Consumer Reports is supporting SB 435, a bill that would amend the CCPA to narrow the law’s current ambiguous exception for “publicly available information” to accord with consumers’ reasonable expectations.
The CCPA currently excludes from protection any “information made available by a person to whom the consumer has disclosed the information if the consumer has not restricted the information to a specific audience.” In practice, this means that any information you provide to any single other person or company is arguably “publicly available information” — and thus outside the scope of CCPA — unless you specifically instruct the recipient not to provide that information to others. Given the modern data ecosystem where consumers interact with dozens (if not hundreds) of companies everyday and there is often no automated or standardized way to restrict resharing, this exception could potentially swallow the whole of CCPA and render it moot.
SB 435 would eliminate this loophole, and also limit another exception to only exempt data that a consumer or widely-available media has lawfully made available to the public.