Jeremiah Posedel Comments on Looming CCPA Enforcement Disputes

Privacy, Cybersecurity & Data Strategy partner Jeremiah Posedel was quoted by Law360 in the article "As Final Calif. Privacy Regs Drop, Enforcement Fights Loom."

The legal industry publication reports that the California attorney general declined to clarify several key ambiguities in his final rules for implementing the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), leaving businesses bracing for enforcement battles and putting the spotlight on a likely ballot initiative that is poised to further complicate matters.

Law360 added that through three rounds of public comments dating to October 2019, business groups and consumer advocates have pressed Attorney General Xavier Becerra to provide more specifics on how to interpret key terms in the CCPA, including what constitutes a "sale" of personal information that consumers can opt out of and how to determine the value of consumer data.

The publication turned to Posedel for insight into how this lack of clarification will impact businesses and where disputes are likely to brew over this.

"It will be interesting to see if the attorney general is going to use enforcement as a way of clarifying some of the open issues, like what constitutes a sale of consumer data, and issues big decisions that impact some of the judgment calls that companies are making," Posedel said.

He added that a key to these fights for companies will be to make sure that they've thoroughly documented their thought process when it comes to making decisions on these gray legal issues.

"Companies don't want to be in a position where the attorney general says, 'Why did you make this decision?' and they have nothing to support it and are scrambling to remedy it," Posedel said, adding that he would suspect the attorney general would "take a much harder position" against those companies as opposed to ones that can "communicate their thought process and make a strong argument for why they made that decision."