Committee advances bill to expand California'delete rights and require web forms for online privacy requests
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Summary
The Senate committee advanced SB 923 to broaden the CCPA'style right to delete to all personal information a business holds and to require online-only businesses to offer a web form or similar method for privacy requests. Supporters said the change closes gaps left by the Delete Act; industry groups sought technical amendments.
Sen. Josh Becker presented SB 923 to the Senate Committee on Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection, saying the bill would expand California''s right to delete so it covers "all personal information a business holds," not just data collected directly from consumers, and would require online'only businesses to provide web forms or similar mechanisms to submit access, delete and correction requests.
Maureen Mahoney, deputy director of policy and legislation at the California Privacy Protection Agency, said the measure would close a gap in the existing law by bringing deletion rights into alignment with other states and make it easier for consumers to exercise them. "Businesses today collect, analyze, and share vast amounts of information," Mahoney said, and the current deletion right "doesn't address the full scope of personal information that's held or used by businesses." (Maureen Mahoney, Deputy Director of Policy & Legislation, California Privacy Protection Agency.)
Privacy advocates including Becca Kramer of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and representatives of Common Sense Media and the Transparency Coalition testified in support and described data brokers' role in assembling addresses, inferred health information and other sensitive details into profiles that are bought and sold. "Most of the personal information being bought and sold about you or about your family was not collected from you directly," Kramer said.
Industry witnesses including Ronak Dilami of the California Chamber of Commerce and trade associations raised technical and operational concerns. Dilami urged carrying over an alternate compliance method that deems a business compliant when it opts a consumer out of nonexempt processing, and asked for an "or" rather than an "and" in the bill's methods-of-submission language to address spam and scalability concerns.
Sen. McNerney moved the bill when the committee took up the motion, and the body voted to pass SB 923 to the appropriations committee. The committee assistant recorded the motion as "pass to appropriations," and the roll call returned a reported 6-0 (on the call) in favor of the motion.
The author and supporters said they are willing to consider technical amendments addressing industry concerns as the bill proceeds to appropriations.
