> I expect many states to follow suit.

More importantly, many companies will follow California rules even outside California. My car was built to California emissions spec at a time when very few states had stricter rules.

(The one major exception seems to be the "sell my data" opt-out and such privacy rules, that industry is sleazy enough that they'll go through extra trouble to keep screwing over non-CA residents.)

The FTC settlement with GM allows GM to sell precise location as long as it's anonymized by attaching it to anonymous identifiers rather than personal info. It also allows non-precise location (e.g. zipcode/census-block) attached to identifying information.

Apparently no one at the FTC is smart enough to realize if Bob and anonid both move through the same sequence of approximate locations that the anonid is Bob. Or maybe they aren't that ignorant and just wanted to look like they were doing their job while protecting the surveillance status quo.

Yeah, we need data minimization. As long as it's collected it is a liability for consumers, turn it into a liability for businesses to incentive them to collect as little as possible.

I've been driving connected cars for a decade and I haven't felt sold out yet. What am I missing?

We need private right of action. That's the big thing holding up the sweeping Mass privacy law. The house supports a private right to action and the senate only wants the attorney general enforcing the law.

> Will this have reach and teeth though?

It'll have reach because MA has a long-arm statute and there's a rich history of applying that statute in the context of Chapter 93.

It'll have teeth but probably not to the effect that you hope.

This statute was written such that only the Attorney General can bring action; see Section 10(b). This diverges from a long history in the Commonwealth of allowing private individuals to bring civil suits for most types of Chapter 93 violations.

As a result, I anticipate that the most impactful change will be in the quantity and frequency of political donations to Mass AG candidates (and in the case of contested primaries their aligned block of candidates up and down ticket).

Consumer protection laws should always provide for a private cause of action. Otherwise they just function as a mechanism for legalized corruption.

once you allow someone to read data, it has been given away.

even if its only retained until buffer refresh, its still given away.

if its read frombuffer space and transformed into a persistent structure, its a gift that indefinately keeps giving.

This seems more symbolic since I don't see were the law has any teeth.

There is no fine nor imprisonment for failing to follow the law.

No, we specifically DO NOT want uniformity. We want a minimum that states can go beyond.

In the current environment, tech companies have to bribe 50 states plus the federal legislature in order to block privacy bills. If you have federal preemption, then you just have to bribe Congress, because states can't pass ANY privacy laws whatsoever. And we already know the feds do not want a privacy law: the entire legality of the federal surveillance apparatus hinges on the fact that buying your data from third parties does not trip constitutional scrutiny. Preemption freezes the requirements in time so they will always be a few steps behind the TLAs[0].

The ideal is that every sovereign entity passes their own privacy law that applies to their territory, with a private right of action, and adtech companies are forced to adopt a "50 states legal" posture. This is, deliberately, a ratchet: it's easy for any state to require a higher standard but hard to get every state to reduce it, so privacy laws cannot be walked back in secret.

[0] Three Letter Agencies: CIA, FBI, NSA