California businesses face the prospect of having to apply elements of the state’s landmark privacy law to their own workers. It threatens to wreak havoc on compliance, including for gig economy companies, whose independent contractor models aren’t exempted from the new rules.
The state’s consumer privacy law, the first of its kind in the US, gives consumers the right to know what data is being collected on them and ask that it not be sold. It contains exemptions for certain data related to employees and business-to-business operations, but those carve-outs are unlikely to be extended, removing an important shield for companies and forcing them to extend those rights to workers beginning Jan. 1, 2023.
How companies apply those rights to employees and contractors, who generate troves of data and information, remains unclear, attorneys say, since employee privacy is a fairly new concept in US law compared to Europe.
“Employee privacy is one of those sleeper issues that has really become central,” said Jeewon Serrato, a partner at Baker & Hostetler LLP in San Francisco. “Not just for the gig economy, but for companies in general.”
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, which took effect on Jan. 1, 2020, the state’s consumers got the right to access personal information companies collect on them...
The National Board of Directors of the Union of Liberian Associations in the Americas (ULAA) hereby alerts the general public to a growing pattern of impersonation, misrepresentation, and the unau...