State Legislative Roundup for June 2024
As many state legislative sessions for 2024 have reached their end, we continue to provide our periodic roundup of bills under active consideration in the states that we are monitoring because they could have an impact on the ecommerce marketing landscape.
California is considering Assembly Bill 2877 which would amend the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 to prohibit developers from using personal information of a consumer less than 16 years of age to train or retrain an artificial intelligence system without affirmative authorization to use the personal information from the consumer or their parent or guardian. If authorization is given, a developer is required to deidentify and aggregate the personal information before using it to train or retrain an artificial intelligence system or service. The bill is sponsored by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Alameda). The Assembly passed the bill and it is currently pending in the Senate. On June 27, 2024, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary passed and rereferred the bill to the Committee on Appropriations.
[NEW ADDITION: PASSED] Georgia enacted Senate Bill 73 on May 6, 2024. The bill amends Title 46 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated to update regulations on telephone solicitations, which are limited to voice calls made without prior express consent. The bill provides that Georgia citizens can seek injunctive relief and damages against those in violation of the Code and against those on whose behalf such violations were committed. An appropriate defense to any action brought under this section is that the telephone number was provided in error by another subscriber and the defendant did not know or have reason to know the number was provided in error. The bill was sponsored by Senator Blake Tillery (R-Appling) and 53 co-sponsors.
Illinois is considering House Bill 5566, which was introduced by Representative Matt Hanson (D – Springfield) and referred to the House Rules Committee on February 9, 2024 and then the House Committee on Consumer Protection on March 5, 2024. If adopted, the bill would amend Illinois’s Telephone Solicitation Act to make three key changes: (1) to prohibit a telemarketer from placing more than 3 calls to the same person during a 24-hour period; (2) prohibit intentionally altering the voice of the caller in an attempt to disguise or conceal the identity of the caller in order to: defraud or confuse the called party; and (3) to create a registration requirement for any person making telemarketing calls into Illinois.
Update as of June 28, 2024: The Consumer Protection Committee filed Amendment no. 1 and rereferred to the House Rules Committee on April 2, 2024. The House read for a second time and rereferred to the House Rule Committee on April 19, 2024.
[PASSED] Maine speedily passed House Bill 1433. The bill passed both chambers of the Maine legislature in just 22 days. The bill will require telephone solicitors to use the reassigned numbers database administered by the Federal Communications Commission to check to verify whether the telephone number has been assigned to a new user before initiating a telephone sales call. Under Maine’s Telephone Solicitation law, a “telephone sales call” is defined as “a solicitation call made to a consumer for: (1) Solicitation of a sale of consumer goods or services; or (2) Obtaining information that will or may be used for the direct solicitation of a sale of consumer goods or services or an extension of credit for such purposes.” Me. Rev. Stat. tit. 10, § 1499-B. Violation of this requirement can be enforced by the Attorney General with fines of up to $25,000, disgorgement of funds, and the payment of costs and attorney’s fees.
Update as of June 28, 2024: Governor Mills signed Maine House Bill 1433 on March 25, 2024 and will go into effect August 9, 2024.
Maryland is considering House Bill 53, which has passed the House and the Maryland Senate Finance Committee held a hearing for on March 19, 2024. HB 53 would establish a task force to investigate e-commerce businesses with more than $10 billion in annual revenue to evaluate whether they have a monopoly in the e-commerce industry and whether those platforms are engaged in unfair competition by creating and selling their own version of a product that is already sold by third-party vendors on the platform and by leveraging algorithms and other tools to give themselves an unfair advantage in selling their version of the product over the product offered by those third-parties. The bill was introduced by Delegate Chao Wu (D-Annapolis).
Update as of June 28, 2024: No further action on the bill.
[NEW ADDITION: PASSED] Maryland enacted House Bill 603, titled “Online Products and Services Consumer Data Protection” and nicknamed “Kids Code,” on May 9, 2024. The bill requires privacy protections for children, including how social media and other companies collect and sell data of users who are minors. Covered entities cannot use dark patterns (deceptive design patterns) to collect more data than necessary, circumvent privacy protections, or take actions that the entity “knows, or has reason to know, is not in the best interests of children.” Cover entities must also implement safety measures like assessing any new features that can be reasonably accessed by children for potential impact on children before the feature can be released. Covered entity is defined to as “any entity (i) that is organized or operated for profit, (ii) collects consumer personal data or uses another entity to collect consumer personal data on its behalf, (iii) determines the purposes and means of the processing of consumer personal data, and (iv) does business in Maryland and (a) has gross revenues of in excess of $25 million, buys, receives, sells, or shares the personal data of 50,000 or more consumers or devices annually, or (c) derives at least 50% of its annual revenue from the sale of personal data.
[NEW ADDITION] Massachusetts is considering House Bill 246, presented by Representative Bruce Ayers (D-Norfolk), which would amend the definition of “consumer” in chapter 159C of the General Laws of Massachusetts to allow for businesses to sign up for the “Do Not Call” list. The bill was referred to the House Committee on Consumer Protection and Professional Licensure on February 2, 2023 and accompanied a study order (Order H4680) on May 30, 2024. On the same day, Order H4680 was discharged to the House Committee on Rules, and the Committee will make its recommendations regarding the bill’s fate when the legislature comes back into session.
