History

HISTORY

• 1890: Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis write “The Right to Privacy,” defining privacy early on as the right to be left alone from invasion. This piece became very popular with the American public with rising fear of new cameras.

• 1928: Olmstead v. United States decided that wiretapping without judicial approval is illegal, and that one cannot be convicted off of evidence from an unapproved intrusion of privacy.
• 1948: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is ratified, asserting privacy rights for people worldwide as displayed in Article 3.
• 1965: In the case, Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court declares the right to privacy within marital relations after Griswold provided marital counselling through the company, Planned Parenthood.
• 1967: Katz v. United States decides that a citizen has entitlement to Fourth Amendment protection from being recorded, whether or not the intrusion invades the physical space around them.
• 1968: The Federal Wiretap Act of 1968 is passed, forbidding the nonconsensual intrusion of “wire, oral, or electronic communications”.
• 1972: A case regarding the storage of sensitive information relevant to prescriptions called Whalen v. Roe established that the power was in the hands of the physicians since it would not impair a citizen’s want or need for said prescriptions.
• 1974: The Federal Privacy Act of 1974, passed in the United States, prohibits federal agencies from disclosing personal information with names or symbols.
• 1986: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, also passed in the U.S.A., tries to prevent government access to private communications.
• 1998: China initiates the Golden Shield Project, a national censorship program outlawing pro-democracy websites, any opinion pieces against the Chinese government, any Taiwanese organization, and crime-related sites.
• 1999: The Swiss Federal Constitution is adopted, in which Article 13 guarantees the right to privacy within mail and telecommunications, and is protected from the misuse of personal data.
• 2001: The court case case, Kyllo v. United States declares that the use of thermal imaging technology that is typically used to take down marijuana-growing operations is an invasion of privacy.

2001: The Patriot Act is passed in October, allowing law enforcement to conduct investigations, collect/facilitate private data, and orchestrate surveillance on anyone who is considered “a threat to national security” without consent.

• 2002: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sues Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad conducted secret DNA testing on employees.
• 2013: Edward Snowden leaks details about the extent of NSA's surveillance program.

• 2015: The Anti-Terrorism Act is passed by the Parliament of Canada, broadening the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s mandate after a man rammed a vehicle into Canadian Armed Forces in the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
• 2016: The Investigatory Powers Act is passed in the UK, giving law enforcement broad access to user Internet data.
• 2016: An updated version of the General Data Protection Regulation formed by the European Union is passed in April, where companies and governments must have one of six acceptable reasons to collect data within the European Union and are subjected to legal liability without subjecting to guidelines.
• 2017: Google begins to link billions of credit card transactions with online activity that is already being tracked through Google-owned programs such as Gmail, Youtube, and others.
• 2018: Facebook faces one of the largest data scandals to come into the media for selling over 87 million users’ data to Cambridge Analytica in order to help target people with specific ads.