A business shall take all reasonable steps to dispose, or arrange for the disposal, of customer records within its custody or control containing personal information when the records are no longer to be retained by the business by (a) shredding, (b) erasing, or (c) otherwise modifying the personal information in those records to make it unreadable or undecipherable through any means.
Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.81
CUSTOMER RECORDS
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case Doe 1 v. AOL LLC (2009)
Most recently applied in Hutton v. Nat'l Bd. of Exam'rs in Optometry, Inc. (March 2017)
Amended by Stats. 2009, Ch. 134, Sec. 2
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: California Legislative Information. Reproduced from public-domain California statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.