Eric Goldman, “A Privacy Bomb Is About to Be Dropped on the California Economy and the Global Internet”:
By tomorrow, the California legislature likely will pass a sweeping, lengthy, overly-complicated, and poorly-constructed privacy law that will have ripple effects throughout the world. While not quite as comprehensive as the GDPR, it copies some aspects of the GDPR and will squarely impact every Internet service in California (some of whom may be not currently be complying GDPR due to their US-only operations). The GDPR took 4 years to develop; in contrast, the California legislature will spend a grand total of 7 days working on this major bill. It’s such a short turnaround that most stakeholders won’t have a chance to participate in the legislative proceedings. So the Internet is likely to change radically tomorrow, and most people have no clue what’s coming or any voice in the process.
As bad as this sounds, the legislature’s passage of the bill is likely the GOOD outcome in this scenario. What could be worse?
Read on in the post for a discussion of the peculiar dangers of the contemporary California initiative process. And as predicted, the bill did pass, unanimously [Issie Lapowsky, Wired]
One Comment
It’s annoying when Mr. Goldman’s first reference to the GDPR is as the “GDPR”, as if assumed every reader knows what that is. He needs an editor.