The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) currently exempts from its provisions certain information collected by a business about a natural person in the course of the person acting as a job applicant, employee, owner, director, officer, medical staff member, or contractor of a business. This exemption is set to expire on December 31, 2020. In addition, the so-called business-to-business exemption for transactions and communications with the business that occur solely within the context of the business conducting due diligence regarding or providing or receiving a product or service to or from that company, partnership, sole proprietorship, nonprofit, or government agency is also set to expire on December 31, 2020.

Recent legislation passed in California would extend both of the exemptions until January 1, 2022. Assembly bill 1281, (AB 1281) which was presented to Governor Gavin Newsom on September 8, 2020, extends the one-year exemption for employee information and business to business information for another year until January 1, 2022. The bill also provides that the extension of these exemptions is contingent upon voters not approving the ballot Proposition 24, known as the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). Should the CPRA pass on November 3, it would extend these exemptions until January 1, 2023. Some other highlights of the CPRA include the creation of a new category of sensitive personal information (SPI) that would give consumers the power to restrict its use, a provision that allows consumers to prohibit businesses from tracking their precise geolocation to a location of approximately 250 acres, and the addition of email and passwords to the list of defined “personal information” included in a data breach.

The key takeaway here is that if AB 1281 is enacted or if Proposition 24 passes, employee/job applicant information as well as business-to-business communications will continue to be exempt from the CCPA. Both AB 1281 and AB 713 regarding medical information, which we wrote about recently here, are currently on Governor Newsom’s desk.