The CCPA and its implementing regulations identify six types of information requests that a consumer can submit to a business. As the first five requests ask that a business respond with broad information about the type of information collected (as opposed to the actual information itself), they are often referred to as category-level access requests. As the sixth request asks that a business respond with the actual information that the business collected about a consumer, it is often referred to as a specific-information request.

So, for example, if a consumer submitted a category-level request that asked a business what categories of personal information the business collected about the consumer, it might be sufficient for the business to respond by stating that it collected “identifiers” about the consumer, or it could respond more specifically by stating that it collected the consumer’s name and email address. If the same consumer submitted a specific information request to the same business, the business might respond by telling the consumer that it collected the name “John Smith” and the email address John.Smith@acme.com.¹

¹ See FSOR Appendix A at 121 (Response 392).