A full constitutional amendment, drafted in the style and seriousness of the Bill of Rights — with findings, seven parts of operative text, anticipated objections, and an honest account of its costs. This is what we're asking Congress to consider.
TL;DR Old rights, made to work again in a world where your papers live on someone else's servers.
The Constitution secures the right to be secure in one's person, house, papers, and effects; to speak, publish, assemble, and petition; to due process; to equal protection. These rights were written for a world in which a person's papers sat in a drawer and a person's reputation was assembled by neighbors rather than computed by machines. That world no longer exists.
The papers are now held by third parties. The associations are logged. The reputation is calculated. This Article does not invent rights — it closes the passage through which existing rights have been drained: the distance between what government is forbidden to do, and what it may simply purchase from those the Constitution does not bind.
A right that exists only in a forum no plaintiff can enter, against a defendant no evidence can reach, is not a right. This Article is written accordingly, and its length is the measure of the ingenuity it must anticipate.
TL;DR Ten reasons the current rules have already failed.
The findings that justify the Article — the factual and legal record it is written to correct.
The doctrine that a person forfeits Fourth Amendment protection in information voluntarily disclosed to a third party has become, under universal intermediation, a general forfeiture of that protection.
Government acquisition of personal data by commercial purchase accomplishes without warrant exactly what the Fourth Amendment was written to prevent. The difference between seizing a record and buying it is one of procurement, not principle.
Consent obtained by contract of adhesion, tendered as the price of access to services necessary to civic and economic life, is not consent in any sense the law should honor.
The aggregation of innocuous facts produces knowledge of a person's health, beliefs, associations, and vulnerabilities more complete than a search of their house would yield.
Automated systems now determine access to employment, housing, credit, insurance, and liberty without notice, explanation, or any opportunity to be heard.
Profiles are built on people who never used the service, agreed to anything, or were told the profile exists.
Technologies are deployed on the public whose effects are unknown even to those deploying them.
Violations of these rights are, by their nature, concealed from the people they injure — so a remedy that requires the victim to first discover the injury is no remedy at all.
A free people cannot govern themselves with respect to systems whose existence is hidden from them. The right to know what is done to oneself comes before every other right this Article secures.
Statutory protection has proven insufficient — subject to repeal, preemption, and the ordinary erosion of legislative attention. The security of these rights requires the permanence of constitutional text.
Each part is collapsed by default — expand the ones you want to read closely.
Personal data means any information relating to an identified or identifiable person, including information observed, collected, derived, inferred, predicted, generated, or purchased.
Aggregation means combining or linking data from two or more sources to a person, household, or device.
Entity means any person, corporation, or body of government — federal, State, local, tribal, or foreign — and every agent, contractor, subsidiary, and successor thereof.
Automated processing means any computational method that produces an output concerning a person, including any human process that adopts that output without independent judgment.
Consent means only that consent which satisfies Section 11, and no other.
This Article is construed liberally in favor of the person affected and strictly against any entity asserting an exception. Where two readings are possible, the one affording greater protection prevails. No violation requires proof of malice, negligence, or financial loss.
These rights apply to every technology by which personal data is collected or acted upon, whether existing now or invented later. No entity may evade the Article through a new label, corporate structure, or contractual form. Substance governs over designation, and doubt is resolved in favor of the person affected.
No right under this Article may be suspended by treaty, emergency, war, or contract — including terms of service or arbitration clauses. No government benefit may be conditioned on surrendering these rights.
Government may acquire personal data only by warrant issued upon probable cause. Buying, bartering, or otherwise receiving data from a third party counts as acquisition. No general, bulk, or suspicionless collection is permitted under any circumstance.
Warrantless access is allowed only to prevent imminent death or serious injury to an identified person, capped at 72 hours, reported to a court, and disclosed to the affected person within 30 days absent a specific judicial finding otherwise.
Data obtained in violation of this Article is inadmissible in any court and must be destroyed. Government may not conceal the true origin of evidence or construct a false account of how it was discovered.
Government may not obtain through a contractor, partner, or foreign government what this Article forbids it to obtain directly. Any private entity performing a government function is bound by this entire Part.
Any government technology that surveils, informs decisions about, or curates content for the public must be disclosed before deployment and reported on annually. Gag orders on disclosure of data demands are capped at 90 days and are never classified in aggregate.
No entity may aggregate, profile, sell, or use personal data to train a model without consent given separately for that specific purpose — including profiles built on people who never used the service.
Valid consent must be specific, affirmative, comprehensible in plain language, unconditioned (declining can't cost you the service), revocable within 30 days, generally time-limited to one year, and personal — never inherited by a buyer of the data. Consent from anyone under 18 is void. A single universal opt-out signal must be honored by every entity.
Personal data is not an asset. It cannot be sold in bankruptcy, transferred in a merger, or inherited by a successor company — a buyer must obtain fresh consent. The Article follows Americans' data wherever it is processed, even abroad.
Entities must destroy data once its purpose ends or consent is revoked. "Our system wasn't built to allow deletion" is not a valid defense.
Entities hold personal data in trust and owe a duty of care. A breach must be disclosed to affected people within 72 hours of discovery — not after an internal investigation concludes.
Anyone can demand, free of charge, a full accounting of their data: its source, every derivative computed from it, and every party it was shared with. They can correct it and take it elsewhere. An entity that can't produce the accounting must destroy the data.
No one can be denied a job, housing, credit, insurance, or liberty by an automated system without notice, a written explanation of the factors used, access to the underlying data, a chance to correct it, and review by a human with authority to reverse the call and no stake in the outcome. "Trade secret" is not a valid excuse.
Speech, press, assembly, and petition rights fully extend online. No one can be forced to prove their identity to read, speak, or assemble online, absent a warrant.
