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 protecting it
Two things are happening at once. Courts are narrowing the implied federal protections that privacy has rested on since the 1960s, and the volume of information collected about ordinary people has grown beyond anything the drafters of the existing protections imagined. Mass data collection and automated analysis mean that a record created for one purpose can be repurposed for another, years later, against the person who created it.
- Federal demands for transgender patients' recordsIn 2025 the Justice Department issued more than twenty subpoenas to hospitals and clinics providing gender-affirming care, seeking patient names, dates of birth, home addresses, Social Security numbers and clinical notes. In 2026 federal prosecutors sought those records from New York hospitals, including NYU Langone. A judge blocked that subpoena, but the protection came from a court order rather than from anything in the state constitution.
- Health data routed into immigration enforcementIn June 2025 federal health officials transferred Medicaid files covering millions of people to the Department of Homeland Security. Twenty states sued, and a federal judge blocked further sharing, finding that the administration had given ICE access to information about Medicaid patients regardless of citizenship. Information given to get medical care became information used to find people.
- Identity turned into a searchable recordAge verification mandates, digital identification requirements and data broker markets increasingly make anonymity impossible as a practical matter. Reading, browsing and movement now leave records that can be bought, subpoenaed or shared between agencies.
- Automated systems that act on inferenceGovernment and private systems increasingly draw conclusions about people from patterns in data, including about health, pregnancy, immigration status and political association. The law still mostly asks whether a record was lawfully obtained. It rarely asks what may be inferred from it.
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
- S8603, Senate bill text and statusFull text, sponsor memo and committee history
- A9377, Assembly companionThe same resolution in the Assembly
- 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
Get involved
Organizations across New York have signed on in support. If your organization wants to join the coalition, submit a memo of support, or host a briefing for members, get in touch.