Lawmakers in California’s senate judiciary committee were expected today to consider amending the state’s tough new privacy law, including changes that could significantly weaken the measure, MediaPost reports.
“The law, slated to take effect next year, allows consumers to learn what personal information has been collected about them by companies, have that information deleted, and prevent the sale of that data,” MediaPost reports. “The current measure’s relatively broad definition of ‘personal information’ includes data that could potentially be linked to individuals — such as cookies, persistent identifiers, browsing history and IP addresses. The bill also has an exception for ‘de-identified’ information, which it defines as including data incapable of being linked to a particular customer.
“One of the amendments under consideration, AB 873, proposed by Assembly member Jacqui Irwin, would revise the definition of ‘de-identified’ data to include material that is not ‘reasonably linkable’ to a particular consumer. If that amendment passes, it could make the law more friendly to online marketers by exempting IP addresses, device identifiers and other pseudonymous identifiers from the material covered by the measure.”
Hahaha, you didn’t think for one minute that the ISPs and advertisers were going to go along with this on unchanged did you?! Even the state of California can’t get away with that! LOL LOL LOL. Wake up everyone, as a billionaire once said, your data is worth more than oil!
People know that organizations like Google and Facebook and all of the news websites collect their information and have accepted the trade-off in exchange for a free service many years ago. Politicians believe that attacking the large online companies is a big political winner for them. But they may find that it backfires when people have to start paying for these online companies. Those that are really worried about their security do not have to use Google or Facebook or any other free service.