[jboggan]

California very quietly passed AB-1542 last week which includes precise location data, health data, SSNs, etc. I expect many states to follow suit.

Related, General Motors got hit with a $12.75M fine for reselling OnStar location data last month: https://ccpa.world/enforcement/gm-onstar-smart-driver

[yencabulator]

> I expect many states to follow suit.

More importantly, many companies will follow California rules even outside California. My car was built to California emissions spec at a time when very few states had stricter rules.

(The one major exception seems to be the "sell my data" opt-out and such privacy rules, that industry is sleazy enough that they'll go through extra trouble to keep screwing over non-CA residents.)

[jboggan]

Well, CT and VT passed their own version of the California DROP system last week and there are 5 other states in play for the current 2026 legislative sessions. I think it will be a slow patchwork for more states to take similar action, but it is coming.

I will note that many "data brokers" will just honor non-California residents' requests as if they were California residents and subject to the CCPA, simply because they would rather remove a potentially litigious consumer from their databases. Given the relatively low potential revenue for a single consumer's data it just doesn't make sense to hold on to information for the kind of person who currently goes out of their way to make that kind of request.

At the same time, many data brokers do go out of their way to deny as many privacy requests as possible. Given that the CPPA/CalPrivacy is starting audits very soon I don't see this as a winning strategy for them in the long run.

[themafia]

Watching "The Price is Right" made California a mythical place for me as a child in the Midwest. All the cars being given away, they were sure to mention, followed "California emissions standards!"

No surprise. I ended up moving here.

[nullc]

The FTC settlement with GM allows GM to sell precise location as long as it's anonymized by attaching it to anonymous identifiers rather than personal info. It also allows non-precise location (e.g. zipcode/census-block) attached to identifying information.

Apparently no one at the FTC is smart enough to realize if Bob and anonid both move through the same sequence of approximate locations that the anonid is Bob. Or maybe they aren't that ignorant and just wanted to look like they were doing their job while protecting the surveillance status quo.

[dylan604]

Selling anonymized precise location of a car that spends ~half the day at a residential location sure will make it impossible to de-anonymize that data.

The FTC under this administration that just doesn't care about people and only care about helping corporations.

[throwaway85825]

The government measures success in column inches.

[jboggan]

The CPPA went above the FTC and banned it outright, as well as forcing the two registered data brokers who bought the data to delete it.

[gnerd00]

it's out of Committee in the House and passed a House vote.. not done yet

[MisterTea]

I wonder how much money GM made selling the data vs the fine.