Features

Companies would be required to acquire
permission before selling customer info 

SACRAMENTO – Despite two high-profile failures to pass financial privacy legislation within the last year, a bill that would require financial companies to get permission before selling personal information is being resurrected by Sen. Jackie Speier. 

Speier, D-Hillsborough, said she will reintroduce the measure this month as the Legislature enters the final days of its two-year session. 

The bill would require financial companies to receive permission before selling personal information, such as bank balances and unlisted phone numbers, to outside marketing companies. 

Speier’s measure would also let financial conglomerates trade information among sister companies to market products, such as a Bank of America mortgage to a Bank of America credit card customer. But customers would be able to deny permission by sending in a form. 

Current law allows banks and insurance companies to have the power to sell personal information received from credit or mortgage applications without getting permission from their customers. These include phone numbers, bank balances and outstanding bills. 

Speier wants to stop that practice and allow customers to “opt in” if they want their information shared. 

A spokesman for Gov. Gray Davis said the governor is preparing to offer his own amendments to Speier’s privacy bill. Davis has said he wants to sign a privacy measure. But the Democratic governor worked behind the scenes with his Assembly allies last year to kill Speier’s bill. 

Davis then offered his own version, but that also died when consumer groups and corporations both refused to support it. 

Speier’s measure was defeated by nine votes last September and is now waiting for reconsideration. Speier and her Assembly allies are now quietly lobbying wavering members, many of them from Southern California and the Central Valley, who claim that the issue is more important to the Bay Area than to their own constituents. 

Consumer groups say the new measure probably needs at least one last push from Davis and state Assembly leaders. 

“Does the Assembly provide the leadership needed that this gets to the governor’s desk,” asked Shelley Curran, a lobbyist with Consumers Union in San Francisco, “or does the legislation never see the light of day?”