July 1 will mark a new era for data privacy, with enforcement of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) scheduled to begin.

The CCPA has arrived with little of the fanfare that greeted the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018. GDPR was headline news for months, and European companies of all shapes and sizes took notice in the rush to become compliant.

Of course , the CCPA’s relatively low profile in Europe makes sense , with businesses so focused on their responses to COVID-19 .

And, after all, it is a piece of state -level legislation , not even prescribed at the federal level.

Your natural reaction could be: We’ve already got the GDPR , so why should we care about another piece of data regulation?

Unfortunately, you do need to pay attention to the CCPA. And I’m here to explain why.

Who is affected by CCPA?

Don’t be fooled by the name: The reach of the CCPA extends far beyond Californian state lines. Let’s get the nitty gritty out the way and define who the law really affects.

At a basic level, you need to worry about CCPA if your company:

Does business in California

and

Collects personal information of consumers that are California residents

and satisfies at least one of the following criteria:

Buys, receives, sells or shares the personal information of at least 50,000 California residents, households or devices

or

Has an annual gross revenue of over $25,000,000

or

Derives more than 50% of your annual revenue from selling the personal information of Californians

Phew, you might be thinking! Well, I wouldn’t stop reading just yet. Unhelpfully, CCPA doesn’t clearly define what ‘doing business ’ in California actually means.

However, what is clear is that you don’t need to have offices or employees in California to be considered to be doing business there. Simply having users or customers in the state could be considered sufficient.

In this digital-first world, businesses are often international from day one, and it is likely that your business interacts with more Californians than you think.

After all, there are 40 million of them, and the state’s economy is the fifth largest in the world (bigger than the UK’s!).

T he concept of ‘selling personal information’ is perhaps CCPA’s biggest grey area.

Importantly, under CCPA ‘selling personal information’ doesn’t necessarily involve making a payment, and could also refer to actions such as ‘disseminating’ ‘making available’ and ‘transferring’ data.

Under the CCPA’s broad definitions, even online advertising — something which almost every business does — can be considered ‘selling’ if it involves the sharing of cookies to track behaviour online.

Although the CCPA’s definitions are somewhat unclear, it would be rash to assume that the law will not impact businesses based in Europe.

CCPA sits on moving plates

You also should not assume that because your business is GDPR-compliant, that it is automatically CCPA-compliant. GDPR and the CCPA have many similarities, but there are also major differences and it is important that your business understands them.

In addition, the CCPA is not without its weaknesses. It was pulled together quickly without consulting key stakeholders, and its short history has been defined by ambiguity.

Plans for the GDPR were in the works years before it finally came into effect and it had been scrutinised at length. By contrast, the CCPA was signed into law in 2018 just months after it was first put forward by a private group of consumer advocates.

The State Legislature scrambled to pass it before it could do so via ballot initiative, which would have made it part of the state constitution, and therefore very difficult to amend or update.

As a result, a number of key details are yet to be finalized by Californian Attorney General Xavier Becerra. This has led to an unusual state of affairs where there is a law that companies need to comply with, and yet they do not know exactly what compliance actually looks like.

With enforcement scheduled to kick off in July, the penalties could be crippling for businesses. The fine for unintentional violations will be $2,500. Crucially, that’s per violation . So if you failed to comply for 1,000 Californians, the penalty would be $2.5 million (about €2.3 million or £1.9 million). Clearly, with fines of that level, non-compliance is not a viable option for most businesses.

There has been some pressure on Xavier Becerra to extend the deadline for compliance due to COVID-19.

But at present , the Att orney General’s Office remains committed to the original deadline, even circulating a reminder to residents of their new online rights.

As more and more p eople do everyday tasks like grocery shopping online, it would seem that Becerra is determined that their data is protected.

Your company needs to get prepared now.

Three steps to prepare your business for CCPA

Data legislation is highly complex by nature and you might be worrying how you can even start to prepare at a time when time and budgets are tighter than ever. Here are three steps any organisation can take right now:

Understand what data you are collecting

The first step for any business is to make sure you understand what data you are collecting. Most GDPR-compliant businesses will have already conducted a data mapping exercise. It’s important to repeat this for the CCPA, though make sure you build on the work you’ll already have done around GDPR where possible. This exercise can help you understand where you must comply with the CCPA and will determine any actions you need to take.

