“There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America; there is no place outside of judicial reach.”
While this quote may sound like a line from George Orwell’s dystopian science fiction novel, “1984,” it is actually a quote by former-FBI Director James Comey during a recent conference on cybersecurity. Comey also stated that Americans “have a reasonable expectation of privacy in our homes, in our cars, in our devices.” However, given the ever-growing prevalence of social media, data sharing, hacking, data breaches and government and private sector surveillance (whether consensual, judicially approved or otherwise), it is increasingly unreasonable for one to expect a modicum of privacy without completely disconnecting themselves from the digital world. Therein lies the dilemma. How is our collective perception of a reasonable expectation of privacy to be defined as we learn that so much of our daily lives consist of sharing our most personal information—both voluntarily and unwittingly? The answer, unsurprisingly, is not so clear. What is clear, however, is that the standard is a fluid one, which evolves over time as social norms, technology and our moral zeitgeist change. Presently, after over a century of increasing the scope of privacy rights in our country, the pendulum of privacy is swinging away from personal privacy.
