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The government regularly outs information concerning people's sexuality, gender identity, and HIV status. Notwithstanding the implications of such outings, the Supreme Court has yet to resolve whether the Constitution contains a right to informational privacy—a right to limit the government's ability to collect and disseminate personal information. This Article probes informational privacy theory and jurisprudence to better understand the judiciary's reluctance to fully embrace a constitutional right to informational privacy. The Article argues that while existing scholarly theories of informational privacy encourage us to broadly imagine the right and its possibilities, often focusing on informational privacy's ability to promote individual dignity and autonomy, there is a disconnect when courts attempt to translate those theories into workable doctrine. The extant theories are products of Fourth Amendment and decisional privacy law, and bear a more attenuated relationship to informational privacy problems, hindering recognition of the right. This Article reorients and hones the focus of the purported informational privacy right toward what the Due Process Clause suggests as the right's two principal and more concrete values: preventing intimate information from serving as the basis for potential discrimination and creating space for the formation of political thought. By so doing, not only is a more precise theory of informational privacy constructed, but instrumentally (and perhaps most importantly), courts will be more apt to recognize a constitutional informational privacy right thereby better insulating individuals from discrimination or marginalization.

In the United States, we have long accepted that candidates for public office who have voluntarily stepped into the public eye sacrifice claims to privacy. This refrain is rooted deep within the American enterprise, emanating from the Framers' concept of the informed citizen as a bedrock of democracy. Voters must have full information about candidates to make their choices at the ballot box. Even as privacy rights for ordinary citizens have expanded, privacy theorists and courts continue to exempt candidates from privacy protections. This Article suggests that two disruptions warrant revisiting the privacy interests of candidates. The first is a changing information architecture brought on by the rise of the internet and digital media that drastically alters how information about candidates is collected and circulated. The second is a shift in who runs for office. As women and minorities—targets of the worst forms of harassment—increasingly throw their hats in the ring, this Article argues that competing democratic values should challenge previous assumptions about candidate privacy. Far from suggesting easy answers, this Article offers a framework for courts to weigh candidate privacy interests in a more nuanced way, drawing on vetting principles for aspirants to other positions of public trust. While there are good reasons candidates should have far less privacy than ordinary citizens, the reflexive denial of candidate privacy must have its limits if we care about nourishing our evolving democracy.

Privacy law scholarship often focuses on domain-specific federal privacy laws and state efforts to broaden them. This Article provides the first comprehensive analysis of privacy regulation at the local level (which it dubs "privacy localism"), using recently enacted privacy laws in Seattle and New York City as principal examples. Further, this Article attributes the rise of privacy localism to a combination of federal and state legislative failures and three emerging urban trends: the role of local police in federal counterterrorism efforts; smart city and open data initiatives; and demands for local police reform in the wake of widely reported abusive police practices. Both Seattle and New York City have enacted or proposed (1) a local surveillance ordinance regulating the purchase and use of surveillance equipment and technology by city departments, including the police, and (2) a law regulating city departments' collection, use, disclosure, and retention of personal data. In adopting these local laws, both cities have sought to fill two significant gaps in federal and state privacy laws: the public surveillance gap, which refers to the weak constitutional and statutory protections against government surveillance in public places, and the fair information practices gap, which refers to the inapplicability of the federal and state privacy laws to government records held by local government agencies. Filling these gaps is a significant accomplishment and one that exhibits all of the values typically associated with federalism such as diversity, participation, experimentation, responsiveness, and accountability. This Article distinguishes federalism and localism and shows why privacy localism should prevail against the threat of federal and—more importantly—state preemption. This Article concludes by suggesting that privacy localism has the potential to help shape emerging privacy norms for an increasingly urban future, inspire more robust regulation at the federal and state levels, and inject more democratic ...

