Senate-approved legislation that would have torpedoed privacy laws by stripping a court’s discretion in sealing information produced during discovery ran into a powerful pro-business coalition in the State Assembly.
The legislation, SB 1149, which would have disclosed everything, including personal information, in environmental and products liability cases, is now dead, the California Chamber of Commerce confirmed to the Northern California Record.
Phil Goldberg, co-chair of Shook Hardy and Bacon’s Public Policy Group, who with his colleague Patrick Oot sounded the alarm on the so-called Public Right to Know Act, credited the business community and the Civil Justice Association of California for educating state lawmakers on how the bill undermines privacy rights.
“They did an excellent job of working with the General Assembly to peel back the onion on this legislation,” Goldberg told the Record. “California’s legislators took the time to truly understand the issues, meet with people on both sides, and came to the realization that this legislation is just a bad idea.”
“Sometimes words like transparency sound good,” he added, “but so does personal privacy, protecting commercially sensitive information and complying with state, national and international privacy laws. Hopefully the legislation’s resounding defeat in California will reverberate elsewhere so that when similar reform efforts are tried, legislatures will be appropriately skeptical of them.”
The legislation would have made public all documents at the end of litigation, even those that contain personal information – some of it potentially embarrassing – and would have violated not only state and federal privacy laws, but international ones as well.
For an earlier story, Oot cited cases involving companies operating within the European Union (EU), whose member countries follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a key component of EU privacy and human rights law.
“A legitimized data transfer to the U.S. is only legal under the GDPR because the data is transferred for the purpose of confidential discovery and that confidential treatment governs the data the entire time it is in the U.S.,” Oot said. “S.B. 1149 will upend this entire regime, and is also a threat to a data transfer framework the Biden Administration just negotiated with the European Commission.”
In a recent commentary, CJAC’s president and CEO Kyla Christoffersen Powell wrote that “no one opposes preventing and addressing public dangers presented by product defects or environmental hazards. But SB 1149 does not do so. It instead hijacks the California civil discovery process so that it is no longer a process confined to the parties of an individual case, but a free-for-all of information disclosure to the entire world. The outcome will be chaos and information overload rather than any meaningful prevention of public dangers.”