What Is the California Consumer Privacy Act?

Following the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California recently jumped on the data privacy bandwagon when Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California Consumer Privacy Act into law in June. The new data privacy law—which was unanimously approved by the state legislature and is the strictest in the United States—is slated to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020. According to the Assembly Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection, it gives Californians the right to know what personal information (PI) is being collected about them, whether their PI is being sold and to whom, the right to access their PI, the right to delete PI collected from them, and the right to opt-out to the sale of their PI. Further, children under 16 must actually opt in for their information to be sold.