The California 2018 Ballot Initiative

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to our very last lesson on the history of the CCP. A lesson 1.5.

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We're going to review the 2018 California Privacy Ballot Initiative that made the CCP a a reality.

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Our learning goals and objectives for less than 1.5 will be to review the timeline of the CCP itself and how it came into law.

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A second and I would say, even more important objective is to review how the unique California ballot process impacted the eventual CCP obligations that we're going to study during these next lessons, and that all businesses are now subject to

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again. The mechanism that made the CCP a possible greatly impacted the obligations that were eventually captured in the law.

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Those will be our two objectives.

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Unlike most of the other states in the United States, California has a very unique ballot initiative. It's basically this

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if a group of individuals are able to obtain more than 600,000 signatures regarding a certain issue, they can force a potential bill. That's Ah, law that has not yet been passed

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onto the ballot for the upcoming election,

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in which case all California voters get to vote yes or no on that certain ballot initiative or proposal.

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Sometimes it's called Prop, and then the number

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You might have heard of terms like Prop. Eight in the news.

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That's what that's referring to. That is a unique mechanism that only exists for the most part in California.

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On October 12 2017, Ah, group of privacy advocates who I will introduce you to in a moment,

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were able to obtain 600,000 signatures for the passage of a privacy law in California.

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The privacy law that they proposed would have been summarized and then put up for passage whenever the voters went to the polls. It would have been in November 2018.

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In the United States, elections were held on the first Tuesday of November.

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That would have been 13 months before the ballot would have actually been presented to the voters.

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There is also a mechanism that exists that is unique to California legislation that if a ballot is going to be presented to the voters in November, up until the June 30th that precedes the election year the California Legislature, that's the California senators and California representatives that air in Sacramento the capital of California.

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They are able to pass their own law that regulates that type of activity that's on the ballot.

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If the California Legislature does pass a law on that subject, then the ballot initiative that is going to be presented to the California voters has to be withdrawing.

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That's what happened in June of 2018.

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With a deadline fast approaching on June 30th, the California Legislature was under enormous pressure to remove the California privacy ballot from the voters because the protections that the privacy advocates had been arguing for that the voters would have been able to vote on were incredibly strong.

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It mimicked in many ways the strong privacy protections that exist in Europe

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toe assuage the concerns of big tech and other industries. The California Legislature stepped in June of 2018 and pass the CCP A with two days to spare.

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The CCP A therefore addressed all of the privacy regulations that the ballot would have addressed.

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However, many of the protections that would have existed under the ballot never were passed. But because privacy as a general issue was addressed,

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they were able to remove the ballot.

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What we now know is the CCP A. You need to hear this.

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It's actually a very watered down version of what the CCP A could have been in an alternate reality where the California Legislature was unable to remove the ballot initiative or had it failed to do so by June 30th

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because of what I'll call the original sin of removing the ballot initiative from the voters hands and what would have been November of 2018. The advocates for privacy in California and elsewhere have been trying to resolve the absence of privacy protections in the CCP A by adding amendments to it,

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we will get to that in less than 10, actually, of this CCP A course,

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it's important to note that you might see in the news see SEPA amendments happening.

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And that's because the original authors of the CCP A have been perennially vexed that many of the protections that they had advocated for never made their way into the law.

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This slide here, I think, captures the timeline of the CCP a. How it was going to be on the ballot. How the legislature stepped in at the 11th hour removed many of the protections that could have been included and instead give California residents a watered down version of the C C P. A, which people have now since tried to amend.

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I'd like to actually introduce you to the authors of the ballot initiative themselves because you again might see their names in the news.

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The main driver is a gentleman by the name of Alistair McTaggart. He's the gentleman standing in the middle.

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He is a real estate developer by trade, not a privacy advocate, but was concerned by the direction that privacy was going in the United States and was one of the main drivers off getting the 600,000 signatures

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Mary Stone Ross on the right. She is a former CIA analyst. If you ever intend a privacy Congress,

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you might well run into her or see her speaking same with Alistair McTaggart. By the way,

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Rick Arnie, finance industry executive from what I've seen, has stepped back since his original involvement in 2018,

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but nevertheless continues to generally advocate for greater privacy protections in the United States.

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In summary, this lesson Lesson 1.5

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We covered the timeline of the ccps passage,

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how the California Legislature intervened at the last hour to remove some of the privacy protections and deliver a watered down version of the law that we now know today.

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How the frustration of the advocates for the California Privacy Act are still unsatisfied with how the law has come to exist and are continuing to push for amendments in the future, which we will get to in future lessons.

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Thank you very much that covers everything in less than 1.5.

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There's a quick quiz will get to in a moment. I'll see you also in lesson to as we discussed the scope of the C C P A and what businesses are subject to it,