EdLaw nat/us/state/ca/caadca/README.md

language: en · status: enjoined · last checked: 2026-10-13

California — CAADCA (AB 2273), duties section (enforcement enjoined)

California's copy of the UK Children's Code for businesses providing online services likely to be accessed by children (under 18).

Litigation status — read first

Enforcement is subject to the NetChoice v. Bonta injunction (N.D. Cal. / 9th Cir.): the DPIA provisions were preliminarily enjoined on First Amendment grounds, and as at last_checked the operative duties remain unenforced pending the litigation. The text is curated because (a) the design expectations survive as the de-facto bar via the UK code, and (b) if the injunction narrows, duties revive on the statutory timetable. Verify the current litigation posture before treating any duty as live.

Applicability to EdTech

If revived, §1798.99.31 requires: DPIAs before launching features likely accessed by children, age estimation or applying high privacy to all users, high-privacy default settings, policy language children can understand, and prohibitions on dark patterns, detrimental use, and unnecessary geolocation — materially the same bar as the ICO code our UK surfaces already meet.

Contents

Document Covers
DPIA-AND-DUTIES.md Civ. Code §1798.99.31 in full

Licence

The corpus reproduces Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.99.31 verbatim from California Legislative Information, the Legislature's own site.

Statute text enacted by a state legislature is outside copyright under the government edicts doctrine. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) (slip opinion, read 2026-10-01), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It applied the doctrine to an arm of the legislature as well as to legislators: "Because Georgia’s annotations are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties, the government edicts doctrine puts them outside the reach of copyright protection."

The section pages on California Legislative Information (leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, read 2026-10-01) carry no copyright notice and no terms of use.

Conditions: none attach to the statute text. The corpus nonetheless names the official source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Sources