It took Alastair Mactaggart two years and more than $3 million of his own money to get a groundbreaking data privacy law passed in California. Now he expects to spend much of the next two years making sure the legislation survives until it takes effect in 2020.  

The law, which passed in late June, gives consumers the power to prevent companies from selling their personal information. Echoing the set of restrictive rules known as GDPR enacted earlier this year by the European Union, the legislation will almost certainly be the subject of intense lobbying from the tech giants that vacuum up all the data.  

“There is the risk that tech will now sneakily come in and eviscerate this law,” Mactaggart said. “I want to stay involved to make sure we keep the gains we made.” He is considering putting together a group of engineers and technical experts to help the state attorney general put the law into effect and enforce it. “The AG is going to have to produce some very sophisticated granular rules for how this stuff gets implemented, and [the tech industry] is going to be lobbying the AG six ways to Sunday,” he says.