About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

18 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 283 (2003)
Protecting Privacy in the Digital Age

handle is hein.journals/berktech18 and id is 299 raw text is: CYBERLAW: PRIVACY PROTECTING PRIVACY IN THE DIGITAL AGE By Will Thomas DeVries You have zero privacy anyway .... Get over it.'' With this proclamation, Scott McNealy, founder of Sun Microsystems, anchored the radical edge of the privacy debate for the digital world.2 He viewed it as a foregone conclusion that, in the information age, any se- cret thing committed to digital form was subject to instant and inevitable distribution. But while digital technology has drastically changed the pri- vacy landscape, reports of the death of privacy have been greatly exagger- ated. Nevertheless, Mr. McNealy's statement speaks some truth in that the conceptions of privacy carried over from the analog world have not aged gracefully. For example, the Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures .. . .3 These words conceive personal privacy in physical terms, but in the digital world, many of one's most private things, such as medical records, may be stored in a database far from one's person or house. How can one tell if a search of such a database is unreasonable? Mr. McNealy also intuited correctly that the existing legal framework for privacy is failing. As digital technology renders obsolete the theories on which the laws are based, the legal protections themselves become at best incomplete and at worst perverse. Privacy law has traditionally devel- oped in tandem with technology-reshaping itself to meet the privacy threats embodied in new technology.4 The information revolution, how- ever, is occurring so fast and affects so many areas of privacy law that the old, adaptive process is failing to address digital privacy problems.5 1. Polly Sprenger, Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over it', WIRED NEWS, Jan. 26, 1999, at http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0, 1283,1753 8,00.html. 2. See, e.g., A. Michael Froomkin, The Death of Privacy?, 52 STAN. L. REV. 1461, 1462 (2000) (discussing, with reference to Mr. McNealy's quotation, the question of whether privacy is indeed dead or dying); see also infra Part I.B. 3. U.S. CONST. amend. IV. 4. See Dennis F. Hernandez, Litigating the Right to Privacy: A Survey of Current Issues, 446 PLL/PAT 425, 429 (1996). 5. See Jerry Berman & Deirdre Mulligan, The Internet and the Law: Privacy in the DigitalAge: A Work in Progress, 23 NOVA L. REV. 549, 554 (1999).

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most