The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was introduced in 2018 and came into effect at the start of 2020. The main point of CCPA is to enhance privacy rights and ensure consumer protection for people living in the state of California.

Just like GDPR, the CCPA also has far-reaching implications for companies and organizations. It is crucial for all organizations working with the residents of California to become fully compliant with CCPA if they want to remain in business in the state. As long as the annual revenues of your company are $25 million or more, you will have to comply with CCPA.  With that in mind, we wanted to inform you of the implications CCPA has on your organization. The following information will enable you to ensure full compliance with the CCPA by the deadline set to be on July 1, 2020.

The Main Effects of CCPA

One of the main effects of CCPA involves data governance. The data you collect needs to be of sufficient quality and needs to be managed in accordance with CCPA. That essentially means that your organization needs to take a thorough look at the data you collect and the data collected in the past 12 months. All of it has to be accurate, and most importantly, you need to be upfront with what you are going to do with it. Under CCPA, you have a requirement to ensure your customers know what the data you collect from them is and what you will use it for going forward. Naturally, this means that you have to have a strategy set in place, one that ensures everything is done in compliance with the CCPA and in a manner that won’t alienate your customers. 

In a similar manner to GDPR, the CCPA also necessitates that organizations give people a choice to opt out of the sale of their data. This is important because it has significant implications on the quality of data you keep. With such rules, most organizations will benefit from having quality data, instead of data that comes from questionable sources. If you can be specific and fully transparent in your explanations on how personal data is used, you can ensure that your customers always enter their information on your platform. 

With all of the new rules set in place by the CCPA, your organization needs to know several things about the data they have and collect:

• What the data is exactly

• How it’s processed

• Where it is located

In essence, complete knowledge of the consumer data you collect is now vital. Plus, the processes and tools you use for data collection and management need to be CCPA-compliant to ensure that everything is done according to the new rules.