Privacy Rights

Privacy Rights in America
  POL 303: The American Constitution











      Privacy Rights in America


The Privacy of the individual is the most important right we have today.   Without privacy, the democratic system that we know would not exist.   According to our text, “For a nation that has always placed a premium on the idea of a limited government intrusion into personal matters, the absence of a specific right to privacy in the Constitution often comes as a surprise to many Americans.”   (Ivers, 2013, para.1)   The most important types of privacy rights we need to be concerned with are Defensive Property, Patient Privacy, On-Line Privacy, Financial Privacy, and Personal Privacy.   Every individual is entitled to their own, his or her, privacy.   However, there are exceptions to privacy rights that create by the need for defense and security.

When our country was founded, privacy had never been an issue.   Our country did not have a fear of terrorists or anything else that threatened the change of our way of life.   Many things have changed since the development of our Constitution.   America is supposedly the “land of the free, and home of the brave.”   Well, what happens when the land of the free, is not so free anymore?   The government is swiping out freedoms right from under our feet, and it seems as if we are oblivious to it.

We all deserve the right to privacy; we must not let our country go down the drain.   According to Mulligan and Bamberger, “Ongoing revelations about the National Security Agency’s massive data collection activities, and a success at circumventing encryption in consumer products, at times with the cooperation-perhaps begrudging-of the corporate sector, suggest that efforts to strengthen the privacy features of technical systems are timely and necessary even in democratic countries.”   (Mulligan & Bamberger, 2013, para.1)   Privacy laws exist for a reason.

Even if we do not always appreciate them, they are still...