On December 10, 2020, the California Department of Justice (“Department”) announced a fourth set of modifications to the California Consumer Privacy Act’s (CCPA) regulations.  The deadline to submit comments to the modifications is Monday, December 28, 2020.

As a quick recap of past developments related to the CCPA regulations, the Department first published proposed regulations for public commentary on October 11,2019. Then in February of 2020, and again in March of 2020, the Department announced a second and third set of modifications to the proposed regulations, based on comments received during the public commentary period. Finally, in October of 2020, the Department issued a third set of modifications to the regulations, and received approximately 20 comments in response to those modifications. The fourth set of modifications issued this week, were developed in response to those comments, and to “clarify/conform” the proposed regulations to existed law.

The fourth set of modifications to the regulations, primarily aims to clarify ambiguities regarding a consumer’s right to opt out, as well as a company’s use of an opt out button and processing opt-out requests.

Regarding the right to opt out, the modifications clarify that a business selling personal information collected from consumers in the course of interacting with them offline shall inform consumers of their right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information by an offline method. The regulations provide examples to understand this clarification: for example, a busi