California enacts law giving consumers ability to universally opt out of data sharing

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed a bill which requires web browsers to make it easier for Californians to opt-out of allowing third parties to sell their data.

The California Consumer Privacy Act, signed in 2018, gave Californians the right to send opt-out signals, but major browsers have not had to make opt-outs simple to use. The bill signed Wednesday would require them to set up an easy-to-find mechanism that lets Californians opt-out with the push of a button, instead of having to do so repeatedly when visiting individual websites.

Privacy and consumer rights activists have been nervously waiting for Newsom to sign the bill, which passed the California legislature on September 11 and is the first law in the country of its kind. The governor had vetoed a similar but broader bill last year which also applied to mobile operating systems.

“These signals are going to be available to millions more people and it's going to be much easier for them to opt out,” said Matt Schwartz, a policy analyst at Consumer Reports.

Until now, Schwartz said, individuals who want to use a universal opt out have had to download third party browser extensions or use a privacy protective browser.

Other bills signed by Newsom on Wednesday also give Californians important data privacy rights. 

One of them requires social media companies to make it easy to cancel accounts and mandates that cancellation lead to full deletion of consumers’ data. A second bolsters the state’s Data Broker Registration Law by giving consumers more information about what personal data is collected by data brokers and who can obtain it.