Privacy advocates throughout California got together last week to tell Sacramento politicians about five things they think are true about privacy, but aren’t. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Consumer Reports, COSPR, ACLU and Oakland Privacy tackled themes like consent is enough, enforcement…
Category: Data Privacy
How CA Tried to Address Algorithmic and Surveillance Pricing (Part 2)
by Samuel Leitch In 2022, a time when rents continued to soar impossibly, the company RealPage boasted that it could help landlords increase profits even further.1 How was this possible? By pooling nonpublic pricing data from clients, RealPage’s software can…
How CA Tried to Address Algorithmic and Surveillance Pricing (Part 1)
by Samuel Leitch Do rideshare companies charge you more if your phone is about to die? The trending Internet rumor, based in part on a fabricated screenshot posted to Reddit, is ultimately unproven.1 However, it serves as an example of…
Facts and Fiction on the California Invasion of Privacy Act and the problematic SB 690
by Don Marti and Robert Tauler While other states debate private right of action in privacy laws, California already has one, and it’s working for us. Since it was enacted the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) has included an individual’s right to…
Our Sponsored Bills in the State Legislature
Oakland Privacy is the sponsor of two privacy bills in the state legislature this year. AB 1337 (Ward) is a much-needed and overdue revamp of the 1977 Information Practices Act, the seminal government privacy law that followed the addition of…
An Award: Worst State Anti-Privacy Bill of the Year – Senate Bill 690
Update 7/1/25: Senate Bill 690 was parked for the year. While we like to focus on the positive, sometimes we gotta call out the shenanigans. Every year in the State Legislature, one proposal among the 3,000 that get offered stands…
The Latest on Age Verification Laws: Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton
On January 15 the Supreme Court heard oral arguments from the parties to and amici of the case Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The legal issue at hand is the validity of a preliminary injunction that the district court of…
Prominent Human Rights Groups Call on CA Governor to Protect Data from Trump
Human rights organizations called for Governor Newsom and other California leaders to take immediate action to protect Californians’ data privacy from anticipated attempts by federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies to violate residents’ fundamental rights under the incoming Trump-Vance administration.…
23AndMe Meltdown
One of the world’s largest DNA collections in private hands, ancestry testing company 23AndMe with over 14 million genotypes, seems headed for a chaotic ownership change after CEO Anne Wojcicki warned of incoming bankruptcy and the entire board quit. While…
2024 State Legislature Wrap-up
It is now past the end of the road for the 2024 state legislative year, so we wanted to report back to you on what happened, what OP did, and what new laws are coming your way. It was the…