(background street noise) DANIELLE CITRON: Young people actually want privacy, they expect privacy.

LAURA FAAS: I would say that digital privacy is critical today because everything is digital.

DANIELLE CITRON: I'm just trying to think of all the ways that we share information about our innermost fantasies our sex lives, our activities.

And that includes the Alexa in the kitchen.

It's the period tracking app that you have on your phone that's really helpful, chart out when, you know, going to ovulate and have your period.

It's the dating apps that so many people use, young, old.

Dating apps that collect an enormous amount of information.

And you look for diseases and chronic conditions on WebMD.

All of that information, your searches, your browsing, your geolocation collected from your apps on your phone, all that put together tell a story about your intimate life.

There are three sort of central actors that worry me and that implicate our intimate privacy.

And that's the corporate surveillance of intimate life.

It's individuals surveilling and exploiting intimate privacy and it's governments invading intimate privacy.

When it comes to the corporate surveillance of intimate life, we know that like one third of all women and girls use some type of health app.

And those health apps gather a tremendous amount of intimate data that is then shared and sold and sold onward and then sold to data brokers.

If you read the privacy policies on each and every one of the things I've just talked about, most often they're saying we're sharing that information with third parties and those third parties often include advertisers and marketers.

Companies may say to us, the information is anonymized, but it's often accompanied with your mobile device ID number, which is your name.

In a state in which abortion is criminalized, and that state abortion law might criminalize the actions of doctors, as well as anyone helping a person who gets an abortion.

And it could also include the pregnant person.

And if we've taken our phone to the clinic with us, it will provide circumstantial evidence of an abortion.

So all of those data points help enable law enforcement to get a warrant and then a warrant to get our phone that can be then used as a predicate to arrest a physician or a pregnant individual who's terminated a pregnancy.

LAURA FAAS: As Professor Citron had, you know, I've learned from her, we tend to think of privacy in these silos.

And we have the law HIPAA that protects health data in certain contexts, but in much more limited context than a lot of people think.

And we also have some consumer protection privacy laws.

But we don't have a comprehensive piece of legislation that protects privacy in all respects.

And I think that that is the goal.

DANIELLE CITRON: What are the protections that we have in Virginia around intimate privacy?

And the answer is woefully inadequate.

Because Virginia lacks a comprehensive approach to intimate privacy.

We all deserve intimate privacy.

We all want it, we all expect it and we all deserve it.

And so I think we need to bring kind of our moral chops to the table and say, this is for all of us and stop it.