New Jersey Legislature Passes Comprehensive Consumer Privacy Bill

On January 8, 2024, the New Jersey legislature passed the state's first comprehensive consumer privacy bill, Senate Bill S332. S332 follows in the footsteps of other comprehensive state consumer privacy laws and aims to protect consumer personal data, which is broadly defined under the bill as "information that is linked or reasonably linkable to an identified or identifiable person," but excluding de-identified data and publicly available information. As a general matter, the bill grants New Jersey consumers many of the same rights afforded to consumers in states with comprehensive privacy laws, including California, Washington, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia. However, there are notable distinctions between S332 and the patchwork of state privacy laws currently in effect, making nationwide compliance difficult to implement. The following alert provides a summary of S332 and some of its key provisions.