AB 3048 is an important, privacy protecting bill recently passed by the California House and Senate. AB 3048 would require all browsers and mobile operating systems in California to implement an “opt-out” signal, which would allow Californians to assert their right to have their data not be shared or sold to third parties. Google is urging California Governor Newsom to veto the bill with a series of misleading and false claims in their current Grow with Google email campaign.
The below is an open letter by organizations and individuals who have been involved in the Global Privacy Control project, which works to create, popularize, and standardize an opt-out signal Californians can use to protect their privacy. We are sharing this letter and sending it to Governor Newsom in the hope that he will act to protect California’s privacy, see through Google’s self-serving and misleading claims, and sign AB 3048 into law.
Claim: AB 3048 would make it difficult for businesses to do necessary tasks like “remembering past purchases, offering tailored promotions, or running targeted ads.”
Fact: Google is being intentionally deceptive.
First, AB 3048 would not impact, in any way, a business’s ability to save and record information about its users. AB 3048, and the opt-out signal it would require mobile phones and browsers to implement, limits only a business’s ability to sell and share user data with third parties. Businesses can continue to remember past purchases and offer tailored promotions to their users, and even use third-party service providers to do it, so long as they do so without selling or sharing that information. Google is actually acting against the interests of small businesses, using small business customer information for its own purposes and to place ads for their competitors.
Second, AB 3048 does not place any new obligations or responsibilities on small business owners or website operators; AB 3048 requires browser and phone makers to implement an opt-out mechanism (in California). Business operators are already required to respect these opt-out mechanisms when Californians send them (which millions of Web users already do). Google’s claim here is just as much a non sequitur as it is a lie.
Finally, Google knows exactly what AB 3048 would (and wouldn’t) do, and knows that the messaging it’s sending to its partners is a mix of lies, false statements, and scary stories. Google’s business model depends on Google collecting data on hundreds of millions of web users, and using that data to track and profile users. That kind of pervasive privacy harm Google’s business depends on is exactly what AB 3048 aims to prevent, and so of course Google will say anything to take advantage of small California businesses for as long as it can.
Small businesses realize Google is trying to play them and won’t fall for it. Google uses small businesses to advance its interests when convenient, but the list of small businesses Google has broken or killed is long and growing: newspapers and media businesses, advertising companies, businesses who lose customers to Google-promoted fraudulent sites, and any business that can’t afford the inflated costs necessary to be highly placed in Google’s search results, among many others. That Google, a company found to be a monopoly several times over, claims to be worried about small businesses is as laughable as it is grim.
We urge Governor Newsom to ignore Google’s objectively, intentionally wrong claims, and sign AB 3048 into law. Web users should be able to use (and shop on) the Web safely and privately, in whatever browser they like.
Signed,
Brendan Eich & Peter Snyder (Brave Software)
Justin Brockman & Matt Schwartz (Consumer Reports)
Jason Kint (Digital Content Next)
Hayley Tsukayama (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Caitriona Fitzgerald (Electronic Privacy Information Center)
Robin Berjon (Governance Technologist)
Hamed Haddadi (Imperial College London)
Emory Roane (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse)
