California just passed GDPR-lite. AB-375 will go into effect in January of 2020.

JLINC founder Jim Fournier weighs in.

How will businesses comply with this?

JF: JLINC offers a way for customers to easily manage their preferences across all companies that opt-in. Signing up takes just minutes, and then onboarding a new company takes seconds.

Can JLINC bring businesses into compliance with ANY privacy regulation?

JF: Yes. We have already had experience with this in the EU under GDPR. Wherever new rights are defined, JLINC can offer people a simple standard way to control their preferences across all participating companies under them.

How?

JF: We put the individual user at the center, so they can tell companies how often they'd like to hear from them, and about what. The great thing for businesses is that by giving people a real option, they actually get multiple benefits:

1. Volunteered data is much more valuable!
2. Respecting your customers is a great way to ensure repeat business. Spying on your customers is creepy, and no longer tolerated.
3. Better quality data, at vastly reduced data maintainence cost.
4. Legal compliance.

We're providing a reputation-based system. It's the same approach we're taking in Europe under GDPR. We believe this provides a mechanism that both industry and individuals can agree on, where users control the permission that they grant, or not, to companies.

The tech industry has told us that we must trade privacy for convenience, and that no one cares about privacy.

JF: Up until now that has been true, the only way to provide personalization has been with tracking and profiling. And a whole industry has built business models based on that, and many are now rationalizing it as the only way it can work.

JLINC has built a new way to give end users control over their own automated data agreements –– essentially a new data control layer on the Internet.

The claim has been that nobody cares, yet the ballot initiative polled at around 80% approval. People obviously care. Up until now, there has been no market alternative.

The question then is how do we do it? JLINC provides the infrastructure, and it does so on a technical basis that can be applied industry-wide.

Sounds like it could be time-consuming.

JF: Not at all. We're providing a technological implementation to allow people and businesses to manage this with convenience, and in detail. People can change their preferences and apply them to one company, or all, in seconds –– in the time it takes to swipe a screen.

We believe that instead of spying on people to extract data and infer what they do or like, it's better to just ask them! It's respectful. And, with GDPR and now AB-375, we're seeing it become the law. We are creating facts on the ground and may have a solution deployed before the law even goes into effect.