Update your privacy policy

Update your privacy policy with a CCPA-specific section that includes information such as a description of the privacy rights of Californians and the categories of data that are collected and shared. At the same time, be sure to unify your company around your policy. This means making sure it governs the activity of your entire organisation.

Prioritize compliance

Even if budgets are tight, it is important that your business prioritizes CCPA compliance because the penalties can quickly become vast. Put in place processes to honour consumer rights and requests, where necessary. Remember, this should include examining all of the vendors and suppliers you work with – you could be vulnerable to penalties through them!

Looking forward, it is worth paying attention to America’s broader privacy landscape. Other states are now set to introduce their own privacy laws, and country-wide federal legislation could also be on the way. In addition, the CCPA itself is changing and could be re-worked as soon as November. The original CCPA advocacy group has put forward another proposition: the California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act or ‘CCPA 2.0’.

To conclude — whatever you do, don’t make assumptions about CCPA.

Don’t assume it doesn’t apply to you or that the disruption caused by COVID-19 will mean the enforcement deadline is pushed back.

And, most of all, don’t assume that because of the groundwork your company did for GDPR you’re safe from CCPA penalties.

How corporate layoffs could kickstart the next wave of startups

The UK has always been a nation of frustrated would-be entrepreneurs.

A survey conducted in January, before the COVID-19 , found that 64% of the UK workforce wants to set up their own business.

We all know that one of the biggest factors that govern startup success is ‘timing’ — and the truth is, there has never been a better time to take a leap.

So, what should you do if you are currently still in work, but you know that your employer will be making cuts and you are likely to be a casualty?

Well, first thing’s first, be assured you aren’t alone. In our recent report ‘Crises calls for Innovation, not hibernation’ nearly a third (29%) of the 300 C-suite we spoke to said they were implementing cost-cutting measures, including redundancy, due to the pressures of COVID-19.

Don’t just take our word for it — look at the daily headlines of corporates making statements on huge layoffs.

The International Labour Organization has warned nearly half of the global workforce are at risk of job losses.

James Reed, the boss of the UK’s largest recruitment firm, has predicted the unemployment rate in the UK could reach 15%, which equates to 5 million people out of work.

Be proactive

The key is not to sit and wait for the inevitable. No one wants to be exited into a jobless market with no plan.

There is an opportunity, which can help both your company and your ambition. Put simply, your company can start a programme as part of its redundancy package where it offers staff its support to build a startup.

It might sound radical, but it is tried and tested.

Ten years ago, Nokia was faced with making over 40,000 job cuts. It opened centres in Europe, India, and the US to help those faced with redundancy to find a new job, either inside or outside the company.

It also formed ‘Bridge,’ an entrepreneurial stream for employees that had an idea for a startup. Since its inception, Bridge has helped over 1000 startups get their beginning. The scheme is credited for fuelling the rise of the Finnish tech ecosystem, which includes success stories like Supercell and Rovio.

It sounds great, but there’s obviously a concern that founding a startup at the start of a global recession is a one-way street to failure. This is actually a misnomer.

It is no coincidence when you look back across history that some of the largest companies started during times of economic downturns. This doesn’t just apply to relatively young companies such as Uber or Airbnb — companies such as Microsoft , Disney and IBM were all founded during deep recessions.

This is because times of rapid disruption provide ample opportunities for startups to take advantage. COVID-19 is reshaping every industry, which lowers barriers to entry and provides huge opportunities for startups to address new consumer demands.

So, where can you start?

Firstly, find some like-minded colleagues who would also be interested in a scheme like this.

Create a proposal that outlines what a programme could involve: do you just want access to unused IP, assets or data? Or could the company invest and use this scheme as a lever for growth?

Of the 1000 startups created by departing talent at Nokia, 18% of them went on to secure commercial deals with Nokia. You could also look at potential partnerships with companies that will help give you the tools and skills to move quickly from ideation to execution and ask your company to cover these costs as part of this new exit pathway.

Once you have the numbers, details and potential solutions then you can present the solution to your HR division. Remember, in matters of persuasion you always need to flip the benefits so that they can see what’s in it for them.

