California’s Cities and Counties Must Step Up Their Privacy Game. A.B. 1337 Can Do That.

“The right to privacy is being threatened by the indiscriminate collection, maintenance, and dissemination of personal information and the lack of effective laws and legal remedies,” some astute California lawmakers once wrote. “The increasing use of computers and other sophisticated information technology has greatly magnified the potential risk to individual privacy that can occur from the maintenance of personal information.”

Sound familiar? These words may sound like a recent push back on programs that want to slurp up the information sitting in ever-swelling government databases. But they’re not. They come from a nearly 50-year-old California law.

The “Information Practices Act of 1977”—or the IPA for short—is a foundational state privacy law and one of several privacy laws directly responding to the Watergate scandal, such the federal Privacy Act of 1974 and California’s own state constitutional right to privacy.

Now, as we confront a new era of digital surveillance and face our own wave of concern about government demands for data, it’s time to revisit and update the IPA.

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The IPA puts a check on government use of personal information by establishing guardrails for how state agencies maintain, collect, and disseminate data. It also gives people the right to access and correct their information.

While the need for the law has not changed, the rest of the world has. Particularly, since the IPA passed in 1977, far more data collection is now done at the county and city level. Yet local and county government entities have no standard protections in the state of California. And those entities have troves of data, whether it’s the health data collected from vaccine programs or held by county-administered food programs.

As demand for this type of local data grows, we need to tap back into the energy of the ‘70s. It’s time to update the IPA so it can respond to the world we live in today. That’s why EFF is proud to co-sponsor A.B. 1337, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego), with our close friends at Oakland Privacy.

Specifically, A.B. 1337, also known as the IPA Reform Act:

• Expands the definition of covered entities in the IPA to include local agencies, offices, departments and divisions.
• Prevents information collected from being used for unintended or secondary purposes without consent.
• Makes harmful negligent and improper release of personal information punishable as a misdemeanor.
• Requires that IPA disclosure records be kept for three years and cannot be destroyed prior to that period.
• Aligns the definition of personal information and sensitive personal information with the California Privacy Rights Act to include location data, online browsing records, IP addresses, citizenship status, and genetic information.

Privacy is foundational to trust in government. That’s part of the lesson we learned from the 1970s. (And trust in government is lower today than it was then.)

We need to be confident that the government is respecting our personal information and our privacy. More than ever, California residents face imminent danger of being targeted, persecuted, or prosecuted for seeking reproductive healthcare, their immigration status, practicing a particular religion, being of a particular race, gender identity, or sexual orientation—or simply for exercising their First Amendment rights.

California is a national leader on consumer privacy protections, having passed a landmark comprehensive privacy law and established the nation’s first state privacy agency. Now, its local governments must catch up.

We cannot afford to wait for these protections any longer. Passing A.B. 1337 is good governance, good policy, and just good sense. If you’re a California resident, tell your Assemblymember to support the bill today.

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