Any technology that surveils or makes decisions about the public must be entered in a public register describing its purpose and effects. Congress must fund public education about these technologies and people's rights — administered independently of the industry it covers.
Regardless of consent, no entity may: collect neural, biometric, or genetic data outside a specific medical/scientific purpose; manipulate someone's decisions below their threshold of awareness; track a person's movements in public by biometric means without a warrant; generate a fake depiction of a real person presented as authentic; deny someone a job, housing, or liberty based on a prediction of conduct they haven't engaged in; or run a general social-credit scoring system on behalf of government.
No one may be experimented on with unproven technology without informed consent — deployment with unestablished effects counts as experimentation, whatever it's called internally.
Narrow, tightly-bounded exceptions exist for security/fraud prevention, independently-reviewed non-commercial research, journalism, and lawfully public records (unless compiled into a profile). The entity claiming an exception bears the burden of proving it applies.
Collecting, selling, and processing personal data is conduct, not speech, and isn't shielded by the First Amendment (journalism remains protected). No entity may claim a property interest in someone's data superior to that person's own. Ordering data destroyed isn't a "taking" requiring compensation. State immunity does not bar suits under this Article.
This Article takes effect on its own, needs no enabling legislation, and any violation is automatically enough to sue over. Sovereign, qualified, and absolute immunity are all waived for claims under this Article.
Every person gets a private right to sue for at least $1,000 per violation, plus actual damages, costs, and attorney's fees. Willful or systematic violations draw treble damages or disgorgement of the profit made from the violation — and courts can order an unlawfully-trained model destroyed. Officers who knowingly permit systematic violations are personally liable and can't be indemnified. Forced arbitration clauses don't apply to claims under this Article.
The entity — not the person suing — has to prove it had valid consent and a lawful basis for what it did. An entity that can't produce adequate records is presumed to have violated the Article. The clock on filing a claim doesn't start until the person discovers, or reasonably should have discovered, the violation.
Whistleblowers who report a violation to a court, Congress, an enforcement officer, or the public cannot be fired, sued, or otherwise penalized — and are entitled to reinstatement, back pay, and treble damages if they are.
Congress and the States share power to enforce this Article, and states may go further, not less. An independent, cause-only-removable federal enforcement officer is required, with protected funding. If any part is struck down, the rest survives. Most of the Article takes effect two years after ratification; the restraints on government (Part II) and enforcement provisions (Parts VI–VII) take effect immediately.
TL;DR Yes, we've heard "this will break the internet." Here's the actual answer.
We'd rather you hear the strongest counterarguments from us than discover them somewhere else.
It will substantially change it. Services funded by non-consensual profiling would need another model — subscriptions, public funding, or advertising that isn't built on individual tracking, which is roughly how the internet worked before 2000. That trade-off falls hardest on people least able to pay for what they currently get "free."
Section 22 answers this directly, with carve-outs for journalism and personal narrative. But declaring a category of activity to be "not speech" in the Constitution is a serious, uncertain move, and a future majority could use that precedent elsewhere. This is the section most deserving of scrutiny during ratification debate.
The Article doesn't forbid government access to data — it requires a warrant. What's actually lost is warrantless bulk acquisition, commercial data purchases, and parallel construction. Those are real operational costs. The same objection was raised against the exclusionary rule and the Miranda warning.
The public-registry requirement includes a size threshold. The core consent and aggregation rules apply to everyone, on the theory that a small firm's non-consensual profile harms a person just as much as a large firm's — and that a size exemption would just incentivize firms to fragment.
Section 3 regulates what a technology does, not what it's called, specifically to survive this. Five decades of statutory privacy law have failed largely because each new law gets outpaced, preempted, or sunset before it matures.
Fair, and the drafters accept the criticism. The Fourth Amendment is a model of brevity, and it has still been read to allow the government to buy what it can't seize. Specificity is a deliberate bet against that kind of erosion — one a reader may reasonably think isn't worth the cost.
TL;DR It isn't free. Here's what it costs, and why it's still worth it.
Honest advocacy means stating plainly what this costs. We believe the trade is worth it — you're entitled to weigh it yourself.
Advertising-supported services would largely stop working in their current form, pushing services toward paid models — a regressive effect for people who can't pay.
Declaring data processing to be conduct, not speech, is a real constriction of First Amendment doctrine that could be applied elsewhere in ways the drafters wouldn't endorse.
Barring national-security exceptions would meet real, non-frivolous resistance from intelligence and financial-crime investigators — some current investigations would fail.
The consent regime adds friction to ordinary transactions. That friction is a genuine political vulnerability.
Public registries could entrench large incumbents, who can absorb compliance costs more easily than new entrants.
Legitimate research using large datasets would get slower and more expensive, even with an independent-review safeguard in place.
The Article's length and specificity is itself a risk — detailed constitutional text ages badly and resists future amendment.
Large statutory damages could invite opportunistic lawsuits, settling weak claims alongside strong ones.
Enforcement against foreign entities would be difficult, potentially disadvantaging domestic companies relative to overseas competitors.
TL;DR States first, then Congress. Not one vote — a sequence.
Under Article V, this requires two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the States. That's the end of a long road, not the first step.
State-level enactment of the consent standard (Sec. 11) and algorithmic due-process provision (Sec. 16) — the parts most workable as ordinary state statute, and the best proof of concept.
Federal statutory enactment of the government-restraint provisions (Sec. 5, 7, 8) — no private-sector compliance regime required, so these can move independently.
Build a track record — of what works, what it costs, and how entities try to evade it — solid enough to justify making it permanent.
Congressional proposal of the full Amendment, refined against everything learned in Stages 1–3.