"Protect Our Right to Anonymity", Jeffrey Rosen

I don't usually link to editorials, but those of us who value our privacy are vastly outnumbered by the rest of you who have made social media such a rip-roaring success so we have to work hard to redress the imbalance. Rosen's New York Times piece points out that if the Supreme Court backs the police's warrantless use of a GPS device in United States v. Jones, it will open the door for law enforcement to conduct warrantless tracking and surveillance in many different contexts.

For what’s at stake in the Supreme Court case is more than just the future of GPS tracking: there’s also online surveillance. Facebook, for example, announced in June that it was implementing face-recognition technology that scans all the photos in its database and automatically suggests identifying tags that match every face with a name. (After a public outcry, Facebook said that users could opt out of the tagging system.) With the help of this kind of photo tagging, law enforcement officials could post on Facebook a photo of, say, an anonymous antiwar protester and identify him.

The Volokh Conspiracy has a good brief summary of the government's reasoning in support of the police's actions and the Fourth Amendment issues in question.

I have a trait common to introverts: I like my privacy. I think that my wishes, since they don't interfere with anyone else's, should be respected. Nevertheless, consider for a moment why privacy matters to you even if you think it doesn't.

Should it be easy for somebody, cop or not, to find out that you ducked out of work early to meet your lover, rather than because you were ill as you claimed?

Maybe you object to that example because it involves lying to your coworkers, sex outside marriage and, if you're already married, adultery. I say that the only ones who have the right to know what's going on are you, your lover and if applicable your spouse (certainly not the police, no matter what regressive laws are on the books), but okay, let's try a different scenario. Do others have the right to know that on Saturday mornings you drive to your therapy session, rather than rake leaves or shop or whatever else people assume you do?

You have an old high school friend with a drug problem. The cops think he has gone beyond using and could lead them to a major dealer. They know you drive him to his outpatient counseling and want to know if you take him elsewhere too, so they tag your car with a GPS device (it's cheaper than assigning officers to follow you 24/7), not bothering with a judge and warrant. It turns out your friend has no connection to the dealer, but the cops now have a record of your (technically illegal) work distributing food to the homeless in your car. Is it right that the police gained their information in this way?

What do you do that you don't blazon forth to the world?

Do you have habits or fetishes that don't harm anyone else, but that you'd rather keep to yourself?

Do you think that your lawful movements are your own business?

I don't think anybody leads a fully public life. I don't think anyone could stand to lead a fully public life. Yet that's where we're headed unless we start pushing back against the loss of our privacy that is happening one little law and court case at a time.