u/JRHowellJR

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, dated May 15, 2026, connects personal data to the exercise of power. Paragraphs 170–172 link profiling and behavioral influence to freedom. Paragraph 178 asks who controls the uses and benefits of data collected from people.

That raises a question about the role of consent. If access to employment, healthcare, or ordinary communication depends on accepting extensive data collection, how much can an individual's agreement justify?

My proposed answer is that privacy law should examine the continuing power created by a dataset. That includes the ability to repurpose information, the opportunity to challenge consequential inferences, and the practical alternatives available when participation requires disclosure.

To give dignity institutional meaning, I would connect it to limits on collection, specified purposes, meaningful deletion rights, and procedures for contesting decisions. Those protections would constrain an organization's authority over people after the initial agreement.

The justification for collecting information still matters. Institutions need information to provide services, investigate misconduct, and make fair decisions. The difficult task is to explain which purposes justify collection and how much continuing control those purposes warrant.

I develop this proposal for legal reform in my essay in The American Counsel. The encyclical supplies the moral framework. The proposed legal protections are my argument, not obligations imposed by the encyclical on American institutions.

I wrote the American Counsel analysis linked below. It examines a question for credit unions issuing cards used through Apple Pay: what would issuers pay under competitive conditions?

A zero-dollar competitive price is an economic claim that needs an explanation. Why would a supplier provide the service without charging this particular group of customers?

The Apple Pay issuer-fee dispute in Affinity Credit Union v. Apple Inc. makes that question concrete. The damages model discussed in my article treats zero as the competitive fee for card issuers. If liability and that benchmark were established, the calculation would count the fees paid during the class period. The difficult work lies in establishing the benchmark.

A useful comparison must account for what each service provides, how the supplier recovers its costs, and whether benefits elsewhere in the business could support a zero issuer fee. Finding another service that charges nothing does not answer those questions. A positive fee in the challenged market also cannot establish that competition would preserve it.

The September 23 order addresses class certification and expert admissibility. It permits the case and model to proceed without deciding antitrust liability or the correct competitive price.

I examine the model and those procedural limits in The American Counsel. The stakes are in the comparison: the model needs an economic reason why this group of customers would pay nothing under competitive conditions.

In Doe v. Adventist Health System/West, the California Court of Appeal examined what tracking data could reveal when it came from an authenticated patient portal. The opinion was issued July 24, 2026. It was certified for publication on August 24.

Adventist filed a petition for review in the California Supreme Court on September 28. The petition remains pending as of October 7.

The patients alleged that tracking tools transmitted information from their portal sessions. A path identifying a radiology result can reveal something about a patient’s communication with a provider. More general descriptions, including access to health records or messages, also acquire meaning within that relationship.

The court held that the patients’ theory concerning the contents of portal communications was capable of common proof. Whether the transmitted information actually met the statutory contents requirement remained for the merits. The court nevertheless upheld denial of certification for the portal subclass’s medical-confidentiality claim. A description of activity inside a portal does not uniformly reveal medical information under that separate statute.

The ruling gives privacy review a concrete task. Examine what the complete transmission tells its recipient. Calling a piece of data a page address does not answer what someone can learn when it arrives with patient identifiers and the context of an authenticated session.

I explain the decision in my article in The American Counsel. The practical point is to evaluate the information conveyed by the system as a whole, including the relationship in which it was generated.

Beginning January 1, 2027, California’s AB 1883 will prohibit employers from using workplace surveillance tools that use AI to recognize, infer, or predict employees’ emotional states or collect their neural data. The law includes a safety exception and specified federal exceptions. It does not prohibit every workplace camera or productivity measure.

Applying that boundary requires an account of what the system actually does. An employer should be able to explain its inputs, outputs, and operational use. Calling a product a fatigue or safety tool cannot replace that examination. Emotion scoring for performance management presents a different question from a genuine safety function.

Workers’ alternatives also belong in the governance discussion. In a separate competition dispute, New Jersey’s Attorney General alleges that restrictions affecting Amazon’s delivery-service partners suppress driver mobility and compensation. That allegation concerns the ability to leave for other work. It does not establish a violation of California’s new surveillance law.

In my article on Amazon, worker surveillance, and monopsony, I argue that oversight should examine both the information extracted from workers and their realistic alternatives. A privacy control offers limited practical protection if exercising it costs someone access to work.

An officer saw a California license plate, searched an ALPR database, and obtained more than fifty vehicle sightings across several states. The records covered a month. At the time of the query, the court found that the out-of-state plate was his only reason for searching.

In the October 1, 2026, decision in United States v. Kyle, Judge Sara E. Hill held that this access to historical location information was a Fourth Amendment search. It lacked both a warrant and probable cause. The court suppressed the evidence that followed.

The opinion addresses a feature of these systems that a single roadside camera does not explain. Records accumulate before anyone decides to investigate the driver. An officer can then reconstruct earlier travel without having followed the vehicle at the time.

The limits matter. This is a district-court ruling about the search in one prosecution. The order does not shut down Flock or establish that every license-plate lookup is unconstitutional. The court acknowledges decisions reaching a different conclusion about ALPR use. It also independently found that the officer unlawfully prolonged the traffic stop.

For public oversight, I think the useful distinction is between locating a particular wanted vehicle and giving officers open-ended access to everyone's accumulated travel history. Retention periods, reasons entered for queries, and the scope of records returned all deserve scrutiny.

I wrote a closer analysis of the opinion in The American Counsel.