California has always been known as being, uh, ahead of the curve. And its legislators proved it again over the last couple of months by passing a barrel of insane privacy laws.
Some of the bills will have negligible impact. Others, as written, could hurt many companies that offer honest value to their customers
Take Jackie Speier’s bill on financial privacy, SB-1. It requires that customers opt in before a bank shares their data with third parties. (See story on page 12.)
On the one hand, we can understand it. Consumers deserve choice, and there have been some nasty episodes arising from sharing data with outside companies.
But the bill goes too far because it cuts off the flow of information entirely unless a person opts in, a very dangerous precedent to set given that SB-1 could end up being the national standard. What if the hotshots in Washington decide that this standard should be applied to, say, catalogs? But even without that, it will hurt financial services marketers who send 6 billion pieces a year, and the result will be that consumers will have less access to credit.
Then there’s Kevin Murray’s spam bill, which basically bans unsolicited e-mail. It doesn’t require setting up a do-not-mail file
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