You must have seen that data breaches and hacks have become very common in recent times. This is where tech companies get away with a lot as they get away by saying that there was a backdoor in their system which allowed this. However, the privacy of users who have been compromised is stolen as a result which can never be claimed back. For this reason, we have seen that people need to change their identity and even their bank accounts as well as cards in many cases. Now, someone has finally taken action against this which is in the form of California’s Consumer Privacy Act.
Basically, California will now have a new Consumer Privacy Act which will take effect from January 1 where there will be a huge lot of privacy benefits for the users living in California. However, you might be aware that most of the tech giants are headquartered in Silicon Valley which is also in California. Therefore, this new privacy law from California has left Silicon Valley absolutely terrified about its impact.
It is known that California’s new privacy law “allows state consumers a right to know what information companies have on them, a right to have that information deleted and the right to opt-out of the sale of that information”. You might recall that this is very similar to Europe’s GDPR which took effect earlier this year.
As a result of the law coming into effect, Silicon Valley companies have already started to lobby the US government and they have also signed an open letter which includes the likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, IBM’s Ginni Rometty and SAP’s Bill McDermott. In this letter, they say that the consumers are not clever enough to “understand rules that may change depending upon the state in which they reside.” which is why the government should come up with a federal privacy bill.
