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Comment by kansface | Hacker News Reader

Would it? The 1st is a prohibition on the rights of government, not private parties. Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals? In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th (and by extension, the states via the 14th). Would a newspaper be allowed to publish unflattering personal, privacy violating details? Would you be allowed to put up a political flyer alleging the same? I'm not sure an amendment is _the best solution_.

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We already have laws that abridge the freedom of speech, so it's not absolute.

What's special about slander that we can have a say "you're not allowed to make defamatory false statements about people," but we couldn't have "you're not allowed to spy on people and sell information about them"?

Granted slander is a civil and not criminal matter, but if I could sue companies for sharing personal information about me that would still be something.

There's nothing in the Constitution as it stands today that prevents us from having strict data privacy laws. No amendment is needed.

> Would the new amendment apply to the government, or to private sector, or to individuals?

It depends on how it's written, but there are no inherent limits here. You can make it do either.

> In any case, the 1st and the 28th? would continually be butting heads, since the 1st prohibits congress from passing laws that would enforce the 28th

Amendments, by definition, amend the constitution, as it was prior to them (meaning with all the previous amendments applied) so a later amendment can always override an older one explicitly, and even if it doesn't do so, the plain intent of the new amendment would likely suffice.

And we even have an explicit example of this in the 21st Amendment repealing the 18th Amendment.

The fun part about amendments you can write that into the amendement and it can say whatever you want. There is no special expceptions, it defines what legal government and persons actions are by definition. The only problem (good thing imo) is it takes 2/3 to approve it which is a mountain of opposition. Complex Amendements suffer immensely from this since they have much more power than laws congress passes. But honestly privacy could probably be ensired easier with a law from congress. It is a right but perhaps starting with a law would actually be easier than an amendment nothing stops the government currently from have laws about privacy if there is an objection the escape hatch could be granted by an amendment

id see a limitation on the government to limit or remove liability for private entities to invade privacy.

private corps could still invade privacy, but they wouldnt be able to shrug the liability from torts related to their bad activity.

eg. the government can not remove liability to any behaviour that breaks the constitution, as thats the government brraking the constitution by deputizing somebody else to break it

I suggest that the new amendment make it illegal for devices to track us.

Cameras, microphones, computers, robots, algorithms, etc would not be able track people. Those are in-animate objects, not people, and shouldn't have any rights, especially the right to intrude on people's privacy.

Individuals would not be able to leverage such devices for power, influence or other selfish raesons.

Only another person, a real human, can watch you in public. Even take notes on you. Like a doctor. Or the employees of a grocery store.

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