CPPA Executive Director: Create Empowered Consumers to Exercise Rights
The CPPA is pushing ahead with a rulemaking to implement a mechanism where consumers can request to delete their personal data, Executive Director Tom Kemp told the CPPA board at a livestreamed Thursday meeting. The agency announced last week that comments in the proceeding are due June 10 and there will also be a hearing that day (see 2504250012).
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"Californians have the strongest privacy rights in the U.S., but individuals often lack the time and expertise to make difficult decisions about privacy, and rights cannot practically be exercised at scale,” Kemp told the board. “Given the thousands of organizations that process people's data, the CPPA is focused on addressing this issue."
Also, Kemp said he sees momentum for passing a bill (AB-566) requiring that websites support global opt-out signals, even though Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed last year’s version of the legislation. The measure "is similar to the bill the governor vetoed last year, but there has been a dramatic change that occurred over the last few months in terms of invasive consumer tracking that makes passage of this bill even more critical.”
That dramatic change is "a large advertising platform" that has "updated its policies to allow its ad partners to use digital fingerprinting technologies to identify users and collect information about them,” said the CPPA executive director. “Fingerprinting allows businesses to collect information about a device's hardware or software, which can be easily combined with other data to uniquely identify a user.” That makes “having an opt-out preference signal available on all platforms … even more critical than ever, as blocking third-party cookies is no longer a viable option.”
Maureen Mahoney, CPPA deputy director of policy and legislation, said AB-566 could get a vote by the full Assembly within two weeks. It became eligible for floor consideration after clearing the Privacy and Appropriations committees, she said (see 2504240019 and 2504020054).
CPPA's board appointed Kemp in closed session at a previous meeting by a 4-1 vote, said Urban. She didn’t say who voted no. A CPPA spokesperson emailed, “Since it’s an HR matter, only the vote count … is public.”