California Electronic Communications Privacy Act

Citation
California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), SB 178 (2016)

Overview
On Jan. 1, 2016, the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act went into effect.

CalECPA has been hailed as "the nation's best privacy law." Under CalECPA, no California government entity can search telephones and no police officer can search online accounts without going to a judge, getting consent, or showing it is an emergency.

CalECPA had broad bipartisan support, jointly authored by Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) and Senator Joel Anderson (R-Alpine), Principal co-author Assemblymember Gatto (D-Glendale) and co-authored by Senators Canella, Gaines, Hertzberg, Hill, McGuire, Nielsen and Roth and Assembly members Chiu, Gordon, Maienschein, Obernolte, Quirk, Ting, and Weber.

CalECPA serves a model for the rest of the nation for updating privacy law for the modern digital world.