The California Senate, in a 25-13 vote on August 31, 2002, killed the Financial Information Privacy Act (SB 773), “which would require a financial institution, as defined, to provide a specified written form to a consumer relative to the sharing of the consumer’s confidential consumer before the financial institution could share the confidential consumer information with other nonaffiliated companies.”
Intense lobbying against the bill by a collation of organizations represented by CAPrivacyProtection.org that used a newspaper marketing campaign titled, “SB 773: A Special Interest Experiment California Can’t Afford,” apparently assisted in the legislation’s demise. Confused? Yes indeed, there is another organization that lobbied for passage of the bill, and it is called CaliforniaPrivacy.org. On the home page of this site, you will find a email letter that citizens could have used to communicate their support of the bill to their Assembly Members.