Centering Civil Rights in the Privacy Debate

Can Congress prevent the disproportionate harm inflicted on marginalized communities from at times irresponsible commercial data practices? As our lives increasingly shift online, so, too, have methods of discrimination—using individual data profiles—and our laws have been slow to keep up. It’s thus vital for Congress, in particular, to conceptualize privacy as a civil right, and move the privacy debate to prioritize perspectives from marginalized communities who are disproportionately harmed by these new dangers. Indeed, privacy and civil rights ought to go hand in hand, but they often don’t. In fact, civil rights discussions have largely been missing from the privacy debate. This is despite the reality that privacy infringements affect civil rights in myriad ways.