Facebook’s stance on CCPA points to a larger role for private industry

The first big challenge to the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (AB 375)[1] will be defining what exactly constitutes the sale of personal data. Within the text of the law, there is significant room for interpretation; Facebook, Inc. intends to use that space to pass the burden of compliance with the CCPA onto third parties that sell data. This tactic was discussed more than a year ago by Antonio García Martínez, who once was employed at Facebook to help with monetization of the data that the social media giant collects. According to Martínez,[2] the CCPA affects smaller, third-party digital advertising much more than it affects larger companies that collect and store personal information:

Unlike much of the ad-tech world, Facebook lives in a walled garden where no data leaves and very little enters. When an advertiser wants to retarget you, it exchanges your contact information with Facebook, both sides agreeing to a pseudonym for you, before placing you in one or more targeting buckets (“shoe shoppers,” for example). For Facebook’s most powerful and invasive micro-targeting, almost no data is shared between advertiser and publisher, and data middlemen are largely absent.

The CCPA targets the data middlemen that purchase and resell data, or purchase access to Facebook’s trove of data in order to process targeted ads.

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