Western Pennsylvania's trusted news source
Lori Falce: Do you have a right to privacy? | TribLIVE.com
Lori Falce, Columnist

Lori Falce: Do you have a right to privacy?

Lori Falce
4246654_web1_gtr-B4euData-071720
Jenny Kane | AP

If you want to have an impassioned discussion about the right to privacy, you don’t want to engage with a constitutional law scholar or a talk radio host.

Find a teenager and suggest that you have casually scrolled through text messages. You will be treated to breathless defense of our God-given right to privacy, complete with shock and horror that you would have dared — dared, I say — to breech something so obviously sacred.

Notice I didn’t say to actually delve into those text messages. For one thing, you shouldn’t casually violate someone’s privacy just for kicks. For another, you probably wouldn’t understand half the messages anyway because of the confusing hieroglyphic language of emojis. As the mother of a teenage boy, there are some things I shudder to translate.

But let’s think about the right to privacy. Does it even exist?

Some countries say yes. Their constitutions specifically spell it out, whether broadly or narrowly or in like terms. China defends personal dignity and confidentiality. For Israel, it is part of the Knesset or Basic Laws. The European Union’s explicit defenses of personal data have had broad implications for internet companies.

In America, it’s a different question, open to interpretation.

Some say no, privacy isn’t protected. While the Bill of Rights gives you freedom of speech and religion and press, none of the 27 amendments use the word privacy. Others say it’s implied in the Fourth Amendment’s defense against unreasonable search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment’s protection from self-incrimination or perhaps must crucially, the Ninth Amendment’s assertion that what rights aren’t spelled out still belong to the people.

Just because the Constitution was silent on the matter doesn’t mean that the U.S. Supreme Court has been. Louis Brandeis spent 23 years as an associate justice, but even before taking that bench, he was expounding on the concept in the Harvard Law Review as one of the first to suggest privacy was a birthright.

The most obvious examples of this are in ideas that were hard to imagine when the Constitution was being written.

The landmark Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut addresses the ability of a married couple to buy and use birth control without the government getting in the way. Justice William O. Douglas likened it to a search and seizure of a couple’s bedroom. Roe v. Wade turns not upon questions of abortion itself but upon issues of the privacy of one’s own body.

While delicate 18th- century sensibilities may have made those issues silent for the Founding Fathers, the issue of digital privacy is one that was totally alien in 1791. They are critical issues today as social media companies can make their money less by selling their service than by selling their users’ data — and information about their habits, interests and spending — not to the highest bidder, but to anyone and everyone who wants it.

Privacy is something we tend to think about as inviolate and we are usually wrong. The diary under your bed in ninth grade could be read by your mom at any time. A high school locker doesn’t belong to a student — and can be opened by the school at any time. Medical records aren’t as less protected by federal law as you think; HIPAA is less about who can’t access your info than it is about ease of access for those who can.

All of that makes it more and more important for people to speak up about their privacy concerns when new laws or rulings or technologies bring them into focus.

And if you don’t understand why, I’m willing to lend my teenager to explain it.

Lori Falce is the Tribune-Review community engagement editor and an opinion columnist. For more than 30 years, she has covered Pennsylvania politics, Penn State, crime and communities. She joined the Trib in 2018. She can be reached at lfalce@triblive.com.

Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.

Get Ad-Free >

Categories: Lori Falce Columns | Opinion
";