“I am incredibly grateful to McGeorge, especially the Capital Lawyering Program, which made this opportunity possible,” Bridges said. “It was through an introduction from a McGeorge alumnus and Adjunct Professor Jessica Gosney, ‘17 that I met Erinn Ryberg, ’13, who is the former Chair of the Capital Center Alumni Board, and current Chief of Staff for Assemblymember Avelino Valencia, that I began working for Valencia’s office.”
Bridges’s journey began in January, when she started working alongside Assemblymember Valencia’s office as part of her externship. Valencia’s goal was to craft a bill that would provide stronger protections for consumers in the increasingly crowded and complicated world of artificial intelligence and data privacy. While the AI space was one of her initial focuses, Bridges quickly realized that a related issue in consumer privacy presented an even more pressing concern.
“I suggested that we could have a bigger impact on consumers by addressing a gap in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA),” Bridges said. “What I found was a loophole that allowed companies to bypass privacy preferences when they acquired another company’s data.”
Under current law, when one company buys the data of another, it’s treated as the buyer’s property, meaning the privacy preferences of the acquired users were often ignored. Companies could use or sell that data without honoring the privacy choices of the people it originally belonged to. Notable examples of this practice include tech giants like Google’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, where user data was handled without respect for previous privacy settings.
Bridges proposed a solution: a bill that would require the purchasing company to respect the privacy preferences of the users from the acquired company. Under AB 1824, the acquiring company would have to provide an option for users to opt out of marketing or data sales — a step toward empowering consumers to retain control over their personal information.
As Bridges took ownership of the project, she dove into the research, drafting a factsheet, preparing background materials for legislative committees, and gathering support from stakeholders. She even helped organize witnesses to testify in favor of the bill. Her dedication paid off, as the bill passed through the legislature with overwhelming support — receiving zero “no” votes along the way.