¶ … right to privacy is wrongly assumed to be expressly protected by the Constitution; in fact no right to privacy clause exists but is implied in the Bill of Rights. Privacy is implied, for example, in the freedom of religious beliefs and practice guaranteed in the First Amendment. The Fourth Amendment's provision against unlawful search and seizure refers to the right to privacy, as does the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. Privacy is broadly believed to be a natural extension of other rights in the Constitution. In Griswold v. Connecticut the court described the right to privacy as part of a "penumbra" or zone encompassing at least the First, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments ("Griswold v. Connecticut and the Right to Contraceptives"). The Griswold case provided the foundation for the later case Roe v. Wade, which used the same penumbra analogy to show that childbearing choices fall within the presumed right to privacy protected by the Constitution. The court has consistently ruled in favor of personal privacy as a fundamental matter of civil liberties, especially since Katz v. United States, which expanded the citizen's locus of privacy in the home to ensure against intrusions of privacy by law enforcement. Since that 1967 case, police...

The penumbra of privacy extends to matters like choice of living arrangements, right to making personal medical conditions such as right to die with dignity laws, the rights of the LGBTQ community, and even to an extent the rights of people to "possess and use small quantities of marijuana" in their home as in the state of Alaska ("The Right of Privacy").
However, the right to privacy is not unlimited. Privacy rights are limited if a person has been placed under arrest, for example. When a person has been placed under arrest, the Court allows law enforcement personnel to conduct searches and seizures of private property and personal space that would not be allowed without probable cause (Kernell, Jacobson, Kousser and Vavreck). An individual's right to privacy may change under other conditions, like entering government buildings (ACLU). Privacy concerns have been escalated in the past several decades due to expectations of online privacy and particularly to the USA-Patriot Act and its narrowing of the scope of personal privacy in the…