Privacy at the Margins

by Scott Skinner-Thompson

Limited legal protections for privacy leave minority communities vulnerable to concrete injuries and violence when their information is exposed. In Privacy at the Margins, Scott Skinner-Thompson highlights why privacy is of acute importance for marginalized groups. He explains how privacy can serve as a form of expressive resistance to government and corporate surveillance regimes - furthering equality goals - and demonstrates why efforts undertaken by vulnerable groups (queer folks, women, and racial and religious minorities) to protect their privacy should be entitled to constitutional protection under the First Amendment and related equality provisions. By examining the ways even limited privacy can enrich and enhance our lives at the margins in material ways, this work shows how privacy can be transformed from a liberal affectation to a legal tool of liberation from oppression.

234 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 2020

Reviews

[Karen Adkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Smart, original analysis for how privacy law could be improved in light of clear inequities in its application. The author efficiently summarizes the unwieldy US privacy jurisprudence and demonstrates some of the assumptions or weak arguments in privacy law (inchoate foundation on dignity, overreliance on the Fourth Amendment), and argues, specifically with respect to informational privacy, that not all information is equally private, and that there is good reason to have higher tests for intimate and political information. The fact that he's an exceptionally clear and engaging writer means that the book is far more readable than many of the law review work I've read (not a lawyer, so that may be a me problem, not a legal scholar problem). The timing of the book is unfortunate with two respects. First, he clearly inserts an *extremely brief* discussion of COVID into his otherwise interesting argument about masks as subversive (brief as in two paragraphs long, I assume inserted at the request of an editor shortly before publication). I found this discussion inadequate, but I suspect so would he. Then second, his emphasis on public privacy as constitutionally defensible and important, particularly for political engagement, I think merits some massaging after January 6. I'm not sure his fundamentals would change in his argument, but given that the J6 crowd both embraced notoriety and privacy as they protested, and the use of mass surveillance to track down insurrectionists, makes me wonder if his conclusions would be as clear as they are in this book. Still, I think this is a really important (and I think legally useful!) contribution to discussions and action on privacy law.