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Searching for the One Ring to Rule Them All: A Look at 8 U.S. Federal Privacy Bills

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This article is Part 1 of 2 in a series exploring proposed federal privacy laws in the United States. Part 2 will discuss the constitutional challenges facing not only a proposed federal privacy law but those facing existing state privacy laws as well.

As predicted in our Privacy Law Forecast for 2019, legislators have raced to introduce national privacy regulation in both the House and Senate this year.

In contrast to the European Union’s GDPR, a hodgepodge of sectoral laws govern privacy in specific industries: medical, financial, educational, and marketing sectors, among others. States have enacted laws to protect their residents. And on top of that, Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. § 45) grants authority to the FTC to enforce against unfair and deceptive acts and practices.

This all results in a confusing and burdensome “patchwork” of national, state and sectoral rules. (For more in-depth discussion on the current U.S. privacy regulatory landscape, please see American Privacy Laws in a Global Context.)

Given this regulatory environment, legislators are keen to put forth a single federal privacy law to standardize this “patchwork” and forestall the passage of dozens more state privacy bills. Some have set a deadline, hoping to pass a federal privacy law before the CCPA comes into effect on January 1, 2020. Since the start of 2019, lawmakers have introduced about 230 bills that regulate privacy in some way in either the House or Senate.

The following is a sample of comprehensive bills from both sides of the aisle. Though these bills are unlikely to pass committee, they indicate what policies lawmakers are considering in the current negotiations:

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Privacy Rights in Class Action Lawsuits

[Originally published in Orange County Lawyer Magazine, May 2019, Vol. 61 No.5.,by Lily Li and Matthew Wegner; Image Credit: kmicican from pixabay.com]

Should Putative Class Members Opt-In Before Their Personal Information Is Disclosed in California Consumer Privacy Act Litigation?

In 2020, the nation’s toughest data privacy law will take effect in California. The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) imposes harsh restrictions on companies seeking to sell consumers’ data, including statutory penalties for any breaches of data. This legislation was spurred by public outrage against the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and Equifax, Target, and Yahoo data hacks, and reflects a growing trend to protect consumer data privacy.

As with so many legislative and judicial movements in California—for example, the Save-On decision, which ushered in a wave of wage-and-hour class actions in the early 2000s, or Business & Professions Code section 17200, which before Proposition 64 was tacked-on to countless consumer class actions—the CCPA is likely to usher in a host of new class action litigation as plaintiffs (and their attorneys) seek to recover statutory damages for data privacy violations.

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