Privacy Advocates Seek to Strengthen CCPA

The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 requires the California Attorney General to adopt regulations by July 2020 to further the law’s purposes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of privacy advocates have filed comments seeking strong regulations to protect consumer data privacy. In an article announcing the effort, the EFF says “the CCPA is a good start, but we want more privacy protection from the California Legislature.” Number one on their agenda: To implement CCPA’s right to opt-out of the sale of one’s personal information, the draft regulation would require online businesses to comply with user-enabled privacy controls, such as browser plugins, that signal a consumer’s choice to opt-out of such sales. The coalition seeks a clarification to this draft regulation that “do not track” browser headers, which thousands of Californians have already adopted, are among the kinds of signals that online businesses must treat as an opt-out from data sale. The coalition wants the AG to issue clarifying regulations that bar efforts announced by members of the adtech industry to evade CCPA’s right to opt-out of sales, and to recognize that broad dissemination of personal information throughout the adtech ecology is a form of “sale” plainly subject to CCPA’s right to opt-out.