Editor’s note: This commentary is by Steve May, who is a member of the Selectboard in Richmond. He also founded an organization, the Forum on Genetic Equity which addresses Genetic Bias and Privacy concerns.
[J]ust when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, now it turns out your browser history is for sale to the highest bidder. The House, under Speaker Paul Ryan, approved regulations that will permit internet service providers to sell the search history of individual online web users on a largely party line vote. The bill will now move to the Senate and ultimately on to the White House but based on the swift action in the House, it seems likely that GOP leadership in the Senate plan to fast track the bill.
Privacy may well be the first victim of this new Congress. Between the infamous H.R.1313 which will void GINA, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, and permit health insurers to use genetic profiling in their underwriting, and the effort to permit the sale of individual search history from everybody’s search engines, it is clear that privacy is squarely under assault.
This Republican Congress, which can’t seem to agree whether or not the sky is blue, is prepared to completely trash your constitutional right to privacy, all in the name of greed and profit. I don’t know about you, but nobody I know was asking that more of their personal information be available to the highest bidder. I mean, I haven’t seen mobs of people in the streets fighting for the right to allow big business to treat your online search history like they’re baseball cards.
I mean, I haven’t seen mobs of people in the streets fighting for the right to allow big business to treat your online search history like they’re baseball cards.
We are completely awash in big data, swamped by a virtual flood of numbers. So much of our essential selves are now only a couple of mouse clicks away. We all are on the verge of being reduced to nothing more than a file somewhere. This access comes with real consequences. There are real tradeoffs to having so much of our personal information in the public sphere.
Currently we have a patchwork of legal opinion, rules and laws addressing this modern legal construct called “privacy.” Unlike most of our other civil liberties, the right to privacy is an implied right. That’s to say that if one were to go looking for the phrase “right to privacy” in the Constitution you aren’t going to find it. The idea of a legal right to privacy is a relatively new concept. Instead, the Founding Fathers discuss the idea of quartering soldiers and imposing on citizens or reasonable search and seizure because they had borne witness to plenty of unreasonable searches and seizure under the British during the colonial era.
Its relative newness, however, makes it no less critical to securing the basic, fundamental rights of every Vermonter. In the absence of action at the federal level to safeguard the privacy rights citizens, it will fall to the individual states to create safeguards to protect the public from initiatives that leave much of the public vulnerable, and we are very much vulnerable …
The advent of technical advances like electronic health records without question creates everyday convenience; it also creates increased individual and collective exposure in an increasingly wired society. The idea of genetic profiles being commoditized in the aftermath of a potential rollback of GINA and browser histories being available for sale and maybe even resale, many times over calls into question, the very idea of “what is private?” Never has it been more important that state legislators rise to the occasion and create a comprehensive privacy act to protect individuals from the excesses of both the marketplace and the government with regard to privacy.
