Planned ballot initiative would strengthen privacy regulations

More than year after he agreed not to submit a ballot measure, wealthy real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart filed an initiative with the Secretary of State's office Wednesday to strengthen online privacy regulations with a measure on the 2020 ballot.

The board chair and founder of Californians for Consumer Privacy agreed to drop his last ballot effort as part of the compromise that helped lead to the passage of AB 375, the California Consumer Privacy Act. The group had already gone through the expensive process of qualifying the initiative for the 2018 ballot.

In an open letter released to announce his latest move, Mactaggart cited extensive efforts by Silicon Valley companies and others to modify the law during the 2019 legislative session.

"Some of the world's largest companies have actively and explicitly prioritized weakening the CCPA," Mactaggart wrote.

The Legislature passed half a dozen measures this year that modify some portion of the consumer privacy act. Many of these exempt certain types of personal data from the regulations or effectively make it more difficult to show data brokers have violated the law. Lobbying reports show companies, including Google LLC and Facebook Inc., spent well over six figures in Sacramento in the first half of this year.

A voter initiative, by contrast, can generally be changed only by the voters themselves. Mactaggart said his new effort, called the California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act, would be written to allow for its data privacy rules to be modified by the Legislature but would require "future amendments be in furtherance of the law."

The ballot effort would also triple fines for violating the privacy of people under 16 and create new rights around the use and sale of personal information. It would create a new entity, the California Privacy Protection Agency, to enforce these rules.

-- Malcolm Maclachlan