“Thank you, I appreciate the time and the deadline postponement. My name is Anton van Seventer, and I am Counsel for Privacy and Data Policy with the Software & Information Industry Association, whose more than 380 members are committed to fostering the free flow of information to enhance both business opportunities and consumer experiences.

Our greatest concern with these draft regulations lies in the automated decision-making tools section. At the same time, while our focus is on the ADMT, there are substantive issues around scope and legality, and we hope these will not be ignored by the Agency, as will also be reflected in our written feedback.

So first, the draft regulations would create a consumer right to opt out of ADMT used for consumer profiling. As written, this means the regulations would place a large burden on businesses to actually entirely redesign their services long used by customers. So for example, a California resident may purchase home supplies at regular intervals in an online marketplace. Today, the marketplace could suggest that the customer may need to order again via SMS text. Yet the current proposed rule will disrupt this ability for businesses to do this basic first party advertising to their own customers.

This is also and notably well beyond the scope of the CCPA, where both negotiations with the business community and plain text specifically conceded that businesses could continue to use data from their own customers to improve their products and to advertise to their consumers.

Second, the draft ADMT regulations create a consumer right to opt out of ADMT training data. So we think this really would first, unnecessarily hamstring California startups developing their own ADMT applications.

But furthermore, larger technology companies, many of which also have their home in the state, would also find it more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain representative training data that does not unintentionally discriminate against groups whose representation in the data set as a whole is skewed by the opt outs. This would perversely even be the case if the discriminated data subjects had themselves refrained from opting out, adding to the potential injustice.

Lastly, we believe the Agency’s process for conducting its economic analysis of these regulations vastly underestimates the cost to California by ignoring businesses that will avoid the state, as well as ongoing compliance costs. If the Agency wants to effectively regulate privacy and ensure business compliance, we believe it first needs to fully understand the realistic financial burdens of these draft regulations.

Due to the overly broad and imprecise elements of the draft, we strongly encourage the Agency to fully incorporate these crucial elements of stakeholder feedback. We very much appreciate your consideration.”