California's new online privacy regulator is the first agency of its kind, with the express goal to monitor how tech companies use and store personal data.
The watchdog agency, the California Privacy Protection Agency, has been tasked with the daunting job of policing tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon with a $10 million budget to help enforce the state's privacy law, the most strict so far in the United States.
But before any of that can happen, the agency first needs to built, from scratch.
The building of the agency has been a long time coming. The wheels were set in motion in 2018, when California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act, which enables consumers to have more autonomy over how their information is collected and shared.
And then a ballot initiative passed in 2020, the California Privacy Rights Act, cemented the need for this type of entity, Tracy Rosenberg, Executive Director of Media Alliance, a media advocacy organization, told KCBS Radio's Patti Reising and Jeff Bell on Thursday.
With their base funding, the agency is going to outline rules based on what was included in the 2020 ballot initiative, she said. "Starting in January 1, 2023, they will start to enforce all of the California state privacy rules."
"It's a huge job," said Rosenberg. "We are certainly wishing them the best."
And once that begins, it's likely that $10 million won't come close to what the agency will need. "If you take a look at the lobbying budgets of Google and Facebook, they are huge," she said.
Not to mention it's an agency starting from square one, their website was created just three months ago.
It's also difficult to predict how much resistance the agency will be facing. "There's already some pushback," she said. "The Chamber of Commerce and a number of other business entities have sort of said, 'Well, maybe you should pushback these start dates of the enforcement.'"
Despite all the challenges, the new agency does have a clear and well-thought-out mission, to make California's privacy rules stronger, said Rosenberg.
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