This Article proposes that tax is a fertile field in which privacy scholars should be working. The privacy burdens of taxpayers have gone unnoticed by privacy scholars. To the extent that privacy scholars are concerned about the dignity of individuals and ensuring that they have "freedom from scrutiny" and "breathing-room" for self-development, the threat to dignity, freedom, and breathing-room endured by Rhiannon O'Donnabhain, Lynnette Harris, Katia Popov, Melvin Nickerson, Ramsay and Elizabeth Farah, and other taxpayers deserves scrutiny. To the extent that privacy scholars worry about the peril to a free society, creeping totalitarianism, and undesirable shifts of power that collection of information by government agencies can bring, the IRS's gathering of information should be no less worrisome than that of other agencies, such as the NSA or FBI. This Article also proposes that privacy is a societal value that tax scholars should work to incorporate into their research. While unrecognized until now, privacy values are comparable to the values of efficiency, equity, and administrability that tax scholars have long heralded as the markers of a sound tax system. Tax scholars should measure the negative impact of specific tax provisions on privacy, weigh the impact against any benefits achieved, and propose ways to reduce the impact without undermining the benefits. Tax scholars should also consider ways in which fundamental reforms could better protect privacy without compromising—or perhaps even better, achieving—the central goals of a sound tax system. For instance, a reform increasing the standard deduction and personal exemption amounts while decreasing the number of specialized deductions and credits might mitigate privacy concerns while also reducing administrative costs. Moreover, a more radical change in the tax base itself—perhaps a move from an income to a value-added or other consumption tax could, as a matter of the base's own logic, require minimal personal information while also enhancing tax ...

Anxiety about surveillance and data mining has led many to embrace implausibly expansive and rigid conceptions of privacy. The premises of some current privacy arguments do not fit well with the broader political commitments of those who make them. In particular, liberals seem to have lost touch with the reservations about privacy expressed in the social criticism of some decades ago. They seem unable to imagine that preoccupation with privacy might amount to a "pursuit of loneliness" or how "eyes on the street" might have reassuring connotations. Without denying the importance of the effort to define and secure privacy values, I want to catalogue and push back against some key rhetorical tropes that distort current discussion and practice. One problem is that privacy defenses often imply a degree of pessimism about the state that is inconsistent with the strong general public regulatory and social-welfare role that many defenders favor. Another is a sentimental disposition toward past convention that obscures the potential contributions of new technologies to both order and justice. And a third is a narrow conception of personality that exalts extreme individual control over information at the expense of sharing and sociability.

This book explores the Janus-faced features of privacy, and looks at their implications for the control of personal information, for sexual and reproductive freedom, and for democratic politics. It asks what, if anything, is wrong with asking women to get licenses in order to have children, given that pregnancy and childbirth can seriously damage your health. It considers whether employers should be able to monitor the friendships and financial affairs of employees, and whether we are entitled to know whenever someone rich, famous or powerful has cancer, or an adulterous affair. It considers whether we are entitled to privacy in public and, if so, what this might mean for the use of CCTV cameras, the treatment of the homeless and the provision of public facilities such as parks, libraries and lavatories. Above all, the book seeks to understand whether and, if so, why privacy is valuable in a democratic society, and what implications privacy has for the ways we see and treat each other. The ideas about privacy we have inherited from the past are marked by beliefs about what is desirable, realistic and possible which predate democratic government and, in some cases, predate constitutional government as well. Hence, this book argues, although privacy is an important democratic value, we can only realise that value if we use democratic ideas about the freedom, equality, security and rights of individuals to guide our understanding of privacy. -- Book Cover.

THIS ESSAY CONSIDERS THE CLINTON SEX SCANDAL AS THE LAST IN A SERIES OF EVENTS THAT ERODED PRIVACY AND ITS PROTECTION IN THE UNITED STATES. IT IS AN "EPISODE IN THE DESTRUCTION OF PRIVACY THAT HAS BECOME THE TOTALITARIAN DEMOCRATIC PROJECT OF OUR TIME." IT EXPLORES THE ROLES THAT LAWYERS, FEMINISTS, THE MEDIA, AND THE OFFICE OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL HAVE PLAYED IN THIS DESTRUCTION OF PRIVACY.