Alastair Mactaggart, San Francisco real estate developer Photo Illustration: Jason Doiy/ALM

Alastair Mactaggart, the San Francisco real estate developer behind California's sweeping data privacy law, said he's confident the regulations will withstand any attacks by the telecommunications and tech lobbies in the new legislative session.

Mactaggart, speaking to The Recorder on Tuesday, said the California Consumer Privacy Act has ardent defenders among state legislators, including Sen. Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, and Assembly privacy committee chairman Ed Chau, D-Monterey Park—the two lawmakers who shepherded the enabling bill to passage last year. The public, too, has had more time to adjust to, and accept, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, he said.

Plus, Mactaggart added, tech companies continue to find themselves the subject of congressional scrutiny and unflattering headlines for how they handle users' personal information. The new law, which takes effect next January, will force companies to disclose what information they collect about customers and then delete that information upon request.

“There's enough visibility now” with the law, Mactaggart said. “This is a California right. Californians hate giving up their rights.”

Critics of the law, including Google, Comcast Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and AT&T, accepted its adoption last year as the preferred alternative to an even more-expansive ballot initiative that Mactaggart was prepared to put before voters in November. The delay in its enforcement gives those industries a chance to push favorable amendments this year. With the bill introduction deadline still weeks away, no changes have been introduced yet.

“There was little input from the companies that will bear the burden of compliance,” Robert Callahan, vice president of government affairs for the Internet Association, wrote in a Sacramento Bee op-ed last month. “To pretend the law is without fault today is to ignore the realities of how the law came to be and the complexities of data regulation.”

Callahan and others may find a different legislative atmosphere this year. On Monday, legislative Republicans, typical allies of the tech industry, unveiled a package of their own data protection bills. One would give consumers the right to sue “any social media company” that does not close their accounts upon request and exclude their information from future sale.

“We want to expand what was passed last year, not take away from it,” said Assemblyman James Gallagher, R-Yuba City.

Mactaggart said he welcomes “more people on the privacy side of things, and we'll see where it goes.”

Mactaggart heads to Washington, D.C., next week to push against efforts to undermine California's law through federal pre-emption. He said he does not, as yet, have a meeting scheduled with Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who has proposed legislation that would bar states from enacting consumer privacy rules that are stricter than those adopted by the federal government.

 

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