[FAILED] Missouri House Bill 2603, titled “Caller ID Anti-Spoofing Act,” would create the offense of caller identification spoofing as a class E felony. The bill provides that recipient of any call (which is defined to include any telephone call, facsimile, or text message) in which the caller uses false caller ID information with the intent to deceive, defraud, or mislead the recipient has standing to recover punitive damages against the caller in an amount up to $5,000 per call and that call recipients may pursue the claims as a class action. The bill does not specifically address its application to text messages, including those sent using a shortcode. The bill was introduced by Representative Mitch Boggs (R-LaRussell).
Update as of June 28, 2024: Missouri House Bill 2603 was substituted by House Bill 2628, introduced by Representative Ben Baker (R-Newton). The new bill incorporated the “Caller ID Anti-Spoofing Act” and passed the House and to the Senate on March 27, 2024. The Senate Committee on Emerging Issues voted to pass the bill on April 25, 2024. However, the Senate failed to pass the bill before the end of Missouri’s legislative session on May 17, 2024.
New Jersey is considering Senate Bill 1237 which passed the Senate with a vote of 37-0 on February 12, 2024 and Assembly Bill 2635 which is still pending before the New Jersey Assembly’s Consumer Affairs Committee. The bill relates to the transmission of caller ID information on telemarketing calls and provides that “a telemarketer shall not fail to transmit or cause to be transmitted the telephone number and, when made available by the telemarketer’s telephone company, the name of the telemarketer, to any caller identification service” except that it is permissible to “substitute . . . the name . . . and the seller’s customer service telephone number that is answered during regular business hours.” The bill does not specifically address its application to text messages, including those sent using a shortcode. The Senate bill was sponsored by Senators James Beach (D-Burlington and Camden) and Nellie Pou (D-Bergen and Passaic) and the Assembly Bill was sponsored by Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Parsippany), Assemblywoman Aura Dunn (R-Chester), and Assemblywoman Tennille R. McCoy (D - Hamilton Square).
Update as of June 28, 2024: No further action on the bill.
New York is considering Assembly Bill 8195, which was referred to the Science and Technology committee on January 3, 2024. The bill would provide for the Department of State in New York to have authority to regulate the use of artificial intelligence. The bill would declare that the use of AI to “psychologically profile individuals for the purpose of targeted advertising, behavioral prediction, or the manipulation of user experiences and interactions in products or services” constitutes a “high-risk advanced artificial intelligence system” and empower the Department of State to require licenses to be issued for the use of such systems. Operators of a “high-risk advanced artificial intelligence system” would be required to establish an ethics and risk management board of no less than 5 people to adopt rules governing the development and use of the AI system and to prepare a risk assessment and reporting to the Department about risk mitigation efforts. The bill would also provide for the Department to establish cybersecurity standards and require the existence of automatic logging and internal controls. The bill is sponsored by Assemblyman Clyde Vanel (D-Queens Village)
Update as of June 28, 2024: No further action on the bill.
[NEW ADDITION: PASSED] The New York Senate and Assembly passed Assembly Bill 7393 on June 6, 2024. The bill was amended to requires telemarketers to make disclosures of certain information (the telemarketer’s name and the person on whose behalf the solicitation is being made, the option to be automatically added to the seller’s do-not-call list, whether the call is being recorded; the purpose of the telephone call; and the identity of the goods or services for which a fee will be charged) within the first thirty seconds of a call and to disclose the address of any company on whose behalf such telemarketer is providing telemarketing services, on any website owned or operated by the telemarketer and on any subsequent written communication to any customer. Under New York’s General Business Law, “telemarketing” is defined to include the solicitation of sales through telephone calls or “electronic messaging texts,” but the amendment fails to address how the requirement to make disclosures during the first 30 seconds of a call can be logically applied to text messages. The bill is awaiting signature by Governor Hochul and is sponsored by Assemblymember Brian Cunningham (D-Brooklyn).
[PASSED] Tennessee is considering House Bill 2504 and Senate Bill 2410 that amend the Tennessee criminal code to make it a Class A misdemeanor for a debt collector or inbound telemarketer service to “knowingly cause any caller identification service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information, including caller identification information that does not match the area code of the person or the debt collector or inbound telemarketer service the person is calling on behalf of, or that is not a toll-free phone number” with the “intent to induce the subscriber to answer.” The bill does not specifically define the “inbound telemarketer service” or address whether the prohibition would be applicable to text messages or specify if it applies to shortcodes. The bills are sponsored by Senator London Lamar (D-Nashville) and Representative Torrey Harris (D-Memphis).
Update as of June 28, 2024: Governor Lee signed both House Bill 2504 and Senate Bill 2410 on April 22, 2024 and the bills will go into effect July 1, 2024.
[FAILED] West Virginia considered House Bill 5251 and Senate Bill 500, a West Virginia Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which sailed through the house passing 98-0 on February 9, 2024 before being referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As we reported, the Senate Judiciary Committee failed to advance the bill before the end of the legislative session.
