Do Americans Have a Natural Right to Privacy?

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to lesson one point to do Americans have a natural right to privacy.

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In the last lesson, we were discussing the various concepts of privacy and how they've evolved over time.

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We also took a moment to categorize these concepts between cultural understandings of privacy and in the legal understandings of privacy.

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The central learning goal and objective for less than 1.2 would be to take that conversation and then narrow it down in scope to the United States.

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I would actually like to begin this lesson by inviting you to quickly pause this video and check out the YouTube clip I'm showing on your screen. Now

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you can find it by going to YouTube and trying to type into the search bar.

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West Wing

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Short List,

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Supreme Court and Constitution.

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This video captures a fictional conversation occurring between the president of the United States, his staffers and a potential judge who is being considered as a nominee for the Supreme Court.

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The central problem the characters are attempting to resolve is the absence of privacy as a legal right in the constitution

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and how judges have attempted to resolve that deficit over time.

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again, feel free to pause this video and check out the YouTube clip.

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Now

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I deeply regret to inform you that there is no legal right to privacy in the United States.

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No matter what you here at the office, at a conference or from a colleague in an email. This is simply not the case.

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It is, of course, for this very reason that the U. S legal system has always struggled to address personal privacy issues.

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A quick mental asterisk.

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By the way, this is not the case in many other regions of the world, including, of course, the European Union, where privacy is actually viewed as a fundamental human right.

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This explains why the EU has always been ahead of the United States and developing its privacy rights regime,

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and you need look no further than, of course, the GDP are to explain that

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now. Just because the United States doesn't have a federal right to privacy doesn't mean that individual states are prevented from filling in this gap.

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In fact, as of this recording, 11 states have already passed their own privacy laws.

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For those of you who are familiar with American politics, what is actually going on in this spreadsheet is fairly interesting, because these 11 states actually come from a broad cross section of the American political spectrum, meaning that, and it's important for you to view this at work

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that, unlike state level battles, where legislation is viewed as a partisan issue and I'm thinking particularly around marijuana legalization, carbon emissions or even *** marriage

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privacy is not viewed that way.

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It's more viewed as a consumer rights issue or as a business regulation problem.

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Now. The most robust of all these privacy laws is, of course, the C C P A, which comes from California. But there are plenty of other state privacy laws that you might encounter at work, including, if you're in the healthcare space Illinois, which highly regulates biometric information.

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I just wanted to make you aware of that

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now, just because there aren't any federal rights to privacy, it doesn't mean that there isn't the concept of privacy that runs through our society. The Bill of Rights, for example, dances around this issue on several occasions. The freedom of religion, which exists in the First Amendment, has actually been viewed over time by judges as a private matter

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that the government should not concern itself with

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if you look at Supreme Court decisions. They frequently mentioned privacy as one of the reasons why individuals should freely practice their religion.

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Aside from the Bill of Rights, there are also mechanisms that individuals can use to privately sue one another for infringing on their privacy.

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I wanted to make a quick note of it in case you were to encounter it at the workplace.

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Let's focus for a moment quickly on the four most common causes of action, which appear on the middle of your screen.

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Intrusion of solitude. You can see your neighbor or a company or a former friend if they enter your home without permission. That's viewed as a privacy violation.

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Public disclosure. This is a big one.

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You can sue again, another person neighbor friend if they share your private information, even if it's truthful without your permission.

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False light again. You consume other person or company

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if they publish information that is not technically false but still characterized in a way that's misleading.

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Although heads up, celebrities and other figures do have a higher burden, and that's why you see all those tabloids at the grocery store,

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then item number four. You can also bring a lawsuit, and your company may very well received one. If another individual sees that your company or you yourself is using a name or a person's image or likeness without that original individuals blessing,

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of course, as a closing thought,

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Americans are growing increasingly frustrated with the state of privacy in this country. Hence why, of course, the CCP a came to be, and they demand MAWR and more privacy protections. Just ask around your next family dinner.

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I'm confident that the subject comes up in some way

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in summary. I wanna make clear that there is no legal right to privacy in the United States.

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The federal government does not protect it.

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Although American jurisprudence has danced around this issue for some time.

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The 1st, 3rd and 4th amendments hint at a right to privacy, and Americans as a whole are increasingly demanding that they have one.

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I'll see you in the next lesson as we discuss the various sectoral laws things like hip A, the G L B A, and how they begin to bump against the CCP a which we will review in the next modules.