Ride the Lightning

California Passes Sweeping Data Privacy Law

October 14, 2015

As Wired reported, on October 9th, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a sweeping law protecting digital privacy rights. The landmark Electronic Communications Privacy Act bars any state law enforcement agency or other investigative entity from compelling a business to turn over any metadata or digital communications—including e-mails, texts, documents stored in the cloud—without a warrant. It also requires a warrant to track the location of electronic devices like mobile phones, or to search them.

The ACLU calls the legislation the most comprehensive in the country.

Five other states have warrant protection for content, and nine others have warrant protection for GPS location tracking. But California is the first to enact a comprehensive law protecting location data, content, metadata and device searches.

The bill had widespread support among civil libertarians like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as tech companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Twitter, which have headquarters in California. It also had huge bipartisan support among state lawmakers.

The law applies only to California law enforcement entities. Law enforcement agencies in other states would be compelled by the laws in their jurisdictions, which is why it will be important to get similar comprehensive laws passed elsewhere.

The law places California not only at the forefront of protecting digital privacy among states, it outdoes even the federal government, where such efforts have thus far failed.

Civil libertarians have lobbied federal lawmakers for years to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to offer such protection nationwide. An amendment to that law has been working with painful slowness through Capitol Hill, where it has 300 co-sponsors. But the proposal is less comprehensive than the law Brown signed, and would merely focus on digital content. Currently, the federal ECPA requires a warrant for stored content that is newer than 180 days; the amendment would extend the warrant requirement to all digital content regardless of age.

Bully for California – and let's hope Congress is taking note of "digital privacy done right."

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