Ms. Harris danced round delicate points. With on-line privateness, she mentioned, she needed to strike a stability between what’s good for enterprise and defending customers. When requested about antitrust enforcement, she mentioned it was vital to not be shortsighted. A state on the verge of chapter, as California was then, “can’t stand in the way in which of enterprise progress and growth,” she mentioned.
That month, David Drummond, then Google’s prime lawyer, personally donated $6,500, the utmost allowed on the time, to her marketing campaign. Google additionally kicked in one other $6,500. Backed by tech cash, Mr. Harris eked out a victory in one of many closest statewide races in California historical past, setting her profession on the trajectory that has now catapulted her to being the primary Black lady on the presidential ticket of a serious political celebration.
Ms. Harris not often challenged the most important tech corporations after she turned California’s lawyer common.
Jamie Courtroom, president of the California-based Shopper Watchdog, mentioned his group lobbied Ms. Harris in 2011 to assist laws that will power corporations to cease monitoring the web exercise of customers in the event that they clearly acknowledged that they didn’t wish to be tracked. She refused to sponsor the invoice or assist it, he mentioned.
Two years later, Ms. Harris sponsored — and California enacted — a much less stringent regulation, requiring corporations to publish in privateness insurance policies whether or not they abide by do-not-track requests and what personally identifiable info they accumulate.
“She presided over this period of nice consolidation and energy within the fingers of those tech giants and she or he didn’t do a factor,” mentioned Mr. Courtroom.
However Ms. Harris’s supporters mentioned that when she did act, her familiarity with the know-how business helped her prod the businesses into motion. Danielle Keats Citron, a regulation professor at Boston College, mentioned she noticed that firsthand when she labored with Ms. Harris in early 2015 to battle so-called revenge pornography — a time period for posting express photographs or movies of an individual with out their permission.