Loyalty
Use what you provided only for the reason you provided it. Information given for a fishing license does not become raw material for unrelated investigations.
For citizens
Your privacy isn't gone. The Constitution already protects it.
Every time you get a license, file your taxes, enroll a child in school, or apply for a benefit, government records facts about you. You have no real choice about it. This page explains what happens to that information, what the Constitution already requires of government, and what you can do. No law degree required.
About eight minutes to read
What happens now
Information you gave for one reason is being used for others
You hand over a photo to get a driver's license. You expect it to be used to confirm you are who you say you are. In 2019, researchers at Georgetown Law found that federal agencies had been running facial recognition searches against millions of state driver's license photos. No driver was asked. Congress never approved it. In Utah, federal agencies got access even though the state legislature had refused to share that information.1
In 2025, Illinois's Secretary of State found that a federal agency had been searching license plate camera data collected by Illinois towns, even though Illinois law prohibited that sharing. The law said no. The system said yes.2
Whatever you think of the purposes in either case, the pattern is the same. Information collected for one reason became available for another, and nobody who supplied it, or who represents them, got a say.
The capability itself is the problem
Most privacy rules ask whether an official misused your information. That question comes too late. Once government systems are connected so that anyone's finances, family, health, property and movements can be pulled together on request, the power already exists, whether or not anyone uses it today. Policies change with the next administration. A system that can do something will eventually be asked to.
The Fourth Amendment does protect you from an unreasonable search. In 2026, in Chatrie v. United States, the Supreme Court held that obtaining a person's cell-phone location data is a search, and warned that government "possesses a virtual panopticon": a system built so that everyone can be watched at all times. But courts decide one search at a time. They have not yet applied the Constitution to the systems that make searching everyone possible, and they cannot redesign those systems. That work belongs to legislatures, and to the people who elect them.
See what government does with your data
1. Researchers at Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology obtained the records through public records requests; reported by NPR, July 8, 2019.
2. Announced by the Illinois Secretary of State after an audit; reported by Axios, August 26, 2025.
The founders' answer
Americans have fought this fight before
In 1761, a Boston lawyer named James Otis stood in court against "writs of assistance": general warrants that let officers search anyone, anywhere, at any time, without saying why. Otis lost the case and won the argument. John Adams later wrote that American independence was born in that courtroom. The Fourth Amendment was written to make general warrants impossible.
Otis named four things that made a general warrant tyrannical. Each one describes a modern combined database just as well:
| What Otis objected to | In 1761 | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Officials choose whom to search | No one checked whether the reason was good enough | Staff and contractors can look up anyone |
| It reaches everything | Not one named item, but all a person had | Records from many agencies, combined |
| It never expires | Usable again and again | Records kept indefinitely |
| No one can check | Searches left no record | You rarely learn who looked |
A system with all four is a general warrant rebuilt in software. No one set out to build one. Government bought it one system at a time, and nobody asked the constitutional question.
Held in trust
Government holds your information the way a lawyer holds a client's secrets
Your birth date, address and income are facts, and nobody can own a fact. But you are the person those facts describe, so you have the greatest stake in how they are used. Government collects them because you have no choice, and that makes it a trustee: like a lawyer or a doctor, legally bound to use what you entrusted to it for your purposes, not its own.
The relationship runs both ways. You owe government accurate information for legitimate purposes. Government owes you four duties in return:
Care
Collect only what the task needs, keep it accurate, and protect it. A data breach is a failure of a duty government already owed you.
Confidentiality
No one looks at your information without proper authority. An unauthorized lookup is itself a search.
Transparency
Tell you what is held, how it is used, and who looked. You can't defend rights you can't see.
Where these duties come from
Each duty comes from the text of the Fourth Amendment. Loyalty comes from its requirement that a warrant name the specific place and things to be searched; care from its requirement that searches be reasonable; confidentiality from its ban on unreasonable searches; and transparency from its requirement of a warrant someone can examine.
The remedy
"Don't be evil" has never worked. The answer is "can't be evil."
Since 1973, government has promised to follow fair information principles: collect only what you need, use it only for the stated purpose, let people see and correct their records. Those principles were right. They were never enforced, because the systems allowed every violation and the rules merely asked officials not to commit them. Illinois had a law against sharing its license plate data. The system shared it anyway.
Don't be evil
Build a system that can do anything, then write a policy asking officials to hold back. The policy can be rewritten, waived in an emergency, or ignored.
Can't be evil
Build a system that answers only the question it is authorized to answer. A license plate check confirms whether a car matches an active warrant, and keeps nothing about everyone else. The tracking capability is never created.
But doesn't government need this?
Six hard cases, answered
Government has real work to do. Every one of these tasks can be done without building a standing profile of everyone:
- Emergencies. Paramedics reach the medical facts they need, when they need them, with a record of the access.
- Fraud. An agency checks whether a claim is valid without pulling your whole file.
- Getting services. You prove you qualify once, with a digital credential you hold on your phone, much like showing a license to prove you're over 21 without handing over your address. Agencies stop copying your records from one another.
- Guardianship. A guardian acts for someone under clear, limited, recorded authority.
- Child welfare. Investigators reach what an investigation requires under specific authority, not a standing view of every family.
- Criminal investigation. Police get specific information about a specific person through a warrant, as the Constitution already expects.
The proposed laws
Three state laws would make the duties real
Rights that cannot be enforced are only hopes. Three model state laws turn the four duties into obligations you can enforce in court.
Your ID belongs to you
Government vouches for facts about you on a digital credential you keep, like a license on your phone. When you use it, government confirms only what is needed and builds no central file of where you used it.
Government owes you duties
Government handles your information the way a lawyer handles a client's confidences, and you can go to court if it does not.
AI follows the same rules
If a government algorithm affects a decision about you, you have the right to know and to challenge it. AI gains no power government itself lacks.
This is already happening. Utah set the principles for citizen-controlled digital identity in 2025 (SB 260). In 2026 it passed SB 275 unanimously, creating a digital identity bill of rights and the first law to give government a duty of loyalty over digital identity: facts can be used only for the purpose they were given.
What you can do
Ask the question nobody asks
Most officials who vote to fund government technology have never been asked whether the systems they are buying are constitutional. You can ask, at whatever level suits you.
- Share one sentence.
"Information I give the government should be used only for the reason I gave it." Post it, send it, or say it at the next public meeting you attend. - Ask three questions at a public meeting.
County councils, city councils and school boards buy data systems too, and their budget hearings are open to the public. Ask:- Can this system look up any resident?
- Who can see the record of who searched?
- Is information used only for the reason it was collected?
- Write to your state legislator.
Ask whether your state's systems can assemble a profile of any resident, and whether your state will adopt the four duties into law. Use our short letter. - Watch and share.
Two short videos explain the argument in plain language. Watch the videos. - Tell us where we're wrong.
This is a working framework, and criticism makes it better. Get in touch.