Virginia is about to get a major California-style data privacy law

Enlarge / The Virginia state Capitol building at twilight, in prepandemic times. (credit: traveler1116 | Getty Images)

Virginia is poised to follow in California's footsteps any minute now and become the second state in the country to adopt a comprehensive online data protection law for consumers.

If adopted, the Consumer Data Protection Act would apply to entities of a certain size that do business in Virginia or have users based in Virginia. The bill enjoys broad popular support among state lawmakers; it passed 89-9 in the Virginia House and unanimously (39-0) in the state Senate, and Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam is widely expected to sign it into law without issue in the coming days.

In the absence of a general-purpose federal privacy framework, states all over the nation are very slowly stepping in with their own solutions. The Virginia law is somewhat modeled on California's landmark Consumer Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 2018 and took effect on January 1, 2020. Legislatures in several other states-including Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Washington-have some kind of data privacy bills currently under consideration.

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