Proposed California Law affecting DNT

Colleagues,

The California Attorney General is sponsoring a bill that could be of interest to our working group. It is AB 370 introduced by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi.  I've attached it as a PDF file.  I'm not sure that the current language exactly accomplishes what the AG's office tells me is their intent, but here is what I was told they want to do:

The bill would amend existing California law requiring privacy policies to require that a commercial website would have to include in its privacy policy whether or not it honors a Do-Not-Track message.  The intent, I was told, is to increase transparency and shift some of the responsibility for Do Not Track on to consumer-facing 1st party sites.

The idea is that a 1st party website could not claim it honored Do Not Track if it allowed or knew it had 3rd parties on its site that engaged in tracking.

The bill offers this definition of tracking:

"The term "online tracking" means the practice of collecting personally identifiable information about and individual consumer's online activities over time and across different Web sites and online services."

I thought you would be interested.

Best regards,
John


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John M. Simpson
Privacy Project Director
Consumer Watchdog
2701 Ocean Park Blvd., Suite 112
Santa Monica, CA, 90405
Tel: 310-392-7041
Cell: 310-292-1902
www.ConsumerWatchdog.org
john@consumerwatchdog.org