Your digital privacy rights: Firefox will now let users delete collected data effective January 7, 2020

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) formally goes into effect at the beginning of the new year. Originally signed into law in June 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) expands the rights of Californians over their data. Starting in 2020, Californians have the right to know what personal information is being collected, access it, see with whom their data is being shared, and opt-out of the sale of that data. The landmark privacy legislation establishing new rules for how companies collect and handle data.

As part of its effort to comply with the CCPA, Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser, announced last Tuesday that it’s giving all users more control of their own data. The change, which spurred by the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, which went into effect Wednesday. In a blog post, Mozilla said the change will not be limited to its California users alone but affect all its users, effective tomorrow, January 7, 2020

In responding to whether the changes will be limited to California users alone, Firefox said the following: “Technically yes, but because so many businesses do business in the state, they will likely make changes that impact people everywhere. Many U.S states are considering legislation of their own. Changes we are making in the browser will apply to every Firefox user, not just those in California.”

The new data privacy law gives California residents the right to know what personal data tech companies collect. It also enables people to ask companies to delete their data and not sell it. Mozilla said changes it’s making under the CCPA will apply to every Firefox user, not just those in California. Under the new CCPA law, companies will be fined $2,500 per violation if unintentional and $7,500 if intentional.

With the new changes, Mozilla said it’ll give Firefox users the option to delete their data collected by the company in the next version of the browser. Firefox doesn’t collect data on websites visited or search queries, but Mozilla said it’ll let users choose to delete telemetry data, which covers things like how many tabs are open or how long a session was. Mozilla said it uses this data to improve the performance and security of Firefox.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) expands the rights of Californians over their data. Starting in 2020, Californians have the right to know what personal information is being collected, access it, see with whom their data is being shared, and opt-out of the sale of that data. The privacy law may soon expand to other states in U.S.