The executive spouse among lawmakers who are trying to weaken California's law on the protection of privacy

The California legislature has worked during the summer to finalize the text of the state's historic data privacy law before the time needed to make any changes was exhausted on Friday. In the Assembly (California's lower house), Assemblywoman Jacqui Irwin was an essential voice and argued motions that would weaken the law, and a new report says her reasoning could be very very close to home.

A review of Politico's state ethics literature found that Irwin was married to Jon Irwin, the controversial COO of the Ring House Home Monitoring Company. This company will have everything to gain if California's law weakens decisively before it can come into effect.

California Governor Gavin Newsom enacted the Consumer Protection Act in California in June 2018. This law provides California residents with several protections with respect to their personal information, including the right to know what is being collected. , what is sold and to whom it is sold. It also gives Californians the right to access their personal information, the right to delete the data collected from them and the right not to participate, without having to pay extra for the services they have. wish.

The provisions of the CCPA come into effect on January 1, 2020, just over three months from now. There was a window in 2019 when the state legislature could still amend the text of the law, and a host of proposed amendments were therefore received by the Assembly and Senate of the United States. 39, state before the deadline last week.

A proposal submitted by the woman of the Assembly, Irwin, would specify the type of data exempted from the provisions of the CCPA, which angered the consumer groups, reports Politico. Irwin also originally proposed to delete "a provision requiring companies to disclose or delete data associated with" households "at the request," a regulation that will likely affect companies like Ring. She also voted against an amendment that would have required smart speaker systems, such as Alexa or Google Home, to obtain the user's consent to sell recorded conversations, and used "video footage from store security as an example of heavy and risky data for users, businesses need to be connected with consumers in response to requests for data deletion. "

Ring is increasingly becoming the focus of attention in recent weeks as a result of a series of media reports on the company's working partnerships with hundreds of police agencies nationwide. These agreements, which often force law enforcement authorities to encourage the widespread adoption of Ring in their jurisdictions, generally encourage law enforcement to adopt a public transparency on the data collected or shared between the Amazonian subsidiary and the government. police.

California law, for its part, is often an extremely high issue. Due to the demographic density and level of influence of the state and the way the Internet tends to work, California's privacy law has become a de facto national standard over time. . The CCPA is expected to have such a large impact – and as a result not surprisingly, it has faced significant opposition from industry groups.

Assemblywoman Irwin told Politico that she found the questions about his wife shocking, given her own experience as a systems engineer. "My role in the privacy debate in the legislature is to bring people together and solve the practical problems we pose as decision-makers, regardless of any job or role my husband might have. "she said.

Potential conflicts of interest for California lawmakers, whose spouses, children or other close relatives may work for regulated businesses, are not entirely unknown, notes Politico. Such conflicts are not limited to the Golden State either. A joint report released by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity at the end of 2017 revealed dozens of cases in which lawmakers across the country were involved in bills likely to affect businesses owned by them themselves or their families. More recently, a joint report between ProPublica and local media in West Virginia revealed that the governor was reaping financial rewards whenever the state's money was spent in one of its resorts. This situation also echoes some conflicts at the federal level.