Lawmakers in California have introduced a sweeping privacy[1] bill to the state legislature that would give Californians unprecedented control over their data and reign in the power of their Silicon Valley neighbors.
Introduced by state assemblyman Ed Chau and state senator Robert Hertzberg, the bill[2] would allow California residents to find out what information businesses and data brokers collect about them, where that information comes from, and how it's shared. It would give people the power to ask for their data to be deleted and to order businesses to stop selling their personal information. It places limits on selling data on users younger than 16 years of age, and prohibits businesses from denying service to users for exercising their rights under the bill.
"All these new technologies are able to gather information about where you are, when you are, what your heart rate is," Hertzberg tells WIRED. "It's critical that government is on its toes."
Concerns about data privacy grew louder this year after news broke that Facebook had allowed a political firm called Cambridge Analytica[3] to amass data on as many as 87 million Americans without their knowledge in advance of the 2016 election. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called in front of Congress and the EU Parliament[4] to answer for the scandal, but what has become abundantly clear in the months since is that Facebook is hardly[5] alone[6] in hoovering up user data and spreading it around liberally to app developers and advertisers.
The California bill joins a wave of international interest in privacy legislation, most notably the passage of the General Data Protection Regulation[7] in the European Union, which requires companies to clearly articulate what