Submission + - California's Corporate Cover-Up Act Is a Privacy Nightmare (eff.org)
The Corporate Cover-Up Act is a massive carve-out that would gut California’s Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and give Big Tech and data brokers a green light to spy on us without consent for just about any reason. If passed, S.B. 690 would let companies secretly record your clicks, calls, and behavior online—then share or sell that data with whomever they’d like, all under the banner of a “commercial business purpose.”
Simply put, The Corporate Cover-Up Act (S.B. 690) is a blatant attack on digital privacy, and is written to eviscerate long-standing privacy laws and legal safeguards Californians rely on. If passed, it would:
- Gut California’s Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA)—a law that protects us from being secretly recorded or monitored
- Legalize corporate wiretaps, allowing companies to intercept real-time clicks, calls, and communications
- Authorize pen registers and trap-and-trace tools, which track who you talk to, when, and how—without consent
- Let companies use all of this surveillance data for “commercial business purposes”—with zero notice and no legal consequences
This isn’t a small fix. It’s a sweeping rollback of hard-won privacy protections—the kind that helped expose serious abuses by companies like Facebook, Google, and Oracle.