Privacy Insider Newsletter | Data Privacy News Delivered Weekly

đźź° Lessons from Parallel Enforcements

Written by Arlo Gilbert | Mar 12, 2026 12:00:02 PM

Hello all, and happy Thursday!

I promise this newsletter covers more than just California privacy news, but CalPrivacy hasn’t been making it easy.

Earlier this month, CalPrivacy fined Ford for creating unnecessary friction in the opt-out process. Specifically, Ford required consumers to verify their identities (via email verification) before they could submit an opt-out request. This is not compliant under the CCPA.

It’s an especially interesting violation because it parallels last year’s enforcement action against Honda in three ways:

  • Both are major automotive manufacturers
  • Both required consumers to verify their identities for simple opt-out requests
  • Both used a legacy provider to support their privacy operations

Taken together, I think these actions underscore a real difference in product philosophy between Osano and legacy privacy providers. The latter is content to hand you all the tools to get compliant, but expects you to know exactly what to do when putting those tools to use.

That’s not a realistic expectation.

If well-resourced companies like Ford and Honda are getting dinged for non-compliance, it’s pretty clear privacy vendors ought to be putting more thought into how their solutions are getting implemented.

As an example, Osano doesn’t require identity verification when processing Do-Not-Sell/-Share requests from California by default. We don’t expect our customers to have perfect knowledge of every jurisdiction’s compliance requirements. That’s why we bake privacy best practices into the platform to the best of our ability.

Best,

Arlo

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