Informed Webmaster

...A landmark privacy rights bill took effect Jan. 1, 2020 in California and will have broad implications for U.S. consumers and businesses. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandates strict requirements for companies to notify users about how their user data will be used and monetized along with giving them straightforward tools for opting out....

...Specifically, CCPA applies to companies that have at least $25 million in revenue and make half their money selling data or gathers information on at least 50,000 consumers.

More specifically, the CCPA bill requires that companies disclose to California consumers the information they collect, why they collect it and what third parties they share it with. They must also honor consumer requests to have their data deleted. Additionally, the law bans companies from offering a higher tier of service for one user who agrees to divulge more personal information versus a consumer who only agrees to share limited data with a service.

Companies that violate the CCPA, or don’t fix violations within 30 days of being notified, face fines up to $7,500 for each violation. The CCPA was signed into law in June 2018...

...Microsoft was one of the first companies to publicly commit to applying CCPA protection to all of its U.S. customers. Mozilla is taking it a step further, applying CCPA rights to all Firefox users around the world. This is not the first time Mozilla has taken this stand. When the EU passed its GDPR privacy legislation, Mozilla similarly extended those protections to all users.

Mozilla is also committing to extending these rules to so-called “telemetry data,” the anonymous technical information about browser usage that helps Mozilla improve security and performance...

How will CCPA impact AdSense publishers?

The main implication of CCPA for AdSense publishers will be the inability to serve personalised ads to visitors from California who have opted out, or if you have enabled automated restricted data processing. Non-personalised ads will generally generate less ad income than targeted ads.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) went into effect on January 1, 2020 with a six-month enforcement grace period. That end date is now here.

...Facebook announced a new feature called Limited Data Use (LDU). As of July 1, LDU has been automatically enabled for all Facebook business accounts, limiting the way user data can be stored and processed in the Facebook ecosystem for all users Facebook identifies as residents of the state of California. The feature automatically detects if a user resides in California, and applies limited data use rules (more on those later). But that feature will only stay on until July 31—then Facebook requires businesses to update their pixel to include an LDU parameter.

If you do not take action by July 31, your business will take on sole responsibility for compliance (and all associated risks with non-compliance) ...