On June 28, 2018, California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.
This Act, effective January 1, 2020, will give California residents rights very similar to certain GDPR rights, such as:
- To know what personal information is being collected about them.
- To know whether their personal information is sold or disclosed and to whom.
- To say no to the sale of personal information.
- To access their personal information.
- To equal service and price, even if they exercise their privacy rights.
Despite the right to equal service and price, section 1798.125(a)(2) of the Act allows companies to offer different services and prices based on a consumer’s exercise of the new privacy rights, if the difference “is reasonably related to the value provided to the consumer by the consumer’s data.”
Whether the value of the consumer data is “reasonably related” to the difference in price or services is likely to be the source of litigation until clarified by regulation or the courts. Until then, businesses that differentiate price or service based on consumer information shared will need to consider their justification for the reasonableness of that difference.
