California Lawmakers OK GDPR-Like Bill with Strict Guidelines on Gathering of Private User Data

Lawmakers in the state of California passed a bill on Thursday seeking stricter policies in the collection, sharing, and selling of digital private user data.

California Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill, which to many signals a huge leap in the protection of consumers’ user data. This is considered a major development especially after the massive Facebook-Cambridge Analytica private data leak scandal that broke out this year.

With provisions that will apparently force tech giants to impose major changes in data collection policies, the bill is being compared to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implemented last month.

The bill paves the way for the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which ultimately forces tech companies to be transparent about all the types of data and personal information they are collecting. Corporations like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and more will be compelled to explain the mechanisms they use in gathering private user data.

To begin with, policymakers will have to define what constitutes “personal information.” The bill also definitively prohibits the collection of data from users who are under the age of 16 “unless affirmatively authorized” based on requirements that will be later specified. This provision can be very crucial for tech companies since younger consumers are a highly valuable audience for advertisers.

Meanwhile, tech companies will have to disclose information about the third-party firms to which they sell private user data as well as “the business purposes for collecting or selling the information.”

More importantly, the bill gives consumers the right to opt out of the gathering and selling of data that a tech company participates in. With a verified request, a customer can specify the types of information he or she wants to be deleted from the companies’ servers.

Although it is a great push forward for advocates of online privacy, the fact is it will not be implemented until 2020. This gives a lot of time for major tech companies to lobby for favorable changes that could diminish the restrictions that the bill aims to impose.