The Fight Over California's Privacy Bill Has Only Just Begun

Lobbying groups and trade associations, including several representing the tech industry, are pushing for a litany of deep changes to California's new data protection law that they say would make the law easier to implement before it goes into effect in January 2020. But privacy advocates worry that pressure from powerful businesses could end up gutting the law completely. "This is their job: to try to make this thing absolutely meaningless. Our job is to say no," says Alastair MacTaggart, chair of the group Californians for Consumer Privacy, which sponsored a ballot initiative that would have circumvented the legislature and put the California Consumer Privacy Act to a vote in November. Big Tech and other industries lobbied fiercely against the initiative. In June, MacTaggart withdrew it once the bill, known as AB 375, passed. With just three days left in the legislative session, California lawmakers are scrambling to vote on a new bill, called SB-1121. The original bill had been hastily written and passed in an effort to keep MacTaggart's initiative off the ballot. The original goal of SB-1121 was to deal with typos and other small, technical errors, with the hope of introducing more substantive changes later. But over the last few weeks, groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Internet Association, which represents companies like Google and Facebook, have pushed for significant alterations, even as the tech industry works to develop a federal privacy bill that would, if passed, override California's law.