CCPA the new GDPR for American companies?

CCPA is just days away and the new law is being billed as the “American GDPR” as it places much stricter data regulations on companies, with the possibility of fines for improper data handling.

The California Consumer Privacy Act will come into enforcement on January 1, 2020, and will require large businesses to provide additional transparency to their customers and users, which will especially impact tech companies.

CCPA is being tied to GDPR as it has similar mechanisms to protect consumer data, and makes data processing more strict for businesses. While CCPA will only be for the state of California, its implications will have an impact on businesses in all 50 states. The reason for this is due to the fact that I.T infrastructure in the cloud means that many businesses transfer data between states on a regular basis. Therefore, data which gets processed in a datacenter in California, which then gets sent back to a datacenter in Oregon, will need to apply strict data compliance in line with CCPA.

Many businesses have been implementing the necessary changes ahead of CCPA, and data erasure has also become a more prominent topic of debate. With companies upgrading infrastructure and retiring older systems, it has become increasingly important for businesses todegauss and even destroy their older hard drives.

As data laws get tighter, consumers have more power to take companies to account. Therefore, it is essential that businesses of all sizes apply CCPA where possible in their architecture, and amend their data erasure practices so that data is being safely erased too once a client, patient or even an employee record is no longer needed.