Pass Parallel Privacy Standards or Privacy Perishes

Abstract

This Article stems from my presentation at a Symposium hosted by Rutgers School of Law-Newark in March 2013, where I asserted that private industry’s ability to surreptitiously gather, collect, store, and sell vast amounts of intimate, personal data constitutes a far more insidious threat to privacy than that posed by government electronic snooping, because government is bound by the constraints of the Fourth Amendment and the federal wiretapping and electronic surveillance legislative scheme. I asserted that our constitutional concept of individual privacy and the protection we afford to the same will be eviscerated by the activities of private industry lest Congress act to protect individual privacy and an individual’s power to control the data gathered, collected, stored, and sold by private industry in ways similar to the protections afforded individuals from such government activity by constitutional, legislative, and common law.