Consumer Reports opposes S.B. 690, legislation that would create a series of broad new exemptions under the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) to allow any business to tap, secretly record, or intercept the private communications of individuals for any commercial business purpose. These exemptions contradict the fundamental purpose of CIPA to prevent spying on individuals and would put Californians’ most intimate and private conversations at risk of being misused, leaked, or otherwise shared with bad actors.
This legislation would would grant businesses unacceptably wide latitude to wiretap and surveil consumers. Under the bill, a phone company would be able to secretly listen in on an individual’s phone conversations for the purposes of serving them targeted advertisements. A social media company could quietly create a backdoor to allow employees to read encrypted messages between users to help them tweak their algorithm to keep people on their platform. Or a smart TV or home speaker could surreptitiously listen to all the conversations in your home to help train their next AI system.
Even if companies don’t use the contents of individuals’ private communications for unwanted internal or commercial purposes, the mass collection of this data for any purpose is incredibly dangerous on its own. If our private communications are lost to cybercriminals in a data breach, collected by data brokers, or otherwise obtained by bad actors, they can easily be weaponized against individuals in ways that directly threaten their physical safety, health, or bodily autonomy.
To read the full letter, please see the attached PDF.