First CA Assembly Hearing on CCPA

Yesterday the California General Assembly held its first major hearing on the California Consumer Privacy Act. A link to the 3-hour hearing can be found here. The hearing was before the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee presided over by Ed Chau, the Chairman of the committee.

A number of business groups, including the ANA, were able to speak at the hearing and provide their perspective on problems with the CCPA. There was also, however, substantial pushback from consumer privacy groups urging limited changes. These groups also alleged that the law would only effect large companies. The business witnesses, on the other hand, clearly pointed out that this is not the case and that the law would have extremely negative impacts on small retailers, restaurants, and other similar types of businesses.

ANA’s Chris Oswald, at the hearing, delivered a letter from ANA signed jointly by the AAF, the 4A’s, the IAB, and the NAI for the hearing record. This joint letter outlines four major problems with the CCPA: 1) the law forces businesses to turn pseudonymous data into identifiable information; 2) CCPA creates the opportunity for any person in a household to potentially access unauthorized personal information about fellow members of that household; 3) it fails to provide other effective means to offer “explicit notice” for the sale of data to a third party; 4) CCPA fails to give consumers’ options for nuanced and tailored deletion and opt-out choices.

ANA will continue to work to respond to the numerous problems with CCPA which make this legislation bad for business and bad for consumers. These issues and other privacy and data security matters will be a major focus of the 2019 ANA Law and Public Conference held in Washington D.C. March 19th and 20th.