New York Privacy Amendment
Put the right to privacy in the New York Constitution
The proposed Privacy Amendment would protect the decisions we make about our bodies, healthcare, and relationships (decisional privacy), as well as our personal data (informational privacy). In Dobbs, the U.S. Supreme Court stripped away federal constitutional protection for abortion, placing other intimate freedoms at risk. Meanwhile, the Court has never definitively recognized a constitutional right to informational privacy, even as government surveillance becomes increasingly pervasive. By adopting the amendment, New York would join 11 other states whose constitutions expressly protect privacy.
What it is
The Most Protective Privacy Amendment in the Country
The amendment adds a new Section 20 to Article I of the New York Constitution, which contains the state's bill of rights. It borrows language from Hawaii and court interpretations of Washington's Amendment. These are the most protective provisions in the country. It reads:
The right of the people to privacy is recognized and shall not be infringed. In applying this section, a court shall consider the nature and extent of the information which may be obtained, if any, and the nature and extent of the intrusion.
What would New York's Privacy Amendment Do
What would it protect?
- Give privacy its own textual home. The Privacy Amendment would establish an independent right to privacy under the New York Constitution, protecting both intimate decisions and personal information regardless of how federal courts interpret the U.S. Constitution. Its language deliberately draws from the constitutions of Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington, where courts have recognized some of the most expansive privacy protections in the country. New York courts would ultimately determine the scope of the right, but the amendment is designed to encourage similarly expansive interpretations. If adopted, New York would join 11 other states whose constitutions expressly protect privacy.
- What Have State Courts Interpreted Personal Privacy to Protect? In 1997, Montana's Supreme Court struck down the state's criminalization of same-sex intimacy, six years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same result. Montana courts have also used the state's privacy amendment to protect abortion and access to gender-affirming medical care. Alaska's Supreme Court has recognized reproductive choice as a fundamental privacy right, and later held that the state could not fund medically necessary pregnancy care through Medicaid while excluding medically necessary abortions. Washington courts have also recognized a privacy interest in refusing life-sustaining medical treatment.
- What Have State Courts Interpreted Data Privacy to Protect? Washington courts have protected bank records, telephone records, hotel guest registries, and information stored on cell phones, rejecting the idea that personal information loses constitutional protection simply because a company holds it. Hawaii's Supreme Court has protected sensitive medical records, even when patient names have been removed, from compelled disclosure without a compelling state interest. Montana requires police to obtain a warrant before secretly recording a private conversation, even when one participant consents. These decisions recognize that government access to personal information can violate privacy even when the information is held by someone else.
It would also set a floor that an ordinary statute cannot lower. A privacy law passed this year can be repealed next year. A constitutional provision cannot be undone without going back to the voters.
Why now
Privacy Is Eroding Faster Than the Law Protects It
The U.S. Supreme Court has withdrawn constitutional protection for abortion and has never definitively recognized a right to keep personal information private. Meanwhile, government agencies can learn more about people than ever before, often from information collected by someone else. Data gathered for ordinary purposes can later become the basis for surveillance or enforcement. Once the file exists, the person it describes may have little say in what happens to it.
- Federal protections for intimate decisions are erodingIn 2022, the Supreme Court overturned nearly fifty years of federal constitutional protection for abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas urged the Court to reconsider precedents protecting contraception, consensual same-sex intimacy, and marriage equality. Those other rights remain protected under federal law, but Dobbs demonstrates how even longstanding constitutional protections can be withdrawn.
- Medical information repurposed for immigration enforcementIn 2025, federal health officials transferred Medicaid enrollment information to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement. A federal judge subsequently restricted the sharing of detailed medical records and certain beneficiaries' information, while permitting more limited disclosure of identifying information. Records collected to provide healthcare had become a means of locating people for immigration enforcement.
- New York's expanding surveillance infrastructureThe NYPD operates one of the country's largest urban surveillance networks. Its Domain Awareness System brings together information from cameras, license-plate readers, and police databases, allowing officers to access information that would otherwise remain scattered across separate systems. The department also maintains a database of suspected gang members, nearly 99 percent of whom were identified as Black or Latino in a 2025 oversight report. These records can remain available to police long after the encounter or activity that generated them.
- Personal information collected, purchased, and analyzedGovernment agencies have purchased access to sensitive location information collected by smartphone applications and sold by data brokers. Combined with other records, that information can expose where someone goes and whom they associate with, even when they have never knowingly shared those details with the government. Artificial intelligence makes it increasingly possible to reconstruct intimate aspects of a person's life from information collected for entirely unrelated purposes.
Fifty states
Where an explicit right to privacy already exists
Eleven state constitutions use the word privacy, or a close equivalent. The rest do not. Where a state put the word matters as much as whether it used it: a clause standing on its own invites courts to read it broadly, while the same word tucked inside a search and seizure provision tends to get read alongside the Fourth Amendment and do very little independent work.
Select any state for its text, what it covers, and where its courts have gone their own way or declined to.
- Freestanding or general privacy right
- Freestanding but informational only
- No standalone clause: privacy folded into search and seizure
- No explicit privacy language
Equal-size tiles rather than geographic outlines, so Rhode Island, Delaware and Hawaii are as easy to reach as Texas. Hawaii is shown in the freestanding group because it has both a standalone privacy clause and privacy language in its search and seizure clause.
Select a state to see its constitutional text and what it protects.
Resources
Read further
- Bill Text and StatusFull text, sponsor memo and committee history
- Tiffany C. Li, State Constitutional Rights to PrivacyGeorgia Law Review, the current survey of all eleven states
- State Privacy Rights Are More Important Than EverShort companion piece at State Court Report
- New York Constitution, Article XIXThe amendment procedure itself
- How an amendment becomes law in New YorkAnd why it is harder to undo than a statute
- Justice Brennan's Foundational Text on State Constitutional LawState Constitutions and the Protections of Individual Rights, Harvard Law Review (1977)
Get involved
For more information about the NY Privacy Amendment, for template memos of support, or for help a Know Your Rights event focused on privacy, please reach out
Get updates on the Privacy Amendment
The lab emails when S8603 / A9377 moves and when there are hearings or events on it.