Bosses Brace for Worker Chaos If California Privacy Law Expands

California businesses face the prospect of having to apply elements of the state’s landmark privacy law to their own workers. It threatens to wreak havoc on compliance, including for gig economy companies, whose independent contractor models aren’t exempted from the new rules.

The state’s consumer privacy law, the first of its kind in the US, gives consumers the right to know what data is being collected on them and ask that it not be sold. It contains exemptions for certain data related to employees and business-to-business operations, but those carve-outs are unlikely to be extended, removing an important shield for ...