The Bill of Rights guarantees certain rights that cannot be infringed upon — speech, privacy and a fair trial, to name a few — but who does the Constitution protect us from?
The Constitution was written to protect the American people from the threat of totalitarian government. The framers sought to ensure that the government could not take away our inalienable rights. But they may not have predicted the modern-day threats to our Constitutional rights. These threats come not from big government, but from big business.
Take the Fourth Amendment for example. It reads in part, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated …” This amendment has long been interpreted as protecting the privacy rights of the American people. But what violations of privacy have been in the news recently? Cell phones that record your location without your knowledge. Facebook violating their own policy and selling user’s identifying information to advertisers. The founders of our nation could not have predicted cell phones or the Internet, but new technology represents the greatest challenge to our Constitutional rights.
Where do we draw the line when it comes to protecting our rights from big businesses? After all, we’re not forced to use these technologies. And the government is not infringing on our rights at all. Should the government step in and tell private businesses what they can and cannot do with their technology? In the coming decade, America will have to answer these questions and more.
Allowing big businesses limitless access to our private lives has its consequences. It is time to rethink how we view our Constitutional rights. They should not just protect us from big government. Government no longer has the monopoly of power that it had at the time of the Constitution’s writing. It must guarantee the rights of ordinary citizens from any entity that has the power to take those rights away. And right now that entity is not the government in Washington, but the corporations we deal with every day.
Part of the problem is that corporations have been defined by decades as persons, a definition reinforced by Supreme Court decisions. But the Constitution protects “the right of the people to be secure … against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The Constitution has been interpreted to protect Americans only from the government. It is time to think about how it should protect us from other private actors, especially when those actors have so much more power than ordinary citizens.
We need government regulation of technologies and business practices that infringe upon our Constitutional rights. Facebook has agreed to be monitored by the Federal Trade Commission for the next two decades to ensure it does not violate its user agreement, but we cannot expect every corporation to be so open.
The Constitution is a living document, one that has been reinterpreted throughout America’s history to ensure our rights remain guaranteed. As the world becomes one the framers never imagined we must be vigilant in ensuring those rights remain safe, from the government and from private actors.