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Christiana State (CIPP/US, CIPP/E) is a senior counsel in Crowell & Moring’s San Francisco office and a member of the firm’s Corporate and Privacy & Cybersecurity groups. Christiana focuses her practice on counseling clients on technology and privacy matters. Christiana leverages a combination of in-house counsel experience and electrical engineering training to guide emerging technology companies through transformational growth stages. Christiana represents technology companies, from start-ups to multinational corporations, in various industry segments, such as: AI/ML, cloud services, biometrics, semiconductors and computing architectures, gaming, AR/VR, drones, and EV charging.

Christiana brings a pragmatic and business-focused approach to her representations. Prior to Crowell, she spent over a decade serving as in-house counsel for various technology companies in Silicon Valley. In those roles, Christiana led cross-functional teams while managing global technology and intellectual property deals, product launches and related regulatory matters, and intellectual property strategies.

The California Office of the Attorney General issued its first opinion interpreting the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) on March 10, 2022, addressing the issue of whether a consumer has a right to know the inferences that a business holds about the consumer. The AG concluded that, unless a statutory exception applies, internally generated inferences that a business holds about the consumer are personal information within the meaning of the CCPA and must be disclosed to the consumer, upon request. The consumer has the right to know about the inferences, regardless of whether the inferences were generated internally by the business or obtained by the business from another source. Further, while the CCPA does not require a business to disclose its trade secrets in response to consumers’ requests for information, the business cannot withhold inferences about the consumer by merely asserting that they constitute a “trade secret.”

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