CCPA Privacy Rights
CCPA is a Californian state statute intended to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for California residents. This statute came into effect on the 1st of January 2020 and is regarded as the US’s toughest privacy legislation. Similarly to Europe’s GDPR, CCPA gives consumers the right to know what personal information companies are collecting about them. Consumers can access this information, know whether it is being sold or disclosed to others and to whom. Consumers can also stop companies from selling their personal information. Moreover, under CCPA consumers can ask companies holding personal information about them to delete this information from their systems. Importantly, consumers can also sue companies for violations of the CCPA. The law technically only applies to private information companies hold of Californian consumers. However, Mozilla has decided to roll out CCPA private data rights to all its users worldwide.
What Private Information Does Mozilla Collect?
Mozilla states that as a rule they hold very little data from their customers and mostly just collect telemetry data. A claim that appears to hold true. On their official blog Mozilla explains that: “This telemetry doesn’t tell us about the websites you visit or searches you do; we just know general information, like a Firefox user had a certain amount of tabs opened and how long their session was.” Mozilla apparently uses this telemetry data to improve the performance and security of Firefox. Although, Telemetry data is often not regarded as “personal data” as it is not individually identifiable. Nonetheless, Mozilla have decided to provide their Firefox users the right to request that this data also be deleted from Mozilla’s systems.
Mozilla’s Private Data Deletion Control Roll Out
The new version of Firefox will have the new data deletion control built in. This new version is due to be rolled out on January 7th. With regards to this new control, Mozilla states: “This setting will provide users a way to request deletion for desktop telemetry directly from Firefox – and a way for us, at Mozilla, to perform that deletion.”
