All Article Summaries

Privacy is not dead. Privacy rules are increasingly critical to protecting individual autonomy and political freedom, and to consumer protection.

As new surveillance technologies and smartphones become ubiquitous, courts in the United States and Europe struggle to apply traditional principles to protect civil liberties.

Leading nineteenth-century scholars assumed that the expansion of sweeping privacy rights was an inevitable aspect of legal progress. But the history of contract and tort law shows that the courts recognized narrow, minimal privacy rights to avoid imposing burdensome duties on others.

As strong encryption becomes more common for data and voice messages, traditional wiretaps become less effective. Law enforcement agencies have shifted from seeking local real-time access to messages to seeking remote access to stored messages, which are often unencrypted.

The United States Supreme Court uses the term privacy in different ways. In conflicts between privacy and free speech, free speech tends to prevail. The Court’s Fourth Amendment rulings are inconsistent with the Court’s rulings on privacy under the Freedom of Information Act.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) should be updated. Reformers propose that law enforcement be required to obtain a warrant before reading email, and other increased protections for privacy. Communications firms and policymakers on the left and right support reform.