New corporate lobbying from Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook and Google, has successfully postponed a committee hearing for a new California state bill: the “Right to Know Act of 2013."

If passed, the bill would allow an unprecedented amount of access to individuals to find out what companies know about us. Further, if the bill does become law, it could have nationwide effects. (California has a history of pushing privacy concepts into law and influencing non-California businesses to comply.) The hearing had been scheduled for last week, but it is now scheduled for May 7 in Sacramento.

According to the Bay Area News Group, the state's Assembly Judiciary Committee chair, Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), postponed the bill due to questions raised by lobbying. The news organization reported:

"Menlo Park-based Facebook and Mountain View-based Google are both in the district represented by Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D-Menlo Park, who said he hasn't made up his mind on the bill, but is looking for the 'sweet spot' where privacy is protected 'but you don't completely shut off Internet commerce. I'm trying to sort it out.'"

Inspiration from Europe

As we reported earlier this month, the bill aims to bring California law in closer line with the European Union, where citizens have a near-blanket right to compel companies to release personal data held about them. This practice has been in the spotlight recently, as it’s the means through which an Austrian law student has become a thorn in the side of Facebook. The student is exercising his right as he attempts to compel the social network to disclose the vast amount of data that it holds about him.

As currently written, the bill’s digest summarizes the draft legislation this way:

This bill would instead require any business that retains a customer’s personal information, as defined, or discloses that information to a third party, to provide at no charge, within 30 days of the customer’s specified request, a copy of that information to the customer as well as the names and contact information for all third parties with which the business has shared the information during the previous 12 months, regardless of any business relationship with the customer. This bill would require that a business subject to these provisions choose one of several specified options to provide the customer with a designated address for use in making a request for copies of information under these provisions.

A recent letter from the group of corporate interests across the Golden State argues that AB 1291 is “overbroad.”

“It would expand the definition of ‘personal information’ under California’s Shine the Light Law to cover not only any information that identifies ‘or references’ an individual, but also any information that identifies or ‘is able to be uniquely associated with a particular device,’” the group writes. “It would specifically reach IP addresses and device identifiers, as well as information that could be associated with that information.”

(We reached out to TechAmerica, a Silicon Valley industry group that is one of the prominent signatories of this letter. We will update this story if more information becomes available.)

However, the bill’s sponsor, Assembly Member Bonnie Lowenthal (representing parts of the Los Angeles area) is pushing ahead.

“We expected significant opposition, but we’re confident that we’ll find a way forward with it,” Allison Ruff, Lowenthal’s chief of staff, told Ars. (She added that the bill was inspired by existing European law.) “It didn’t kill industry [in Europe]. Most of these companies, they’re already complying with laws in the European Union, so complying in California shouldn’t be a problem for them.”