An Empirical Evaluation of the Implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

On January 1, 2020, California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) by more than 56% of voters intended to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California, United States. Since then, more conditions have been added to the Act to support consumers' privacy. In addition, two years after the first effective day of CCPA, consumers have seen California organizations apply approaches to adapt to CCPA. Many organizations quickly upgrade their policy to comply with the legislation and create effective platforms such as data portals that allow consumers to exercise their privacy rights. However, on the other hand, we still noticed aspects of CCPA being absent on some websites. Additionally, we found no prior evaluation of the CCPA implementation in organizations. Therefore, the convergence of the regulatory landscape and the organization's privacy policy needs to be studied. This paper was about an empirical evaluation of the implementation of the California Consumer Privacy Act. The report includes the evaluations of the following industries: social media, financial institutions, mortgages, healthcare providers, and academic institutions. Our approach was to set up a criteria table constructed from the CCPA Act and then use that table as a checklist while reviewing a company's privacy notice. Finally, we concluded this paper with an online tool application design that verifies the CCPA implementation. Upon completion, the application would be free to use so consumers can quickly inspect a website for CCPA compliance. Additionally, it is an advising tool that a website admin can utilize to enhance CCPA compliance for their website. The conjunction of this empirical report and a practical application function as a stimulus to promote CCPA implementation in organizations and deliver awareness to consumers about privacy rights they can demand.