Advertisers Eye Loophole In California’s New Privacy Law

The new California consumer privacy law, effective Jan. 1, 2020, contains “broad sweeping definitions of personal information,” according to Ron Camhi, managing partner at law firm Michelman & Robinson in Los Angeles, and chair of its advertising and digital media industry group. Along with the standard categories – names, email addresses, Social Security numbers – it covers IP addresses, geolocation, shopping, browsing and search histories, and consumer profiles based on inferences from personal information. The law will require companies to tell state residents what information they collect, how it’s used, and provide an option to ask the company to delete or stop selling that information. Online tracking cookies and mobile advertising IDs may fall under its jurisdiction, but digital advertising companies are preparing to argue that they meet the law’s exemption standard because they aggregate those identifiers into anonymized audience pools. Both Facebook and Google have rolled out features required by the law, such as privacy settings that categorize the information that the companies collect from people and tools for people to request that information be deleted. They claim that they don’t sell people’s information, so they don’t need to provide a way to request that the companies stop selling their data.