didn’t include some of these changes into the initial draft regulations announced earlier this month. The most impactful changes across industries are as follows:

Business employees

To start off, the issue of employee coverage under the CCPA has been a fractious one. On one hand, business has rightly claimed that the relationship with an employee is not the same as the relationship with a customer. On the other hand, privacy advocates have claimed that employees shouldn’t give up privacy rights just because they are employees.…
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Attorney General Becerra’s office posted the long-awaited draft CCPA regulations a little before 2:00 pm (PST) October 10th. It was a bit of a curve ball, to be perfectly honest (considering the final swath of amendments to the CCPA are not even final until Governor Newsom signs them, or on October 13th). Tellingly, the California Administrative Procedure Act requires the California Department of Finance to approve “major regulations” (and they have 30 days to do that) prior to publication. Based on this, it would seem that these regulations were drafted prior to the amendments to the CCPA going through the legislature. This does not seem like an effective way to draft regulations, but hey, no one should tell the AG he shouldn’t jump the gun! They are now out there so, one reviews anyway.

Topping out at a modest 24 pages (the CCPA itself is 19 pages), the regulations are organized into seven articles. We’re directing our comments to the issues that pop out to us initially, and as always, we’ll post further observations as things progress.…
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Those interested in keeping up with the latest news impacting the California Consumer Privacy Act have been heavily focused on AB 25, and its potential to exclude employees from the scope of the CCPA. In a marathon late-night session, the California Senate Judiciary Committee weighed in July 11 on various bills – including AB 25. An while AB 25 was part of the Committee debate, that amendment may actually make the bill less useful than first intended. Additionally, another bill made it out of committee which has the potential of a far greater impact than anyone seems to be noticing.…
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In just a few short months, on January 1, 2020, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is set to go into effect, establishing new consumer privacy rights for California residents and imposing significant new duties and obligations on commercial businesses conducting business in the state of California. Consumer rights include the right to know what…

In prior posts, we’ve commented on the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), likening it, and its Texas ‘flavored’ variant(s), to ‘elephants in the room’. Here, we’ve opted to expand our coverage and talk about what we’re seeing other states do (or, let’s expand the elephant metaphor to: elephants, elephants everywhere.)

It seems that all of a sudden, consumer privacy is THE hot topic and everyone’s jumping on the CCPA bandwagon! Consumers have woken up to what is happening with their personal information and are demanding government protective action! These are sensationalist statements, to be true, but are they accurate statements? Well, as is usually the case it is a bit more nuanced and it is important to set some things straight.…
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In Part 1 of our ‘Texas Joins the Privacy Fray’ series, we focused on the Texas Consumer Privacy Act. Here, we shine the light on the Texas Privacy Protection Act (HB 4390).

The TXPPA is distinguishable from both the TXCPA and the CCPA because the applicability threasholds are different. For the TXPPA to apply,…

Last month, Texas saw the introduction of not one, but TWO privacy bills in the Texas state legislature: The Texas Consumer Privacy Act (TXCPA) and the Texas Privacy Protection Act (TXPPA). With news of this likely meeting with a collective groan and shoulder shrug, we do have some good news for you.

Both bills’ foundations are set with familiar CA Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) language. Unfortunately, this is also bad news because they both suffer from the same problems found in the CCPA – we’ll explain below. It’s also still early in the game, with the bills having just been filed in the state legislature. Given that there is time in the legislative session for amendments to be made and especially considering the ‘ring-side’ view Texas lawmakers have to the CA legislative and Attorney General rule/procedure process currently unfolding, it would be unreasonable not to expect changes. Finally, the bills are reactive responses to the national (or international) focus on privacy issues of late and may allow impacted businesses a grace period, as we’ve seen in the CCPA. In this blog, we shine the light on the first of these bills: The Texas Consumer Privacy Act.…
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California, home to more than 40 million people and the 5th largest economy in the world, has passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), its omnibus consumer privacy law. The law creates sweeping new requirements concerning the collection, maintenance, and tracking of information for both employees or customers who are residents of California. Many aspects of the implementation and enforcement are still being finalized by the California Attorney General. However, companies with employees or customers in California need to take stock of the information they are processing that could qualify as “personal information” for California residents, and they need to begin establishing mechanisms for compliance before the end of 2019.…
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Welcome to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) […as if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the GDPR!].

The bracketed, italicized text, albeit a bit cynical, is with little doubt, how many of us initially reacted to the news of a new data protection law, hailed as the standard in consumer privacy protection, in California. And while the effective date is supposed to be January of 2020, January of 2019 isn’t too early to starting getting ready for the new law.

To dispel the rumors, the CCPA is not “GDPR-lite.” Where it comes on the heels of the GDPR’s May 2018 enforcement date, it isn’t a mirror image of the GDPR, or even a “watered down” variant of it. Drafters of the CCPA did indeed look to the GDPR as a basis for some of data protection concepts, but they focused on existing California privacy laws as well.

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