Legislation

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It has been a busy spring for data privacy in the Southeast. On April 17, 2026, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed the Alabama Personal Data Protection Act (HB 351). Weeks later, on May 11, 2026, Governor Kemp signed Georgia’s SB 111. There is an important caveat there: although the Senate-passed version of SB 111 carried the title “Georgia Consumer Privacy Protection Act,” the House substituted the bill’s entire text with unrelated amendments to the rural hospital tax credit. The Senate agreed to the substitute on April 2, and the version Kemp ultimately signed has nothing to do with consumer privacy. Legislative tracking services continue to display the original title, which has caused understandable confusion, but Georgia did not enact a comprehensive privacy law this session.

That leaves the Southeast with three states currently operating under a comprehensive privacy statute: Florida (in effect since 2024), Tennessee (in effect since 2025), and Alabama (taking effect in 2027). Georgia remains a state to watch, with sponsors expected to introduce a successor measure when the new General Assembly convenes in 2027. And in keeping with the national trend, each state’s “omnibus” law (or proposed law) takes a slightly different approach with qualifying thresholds and defined terms. This article provides a short summary of what businesses operating in the region need to know and what they should be working on today.

Who Is Covered: Three Enacted Laws and Three Thresholds (and a Note on Georgia)

The biggest difference among the three enacted statutes is the way each defines businesses that must comply.

Florida’s Digital Bill of Rights (FDBR), which took effect on July 1, 2024, has the narrowest scope by a wide margin. The FDBR imposes obligations on controllers with annual global revenue of more than $1 billion that also meet one of three additional criteria: derive 50% or more of annual revenue from selling online ads, operate a consumer smart speaker with an integrated virtual assistant, or operate an app store with at least 250,000 applications. By design, the majority of the FDBR’s controller obligations apply only to the largest tech and platform companies. As a practical matter, most Southern businesses will never need to worry about Florida’s controller obligations, though enforcement has now begun. The Florida AG’s October 2025 action against Roku is a useful reminder that the FDBR is no longer dormant for the companies that do qualify.

Continue Reading Southeastern Privacy Laws Taking Shape: Current and Upcoming Omnibus Laws for Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee
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When Colorado enacted the first comprehensive state AI law in 2024, it imported the conceptual architecture of the EU AI Act: a risk-based regime built on duties of care, risk management programs, and impact assessments. Two years later, and within a matter of weeks, the state has dismantled that legislation. On May 14, 2026, Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 26-189, which repeals SB 24-205 and replaces it with a disclosure-and-rights framework focused on automated decision-making technology (“ADMT”). The new framework takes effect January 1, 2027.

The substance of the rewrite has been well-covered already. Less examined is how Colorado got here, and what the speed and direction of the pivot signal for the rest of the state AI regulatory landscape. The new bill was introduced and signed within two weeks of its introduction. The Governor’s AI Policy Working Group did the heavy lift in advance: roughly six months of stakeholder consultation produced the draft framework released on March 17, 2026. But the final two-week sprint reflects pressure to land the rewrite before the original AI Act’s June 30, 2026 effective date and amid escalating federal headwinds.

The Federal Backdrop

On December 11, 2025, the White House issued an executive order (“EO”) titled, “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence.” The EO directs federal agencies to challenge conflicting state AI laws through litigation and coordinated federal action, and urges development of a preemptive national framework. It specifically named Colorado’s AI Act as an example of a state law that, in the administration’s view, would compel AI systems to “produce false results in order to avoid a ‘differential treatment or impact’ on protected groups.”

Continue Reading Colorado’s AI Reset: Two Weeks, a White House Callout, and a Pivot Away from the EU Model
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Legal500 featured an article by Seyfarth partners Kathleen McConnell and Lauren Gregory Leipold, and associate Daniel Riley, “AI Governance In (and Beyond) Privacy: Regulatory Tensions in Automated Decision‑Making, the Digital Authenticity Crisis, and Restrictions on Professional Use.”

The piece, published as a part of the Legal500 Country Comparative Guides, examines the rapidly…

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The lesson from the PocketOS database deletion is not that agentic AI is dangerous. It’s about governance and controls.

You have probably seen some version of the headline by now: “AI Agent Deletes Company’s Entire Database in 9 Seconds.” It is a compelling story. But the headline, while technically accurate, obscures the far more important lesson buried in the details.

So what actually happened? PocketOS, a small SaaS company that makes software for car rental businesses, was using a popular AI-powered code editor running on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model. The AI agent was tasked with resolving a routine issue in a staging environment. When it hit a credential mismatch, the agent decided on its own initiative to “fix” the problem by deleting a volume on Railway, the company’s cloud hosting provider. The agent found a password in an unrelated file and used it to execute a deletion command. Because of permissions made available to the agent and the way access to the infrastructure was configured, that single command using a password which was valid across all systems wiped both the production database and all associated backups.  

The agent, when asked to explain itself, produced what multiple outlets described as a “confession,” acknowledging it had violated its own safety instructions. The story has gone viral. The framing in most coverage puts the AI squarely at the center of the narrative: the agent “went rogue,” it “confessed,” it acted autonomously and destroyed a business. But the reports are not entirely accurate and usually miss the point.

Continue Reading The AI Didn’t Go Rogue. Guardrails Were Never There.
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On Friday, October 17, 2025, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria issued a biting Order granting defendant Eating Recovery Center, LLC’s (“ERC”) motion for summary judgment on the plaintiff Jane Doe’s California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) claims, a law enacted in 1967 to address the increasing use of wiretapping to eavesdrop on private phone…

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On July 24, 2025, the California Privacy Protection Agency (“CPPA”) unanimously voted to adopt a package of Proposed Regulations for the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), marking a significant development in California privacy law. These cover Automated Decision-making Technology (“ADMT”), mandatory Cybersecurity Audits, Risk Assessments, and clarifications for the CCPA’s applicability to Insurance Companies. The package will move into its final review stage before formal enactment, once filed with the California Office of Administrative Law.

CCPA Steering Toward Operational Compliance

This is a clear signal that privacy compliance expectations in California are trending toward a more operational phase. The new rules are designed to give Californians greater control over how their personal information is used while pushing businesses toward higher levels of transparency and accountability, especially when automated decision-making and high-risk data processing is involved. For companies, this is more than just a theoretical update – it’s a clarion call to ensure these requirements are built into day-to-day governance, technology and process design, and vendor management practices.

Continue Reading California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) Finally Voted to Adopt Much Debated Update to CCPA Regulations: What Your Business Should Know
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The UK’s Data (Use and Access) Act received Royal Assent last Thursday, June 19th, bringing into law some significant changes to the country’s post Brexit data protection framework, among an array of other, related rules (on matters ranging from financial conduct to smart meters and “underground assets,” which is more to do with…

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On June 3, 2025, the California Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 690 (SB 690), a bill that seeks to add a “commercial business purposes” exception to the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA).

After multiple readings on the Senate floor, SB 690 passed as amended, and will now proceed to the California State Assembly. SB…

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This post was originally published to Seyfarth’s Global Privacy Watch blog.

California Senate Bill 690 (SB 690), introduced by Senator Anna Caballero, is continuing to proceed through the California state legislative process. The proposed bill would amend the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) by adding an exception to the statute which has the…

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Seyfarth Synopsis: In a significant decision for website operators, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court clarified that tracking users’ web activity does not constitute illegal wiretapping under the state’s Wiretap Act. The court found that person-to-website interactions fall outside the Act’s scope, which focuses on person-to-person communications. However, the court emphasized that other privacy laws could…