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 the right to privacy to the State Constitution in 1972. Assembly Bill 1337 is the third try at updating the IPA, but the first to go forward under Trump 2.0, which has shattered the civil society consensus on government handling of personal information in 120 days.
Assembly Bill 1337 makes some key changes to the IPA including:
- Aligning the definition of personal information in the IPA with the more modern definition contained in the CA Privacy Rights Act. This would encompass data points like location data, online browsing records, IP addresses, citizenship status, and genetic information.
- Expanding the definition of covered entities in the IPA to include local agencies, offices, departments and divisions.
- Preventing information collected from being used for unintended or secondary purposes without consent, closing the secondary purposes loophole to ensure that accidents don’t put people into unnecessary danger.
- Making the negligent and improper release of personal information that causes harm to a person potentially punishable as a misdemeanor
- Requiring that IPA disclosure records be kept for three years and not be destroyed prior to that period
If you belong or are affiliated with an organization that can support AB 1337 as it enters the State Senate in June, please use this sign-on sheet to lend your support.
Our second sponsored bill is Senate Bill 361 (Becker). SB 361 adds additional disclosure items to the data broker database maintained at the California Privacy Protection Agency, which is developing a mass opt-out mechanism for all 500+ data brokers in the registry.
The new disclosures include whether data brokers amass and sell information about:
- Citizenship Status
- Sexual Orientation
- Gender Identity and Expression
- Union Membership or Affiliation
- Customer Log-in Credentials or Account Data
Senate Bill 361 has, so far, had an easy time in the Legislature with zero NO votes. But things can change, so we will let you know if the bill needs some people power to get over the finish line.
Additionally, Oakland Privacy has filed position letters and advocated on 82 additional bills so far this year on your behalf, either supporting or opposing them or suggesting amendment language to improve a wide variety bills spanning a host of privacy issues, governmental transparency and criminal justice reform.
For more granular details on our advocacy work, consider asking to join our activists rise-up email list serv.