California’s Cities and Counties Must Step Up Their Privacy Game. A.B. 1337 Can Do That.

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“The right to privacy is being threatened by the indiscriminate collection, maintenance, and dissemination of personal information and the lack of effective laws and legal remedies,” some astute California lawmakers once wrote. “The increasing use of computers and other sophisticated information technology has greatly magnified the potential risk to individual privacy that can occur from the maintenance of personal information.”

Sound familiar? These words may sound like a recent push back on programs that want to slurp up the information sitting in ever-swelling government databases. But they’re not. They come from a nearly 50-year-old California law.

The “Information Practices Act of 1977”—or the IPA for short—is a foundational state privacy law and one of several privacy laws directly responding to the Watergate scandal, such the federal Privacy Act of 1974 and California’s own state constitutional right to privacy.

Now, as we confront a new era of digital surveillance and face our own wave of concern about government demands for data, it’s time to revisit and update the IPA.

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The IPA puts a check on government use of personal information by establishing guardrails for how state agencies maintain, collect, and disseminate data. It also gives people the right to access and correct their information.

While the need for the law has not changed, the rest of the world has. Particularly, since the IPA passed in 1977, far more data collection is now done at the county and city level. Yet local and county government entities have no standard protections in the state of California. And those entities have tr

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