Trends to Watch in the California Legislature

If you’re a Californian, there are a few new state laws that you should know will be going into effect in the new year. EFF has worked hard in Sacramento this session to advance bills that protect privacy, fight surveillance, and promote transparency.

California’s legislature runs in a two-year cycle, meaning that it’s currently halftime for legislators. As we prepare for the next year of the California legislative session in January, it’s a good time to showcase what’s happened so far—and what’s left to do.

Wins Worth Celebrating

In a win for every Californian’s privacy rights, we were happy to support A.B. 566 (Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal). This is a common-sense law that makes California’s main consumer data privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, more user-friendly. It requires that browsers support people’s rights to send opt-out signals, such as the global opt-out in Privacy Badger, to businesses. Managing your privacy as an individual can be a hard job, and EFF wants stronger laws that make it easier for you to do so.

Additionally, we were proud to advance government transparency by supporting A.B. 1524 (Judiciary Committee), which allows members of the public to make copies of public court records using their own devices, such as cell-phone cameras and overhead document scanners, without paying fees.

We also supported two bills that will improve law enforcement accountability at a time when we desperately need it. S.B. 627 (Senator Scott Wiener) prohibits law enforcement officers from wearing masks to avoid accountability (The Trump administration has sued California over this law). We also supported S.B. 524 (Asm. Jesse Arreguín), which requires law enforcement to disclose when a police report was written using artificial intelligence.

On the To-Do List for Next Year

On the flip side, we also stopped some problematic bills from becoming law. This includes S.B. 690 (Sen. Anna Caballero), which we dubbed the Corporate Coverup Act. This bill would have gutted California’s wiretapping statute by allowing businesses to ignore those privacy rights for “any business purpose.” Working with several coalition partners, we were able to keep that bill from moving forward in 2025. We do expect to see it come back in 2026, and are ready to fight back against those corporate business interests.

And, of course, not every fight ended in victory. There are still many areas where we have work left to do. California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill we supported, S.B. 7, which would have given workers in California greater transparency into how their employers use artificial intelligence and was sponsored by the California Federation of Labor Unions. S.B. 7  was vetoed in response to concerns from companies including Uber and Lyft, but we expect to continue working with the labor community on the ways AI affects the workplace in 2026.

Trends of Note

California continued a troubling years-long trend of lawmakers pushing problematic proposals that would require every internet user to verify their age to access information—often by relying on privacy-invasive methods to do so. Earlier this year EFF sent a letter to the California legislature expressing grave concerns with lawmakers’ approach to regulating young people’s ability to speak online. We continue to raise these concerns, and would welcome working with any lawmaker in California on a better solution.

We also continue to keep a close eye on government data sharing. On this front, there is some good news. Several of the bills we supported this year sought to place needed safeguards on the ways various government agencies in California share data. These include: A.B. 82 (Asm. Chris Ward) and S.B. 497 (Wiener), which would add privacy protections to data collected by the state about those who may be receiving gender-affirming or reproductive health care; A.B. 1303 (Asm. Avelino Valencia), which prohibits warrantless data sharing from California’s low-income broadband program to immigration and other government officials; and S.B. 635 (Sen. Maria Elena Durazo), which places similar limits on data collected from sidewalk vendors.

We are also heartened to see California correct course on broad government data sharing. Last session, we opposed A.B. 518 (Asm. Buffy Wicks), which let state agencies ignore existing state privacy law to allow broader information sharing about people eligible for CalFresh—the state’s federally funded food assistance program. As we’ve seen, the federal government has since sought data from food assistance programs to use for other purposes. We were happy to have instead supported A.B. 593 this year, also authored by Asm. Wicks—which reversed course on that data sharing.

We hope to see this attention to the harms of careless government data sharing continue. EFF’s sponsored bill this year, A.B. 1337, would update and extend vital privacy safeguards present at the state agency level to counties and cities. These local entities today collect enormous amounts of data and administer programs that weren’t contemplated when the original law was written in 1977. That information should be held to strong privacy standards.

We’ve been fortunate to work with Asm. Chris Ward, who is also the chair of the LGBTQ Caucus in the legislature, on that bill. The bill stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee during the 2025 legislative session, but we plan to bring it back in the next session with a renewed sense of urgency.