After the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) took effect on New Year’s Day, businesses around the country began scrambling to work out how to comply with its strict rules and regulations. These days, more and more states are buying into the idea that they’ve got a role in regulating online privacy. Washington and Massachusetts, for instance, already attempted to pass their own state-based privacy laws in 2019, and many other states will likely follow suit this year.
This is bad news for online businesses, which now need to decide whether to comply with different state standards on digital privacy or to suspend service to particular states altogether. It’s also bad for consumers, who might see their options for certain services severely reduced, like they did in Europe after the EU enacted burdensome digital privacy regulations of its own in 2018.