On a warm Monday in June 1965, the Supreme Court declared that married women had the right to use contraceptives. This was a hard-won victory for Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut and namesake of the case, Griswold v. Connecticut. She had previously helped displaced persons after World War II and, motivated by her conviction that contraceptives could alleviate poverty and human suffering, fought tirelessly to overturn the birth control laws in Connecticut, then some of the strictest in the country. Her persistence in the face of failed appeals, fines, and even jail time managed to transform contraceptive access from something reserved for well-resourced women to something available for all (married) women. But the legacy she left behind is far greater than the outcome of this single court case and the women her clinic personally helped with family planning. Griswold v. Connecticut set a precedent for the blockbuster reproductive health victories that followed, like Eisenstadt v. Baird, which extended contraceptive access to unmarried women, and Roe v. Wade, which granted women the federal right to an abortion. It also laid the groundwork for future court cases that decriminalized sodomy, same-sex marriage, and interracial marriage. But that wasn’t all. Estelle Griswold’s fight for contraceptive access paved the road for something else, something she couldn’t have imagined at the time: the right to internet privacy. Even as a privacy researcher, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that a married woman’s right to contraceptives was somehow related to internet privacy. The connection is thanks to the argument made by Justice William O. Douglas, who delivered the majority opinion in Griswold, in which he stated that to interfere with the contraceptive use of married couples would be a violation of their — and here is the key word — privacy. To connect the dots explicitly, he asked and then answered his own question. “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.” On its own, this section of his opinion is worth celebrating, at least for married couples, but it is narrow. Yet Douglas didn’t stop there. He argued that the marriage relationship was actually just one example of something that falls in the “zones of privacy” afforded to Americans, as implied by the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. Essentially, Americans have the right to privacy even though it isn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution, and that right manifests across many different zones of life. Other zones include the home, and the papers and other personal effects within them, as covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protection “against unreasonable search and seizures” and the fifth amendment’s self-incrimination clause, which turns our words into a zone of privacy, such that we cannot be forced to speak in a way that can be used against us. Obviously, the internet was not explicitly mentioned in a ruling made decades before it existed, but it has since become a space where we regularly make decisions akin to the ones we make in the “sacred precincts of marital bedrooms” and manage documents as sensitive as the papers we keep in our homes. The notion that at least some corners of the internet should be zones of privacy is evidently held by a majority of Americans who, according to the Pew Research Center, are concerned about the state of privacy online and in general. We have Griswold, and the subsequent legislation built on top of it, to thank for that. In the sixty years since this landmark ruling, the fates of both reproductive health and internet privacy have continued to touch, even as they both face an uncertain future. Perhaps this unexpected entanglement can teach us something about what is to come for them both. In the decades since Griswold v. Connecticut, the internet has expanded rapidly, subsuming much of our social infrastructure. As a consequence, the many data pieces that stitch together a single life often exist as online digital traces, covering everything from shopping to taking tests, filing taxes, and making doctor’s appointments. Although the United States still has no comprehensive federal privacy law — unlike other governing entities, like the European Union — it does have some regulations which acknowledge that certain categories of data require more privacy than others. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 restricts the collection and use of protected health information, like emails, phone numbers, social security numbers, or IP addresses, that can be used to link an individual to their health records. This regulation has taken a cue from Griswold and carved out specific digital records as belonging to a zone of privacy. To see it in action, consider a case from two years ago. A patient at Redeemer Health, a Catholic non-profit health system, requested that Redeemer send a prospective employer a test result from her records, likely the results of a drug test or physical exam. Rather than only send the specific result requested, Redeemer sent the prospective employer her entire medical record without her consent, including her reproductive health and other OB/ GYN history. Consequently, Redeemer Health paid over $35,000 in settlement money and committed to a two-year corrective action plan. HIPPA serves as an example of how the law has codified the notion that reproductive health, even in digital form, is deserving of privacy in a way that cannot legally be breached. Still, even though we have some internet privacy regulation today, it is insufficient for robust privacy. Although this reality has been somewhat demystified through large and well-documented scandals, like Cambridge Analytica’s unauthorized collection of Facebook data and Edward Snowden’s NSA disclosure, it can be easy to forget or dismiss. This is especially true when we use the internet to browse more intimate matters in isolated physical spaces, under what can feel like a cloak of invisibility. When privacy violations intersect
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