There is huge brand equity for a company that creates this pathway. It shows that the company is actually living its people first values by truly empowering its people and taking a proactive role in helping the local economies in the communities they serve. Plus, when they return to growth, they can use the scheme to help retain existing talent, attract new workers and prevent the usual drop in productivity seen when redundancies are made.

There is currently a huge opportunity to create your future, by building it yourself and become a force of disruption that drives economic impact and new job creation.

The startup gender pay gap no one is paying attention to — equity

The fact that women are paid less than male colleagues is a stubborn fact in the U.S. workplace.

As of July, women earned 84 cents for every dollar a man earned. It is a discrepancy that has garnered significant attention from scholars , the media and sex discrimination lawsuits .

But this figure only tells part of the story regarding gender pay inequality.

As a professor of business management , I have long studied compensation and inequality and know that base pay is only one way that women are disadvantaged in the workplace. Recent research by myself and colleagues shines a light on how female employees – particularly in the tech industries – likewise lose out when it comes to other forms of pay that receive far less attention: equity-based awards.

These are stock grants, in which employees are offered shares in the firm as a form of pay, and stock option grants that offer the right to buy company stock at a preset price in the future. The value of both are tied to the employing organization’s market price.

Less of an option?

Equity-based awards are commonly used in technology firms and startups and can make up a substantial part of employees’ compensation. In fact, according to the 2014 General Social Survey , which was administered to a national random sample of working adults, 20% of all workers in the private sector own stock and stock options in their companies.

Some estimates suggest the average value of stock options to employees who receive them is $249,901, and the average value of stock is $60,078.

My colleagues and I wanted to see if gender played a role when it comes to equity-based pay.

Aaron D. Hill of the University of Florida, Ryan Hammond at the data storage company Pure Storage, Ryan Stice-Lusvardi at Stanford University and I analyzed equity-award data from two technology organizations. We found a gender gap for equity-based awards ranging from 15% to 30% – even after controlling for the typical reasons that women tend to earn less than men, such as differences in occupation and length of service at a company.

What’s in a name?

We wanted to know what could be behind the discrepancy, so we ran an experiment in which we asked working professionals to play the role of a manager in a fictitious company. Participants were asked to read a set of employee performance reviews and distribute stock options to their team based on one of two criteria often used for equity-based awards: retaining talent and recognizing high potential employees.

The fictional employees were randomly assigned one of two gender-typical names, Steven and Susan, so that each profile was given the man’s name half the time and a woman’s the other half. This helped ensure that any differences between the profiles did not affect the results.

What emerged was a gender gap favoring men when it came to distributing stock options based on retention – but not based on potential.

In other words, the data showed when it came to equity being used as an incentive to keep employees at the company, there was a significant gender gap.

Our results were backed up by what we saw in the data provided by the technology firms, as well as publicly available data of executives .

These findings come at a time when many companies are seriously looking at gender pay discrepancies .

But even with efforts underway to address the gender gap in base pay and bonuses, we believe that many businesses do not appear to be focusing equal attention to equity-based awards. We heard this firsthand in interviews conducted with 27 human resources professionals at both public and private companies. Although nearly all interviewees acknowledged their employers were doing pay audits for base pay, and sometimes bonuses, only three said their companies conducted audits on equity-based awards.

We also found evidence of this within the two technology companies we studied. There was small to no gender gaps in salary and bonuses after controlling for typical reasons that women receive less pay; however, large gender gaps existed in equity-based awards.

Unequal equity

Part of the reason this gender gap in equity awards exists is down to why they are handed out to employees in the first place. Stocks and options are most often distributed to employees to keep them from leaving. In fact, a survey of 217 companies found that almost 90% said retention was the primary objective of their stock option program.

Our interviews with HR professionals backed this up. Interviewees described equity-based awards as retention incentives for “high performers” and as “a forward-looking reward program.”

And studies have shown that men tend to be perceived as more capable in work settings than women and as such are likely viewed as more important to retain in a company and often seen as a higher risk of leaving for a rival. As a result, men are likely to receive more equity-based awards than women.

While some companies are working hard to address gender inequality, our findings suggest that efforts should be applied more broadly to all forms of pay.

This article is republished from The Conversation by Felice Klein , Assistant Professor of Management, Boise State University under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .