SACRAMENTO — Two significant pieces of privacy legislation died in the Legislature this past week. And while privacy advocates may be gloomy, tech groups are surely enjoying the feeling of seeing their political power on the rise.
Tech lobbying helped kill SB 383, which would have extended prohibitions on customer-information collection to online retailers, and SB 1348, a measure to curb brokers’ data-selling practices. Advocates insist privacy issues aren’t going away and that California has a leading role to play in creating commercial restrictions. SB 1348′s author, Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, said Thursday that the state is one tragic and highly publicized data-mining incident away from seeing a serious public demand for industry changes.
