Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law

Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by nickodell on Thursday September 19, 2019 @08:23PM (#21022105)

>You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do.

What's the practical difference between these two scenarios?

1) I offer a free service if you let me collect your data, but charge you $3/mo if you refuse to let me collect it.

2) I offer a $3/mo service, but give you $3/mo back if you let me collect your data.

Option #1 is explicitly illegal under the new California law. If option #2 is legal, then what is the law supposed to ban?

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Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by saagarjha on Friday September 20, 2019 @03:04AM (#21023912)

The second one has a much higher barrier for users, as they now need to hand over their credit card information.

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Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by phlakaton on Friday September 20, 2019 @11:17AM (#21027630)

Only if that's how you design your onboarding flow. It's for your company's convenience to do it that way, though, not necessarily the user's.

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Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by tikiman163 on Friday September 20, 2019 @04:00PM (#21030628)

The difference is mostly to do with user experience. It also has to do with the requirements of how you bill the customer. It means you can't give them a "free" sign up and then charge them a fee after the click the data selling opt out button.

What's meant by saying you can offer incentives is that you must present all information at the same time and that users are considered as opt-out by default.

Basically, the user must go through a sign up page that has a box that says "You may sell my data in exchange for a $3 discount" and it cannot be selected by default. You also cannot have a sign up page that has a box that must be selected to opt-out whether the box is selected by default or not.

The no-relatiation clause also has addition requirements that are not related to money. For example, you cannot refuse to allow a user to access your site because they didn't allow their data to be sold. You also couldn't impose access limitations like slowing the rate of page response or increasing the number of advertisements on the page or send spam only to users that opt-out.

The difference isn't really about charging a fee to users that won't let you sell their data. It's more about not allowing websites to harass users with increased advertising on behalf of whoever they wanted to sell your data to. It's only illegal for them to sell the data, internal use is still legal, so they're preventing a loopholes.

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Re:Silicon Valley is terrified of California’s privacy law by mokus on Thursday September 19, 2019 @11:40PM (#21023165)

One difference, it seems, is that under the proposed law you couldn’t advertise your $3 service as “free”, maybe?

Either way though, I’d be happy if it were just required that there BE an opt out even with a price tag. Google can then finally tell me how much money they want for their services.

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