CYBER-SECURITY, PRIVACY, AND THE COVID-19 ATTENUATION?

Large-scale data brokers collect massive amounts of highly personal consumer information to be sold to whoever will pay their price, even at the expense of sacrificing individual privacy and autonomy in the process. In this Article, I will show how a proper understanding and justification for a right to privacy, in context to both protecting private acts and safeguarding information and states of affairs for the performance of such acts, provides a necessary background framework for imposing legal restrictions on such collections. This problem, which has already gained some attention in literature, now becomes even more worrisome, as government itself becomes a consumer of this information to fight off a domestic instantiation of the global Covid-19 pandemic. This Article proposes some definite ways in which the courts and Congress might limit both the private sector and the government’s use of such data to ensure individual autonomy will not be sacrificed.