Home » About » Newsletters » March 1999
Privacy and the ACLU
"The makers of our Constitution...sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone the most comprehensive of the rights of man and the right most valued by civilized men." Justice Louis D. Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead v. United States, 1928
From using the telephone to seeking medical treatment to applying for a job or sending email over the Internet, Americans' right to information privacy is in peril. Our personal and business information is being digitized through an everexpanding number of computer networks in formats that allow data to be linked, transferred, shared and sold, usually without our knowledge or consent. Now, thanks to the growth of the Internet, more and more of your personal data has been made even easier to access not only by the government and your employer, but by whoever is interested.
Enjoying the right to privacy means having control over your own personal data and the ability to grant or deny access to others. But government and business practices that cause serious privacy violations have been insulated from the law. The Privacy Act of 1974 applies only to government agencies and is filled with loopholes. And the private sector is virtually unregulated. That is why the ACLU has called upon Congress and the state legislatures to shore up the information privacy rights of this and future generations.
In 1789, nearly every bit of personal information about an individual was kept at home, on paper, and stored as a personal effect. To protect privacy of this information, Americans insisted on the Fourth Amendment, which established the home as a person's "castle," inviolate against government searches except when warranted by a court for particular criminal investigations.
Today, more than two centuries later, the Fourth Amendment still protects the privacy of our homes, but our personal information isn't exclusively stored there anymore. Now, a wide array of personal information about each of us is kept electronically by others by medical insurers, employers, credit card companies, banks, phone companies and a wide range of government and private agencies, some of which are in the business to sell our personal information, no matter how private. And new technologies keep arising to develop, collect, store and disseminate the most private information about each of us, with few if any legal protections.
As a result, Americans are facing a record number of threats to privacy, from marketing of prescription drug information to government sales of Department of Motor Vehicles information, including photos, to the Clinton Administration's plan to assign every American a "unique health identifier" that could be used to create a giant database of our medical records from cradle to grave, without adequate safeguards to prevent unauthorized dissemination.
To learn more about how the ACLU is working to protect your privacy, check out our "Defend Your Data Campaign: What They DO Know Can Hurt You" on the National ACLU's web site at www.aclu.org/privacy.
