California Consumer Privacy Act (and a note about Twitter)

July 2, 2020

Just wanted to briefly get this out of the way. On June 24, our Twitter account, @clicky, was suspended for reasons unknown. I'm stunned that they would suspend an account without notification or reason. It just suddenly…gone. We've submitted two appeals and heard nothing back. Hopefully it will be sorted out soon. Twitter is where we post the most updates, in particular we have many things to say that don't warrant a full blog post and often enough that Twitter is the perfect place to do that, so having this cutoff is painful.

Anyways… on to the meat and potatoes:

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, 2020, but enforcement did not start until today, July 1, 2020. And just in time for that, we have updated all relevant pages on our site to talk about the CCPA as necessary.

Unlike the GDPR of 2018, which requires consent or an "opt-in", the CCPA is instead an "opt-out" law. This means that tracking of data does not require consent, so it doesn't force any further restrictions on any site that's already GDPR compliant.

The main part of the CCPA is that it allows California residents to submit requests to view their Personal Data, and/or delete it, with some exceptions – exactly like the GDPR. We already created a Personal Data request management tool for GDPR compliance that you can use with CCPA as well, so again, as long as you are GDPR compliant, nothing really changes.

We've updated the following pages with new language about the CCPA:

We also added a "Do not sell my personal information" link to our homepage as well as our privacy policy, per CCPA requirement.

Anyways, again, this will have almost no impact on sites that were already complying with GDPR. You just might start getting more Personal Data requests in general, that's all.