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We Need Privacy We Can Afford

The good news: California has passed the country's first comprehensive consumer privacy law (CCPA). It goes into effect in 2020.

The bad news: While CCPA will let you find out if companies are selling the personal information you give them to third parties, the law currently lets companies give better prices to customers who don't opt out of such sales. Which means higher prices if you choose to protect your privacy.

Think about it. How many big companies do you engage in transactions with every year that collect some identifying data on you? Think about all those companies sending you opt-out notifications with a charge attached? Even if it is only $10 or $20 a year, how many of those would it take before your budget was busted and you lost interest in emptying your pockets to protect your privacy?

California has one of the highest costs of living in the country. Californians don't have stacks of money sitting around for annual privacy budgets. Especially if they are renters in the most expensive regions in the country, minumum wage workers, single parents, or middle class families buying things online constantly to save time.

The slippery slope the new law can create is privacy-haves and privacy have-nots, with the wealthy safe and secure and the poor and struggling middle awash with "rights" they can't afford to exercise.

Write to the AG's Privacy Regulation Coordinator to remind them a right is only a right if you can afford it and we need regulation to control costs for consumers.

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Coordinator of Privacy Regulation, CA Dept of Justice

Subject: We Can Only Pay So Much For Privacy

Message:

California has taken an innovative step by passing the nation's first comprehensive consumer privacy legislation. We understand that your office has a big task in front of it to make this new law operational and functional. We write to you today as both Californians who worry about the sale of our data to third parties without our consent and as consumers of modest means who use a large assortment of services online and offline where our personal information may be collected. Like most people, to at least some extent, we enjoy some of the convenience that comes with targeted services. But as we find out in the press, usually after the fact, sometimes the price we pay for such services is the exposure of our personal information to parties we never expected. It wouldn't always be worth it if we knew what we were doing. CCPA will do a lot to help us understand what the consequences of our decisions will be, and give us the opportunity to opt out if we don't want those consequences. But we have some concerns about the non-discrimination clause. CCPA does contain a non-discrimination clause so we can't be punished if we choose to opt out, but it leaves the door open for companies to charge lower prices to people who don't opt out. This means that higher prices can be charged to customers who choose privacy. That can be a slippery slope. We want to caution that many consumers, if not most, engage in data-laden transactions with hundreds of companies every year. While all may not be subject to CCPA, it seems clear that consumers will be making opt-in or opt-out decisions at least dozens of times annually. California has one of the highest costs of living in the nation. Many working class households and people of modest means are without significant disposable income that would cover a "privacy budget". Even seemingly modest fees like $5 or $10 year, if applied multiple times every year, are going to add up, especially for large families, renters struggling to meet the highest rental costs in the nation, single parents, minimum wage workers and others who are already struggling. Despite being very concerned about the privacy of their data, if it is a choice between food on the table and consumer privacy, food on the table will always win. A process of sorting among the available opt-outs to pick the particular companies whose practices are most egregious in order to get the most bang for the limited privacy buck, is an onerous task for a literal privacy expert and a lot to expect from a minimum wage worker or a busy single parent. At best, without regulatory constraints, the current CCPA language can create privacy-haves and privacy have-nots and be of limited use to the communities most victimized by identity theft and predatory marketers.. At worst, without appropriate regulation, it will turn the right to opt-out into a paper right that few will actually exercise.

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We Need Privacy We Can Afford

Thank you for taking action.