California Governor Jerry Brown has recently signed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act into law. The new statute will provide the citizens of California with sweeping protections of digital privacy rights. State law enforcement agencies and other investigative entities will now be barred from compelling businesses to turn over metadata or any digital communications without a warrant. These digital communications include emails, texts, and documents stored in a cloud. Civil libertarians have lobbied hard for these new privacy now protections, and privacy activists are now trying to encourage other states to follow California’s example. There are also efforts to encourage Federal lawmakers to pass more sweeping digital privacy protections.
See Kim Zetter, California Now Has The Nation’s Best Digital Privacy Law, WIRED, October 8, 2015.
Special thanks to Jim Hillhouse for bringing this article to my attention.
