Children and Their Digital Dossiers:lessons in Privacyrights in the Digitalage

The right to privacy is a firmly entrenched democratic principle that has been inferred in the U.S. Constitution and protected by the Fourteenth Amendment as a liberty of personal autonomy.I Although the Constitution does not include language that explicitly details privacy protections, since the 1800s justices have interpreted the text as promoting the "right to be left alone."2 Evidence of compelling support for protection of privacy also has been found in several of the Constitutional Amendments, including the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth.3 However, it is the statutory right to privacy that has been most closely aligned with data protection as a form of self-protection. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has led efforts to enforce compliance with privacy. The statut°ty right of privacy limits access to personal information and has been extolled in the proliferation of privacy policies and legislation that control the collection of information about children on the Internet.4