Last Minute Panic: A CCPA Update

Welcome to this week’s Tip of the Hat!

We hate to break it to you, but there are only a few weeks left in 2019. Do you know what that means? That’s right – only a few more weeks before the California Consumer Privacy Act comes into effect. A lot has happened since our first newsletter about the CCPA in March, so let’s take some time to catch everyone up on the need-to-knows about CCPA as we head into 2020.

Everything and nothing have changed

Lawmakers introduced almost 20 amendments in the past few months in the State Legislature, ranging from grammatical edits to substantial changes to the CCPA. In the end, only a handful of amendments were signed by the state governor, all of which do not substantially change the core of CCPA. There are now a few exceptions to CCPA with the amendments, such as employee data, but that’s the extent to the changes introduced into the Act going into 2020.

However, this doesn’t mean that we won’t see some of the stalled or dead amendments come back in the next legislative session. Expect additional amendments in the coming year, including new amendments that might affect regulation and scope of the Act.

What you need to know about regulation and enforcement

In October 2019, the California Attorney General office published a draft set of regulations of how their office will enforce CCPA. While the public comment period is open until December 6th, many businesses are taking the regulations as their new playbook in preparing for CCPA compliance.

“Household” dilemma

The problematic definition of “personal information” remains… problematic. The amendment that sought to remove “household” from the definition stalled in the State Legislature. The regulations address the handling of household information to a small extent. If someone requests access to personal information, including household information, the business has the option to give aggregated data if they cannot verify the identity of the requester.

Again, this broad definition has ramifications regarding patrons requesting information from library vendors. Libraries should work with library vendors in reviewing confidentiality and privacy policies and procedures and discuss the possible impact this definition will have on patron privacy.

Hello, COPPA!

One of the major elements of CCPA is the regulations surrounding collecting and processing personal information from anyone under 16 years of age. CCPA requires businesses to get affirmative authorization from anyone 13 years old up to 16 years old before the business can sell their personal information. To comply with the new requirement, many businesses might now have to collect or otherwise verify the age of the online user. This leads into the realm of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) – now that the business has actual knowledge of the online user’s age, more businesses could be subject to liability under COPPA.

This could lead to another tricky conversation for libraries – library vendors who fall under CCPA collecting additional patron data for compliance. Collecting and processing patron data is sometimes unavoidable due to operational needs, but it’s still worthwhile to ensure that the data is properly secured, processed, and deleted.

Do Not Track, for real this time

Do your browsers on your library public computers have “Do Not Track” turned on by default, or have other browser plugins that prevent tracking by third parties? If not, here’s another reason to do so – the regulations state that “If a business collects personal information from consumers online, the business shall treat user-enabled privacy controls, such as a browser plugin or privacy setting or other mechanism, that communicate or signal the consumer’s choice to opt-out of the sale of their personal information as a valid request…” So get installing those privacy plugins already!

Do we have to comply with CCPA?

It depends on who the “we” is in this question. As of now, most California libraries are most likely out of the scope of CCPA (though, as Joshua Metayer pointed out, the CCPA gives no guidance as to what is considered a for “profit” business). Library vendors will most likely have to comply if they do business in California. Some businesses are trying to keep CCPA compliance strictly to CA residents by setting up a separate site for California, while other businesses, such as Microsoft, plan to give all US residents the same rights CA residents have under CCPA.

We’ve only covered a section of what’s all going on with CCPA – there’s still a lively debate as to what is all entailed by the definition of “sale” in regards to personal information which is a newsletter in itself! We also could have an entire newsletter on CCPA 2.0, which is slated to be on the November 2020 ballot. California continues to be a forerunner in privacy law in the US, and the next year will prove to be an important one not only for everyone under the scope of CCPA but for other states looking to implement their CCPA-like state law.

Website Maintenance on March 31st

Starting at 7 PM PDT, the LDH website and email will experience intermittent outages as we upgrade our server.