Why Californians Have What Texans Don’t
Most Texans assume they have a legal right to privacy — that the government, employers, and companies must respect their personal boundaries. But the truth is far less comforting. In Texas, the right to privacy is limited, implied, and inconsistently enforced.
Unlike California, which explicitly guarantees privacy in its state constitution, Texas has no broad constitutional right to privacy. What protections Texans do have come piecemeal from court decisions and narrowly written statutes. As digital surveillance, data collection, and workplace monitoring become more pervasive, that legal gap is widening fast.
The Origins of the “Right to Privacy”
The U.S. Constitution never mentions the word privacy. The idea evolved through Supreme Court decisions that inferred privacy from several amendments.
Key cases include:
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): Recognized a right to marital privacy regarding contraception.
Roe v. Wade (1973): Extended that right to abortion decisions (later overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022).
Lawrence v. Texas (2003): Struck down Texas’s sodomy law, affirming that adults have a right to private, consensual relationships.
From these cases, privacy emerged as a limited constitutional right, focused mainly on intimate, personal decisions, not on data, workplace, or consumer privacy.
So when Texans say, “I have a right to privacy,” what they really have is a patchwork of protections that vary depending on who is intruding and how.
Privacy in Texas: Narrow and Fragmented
Texas recognizes privacy primarily through tort law and specific statutes, not through its constitution. The Texas Constitution does not include a general privacy clause, offering only indirect protection under provisions for liberty and due process.
State courts recognize four types of privacy violations under civil law:
Intrusion upon seclusion, such as wiretapping or unlawful surveillance.
Public disclosure of private facts, such as revealing confidential medical or sexual information.
Appropriation of likeness, such as using someone’s image or name without consent for profit.
False light publicity, such as misrepresenting someone publicly in a way that damages reputation.
These are reactive, not preventive: they allow lawsuits after a violation occurs but do not prevent invasions from happening in the first place.
Statutory protections exist for specific data categories, such as:
The Texas Medical Privacy Act, which mirrors HIPAA rules for health data.
The Texas Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act, which requires breach notifications.
The Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (2023), which imposes limited consumer data restrictions on large businesses.
Together, these provide fragments of privacy protection — but there is no comprehensive right to control how your information is collected, sold, or monitored.
Recording Laws: Texas’s One-Party Consent Rule
Another area where Texans overestimate their privacy is in audio and video recording.
Under Texas Penal Code §16.02(c)(4)(A) and Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code §123.001, Texas is a one-party consent state for recording conversations. This means that as long as one participant in the conversation — including the person making the recording — is aware of and consents to the recording, it is legal.
In practical terms:
A person can legally record a phone call or in-person conversation without informing the other party, as long as they themselves are part of it.
Recordings made secretly by a non-participant (for example, a hidden third party bugging a room) are illegal.
Consent is required only from one side of the exchange.
For many Texans, this comes as a surprise. They assume that private conversations are protected, or that secret recordings are automatically illegal. In reality, under state law, you can be recorded without your knowledge or permission — and that recording can often be used as evidence in court.
By contrast, California is a two-party (or “all-party”) consent state under its Penal Code §632. In California, all participants in a conversation must agree to the recording. Recording someone without their consent is a criminal offense that can also lead to civil penalties.
This difference captures the broader philosophical divide between the two states:
Texas values individual discretion and evidence-gathering.
California prioritizes personal consent and informational privacy.
California: Privacy as a Constitutional and Consumer Right
California enshrines privacy directly in its state constitution. Since 1972, Article I, Section 1 has declared:
“All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”
This gives Californians a clear legal basis to challenge both government and corporate intrusions.
It also laid the foundation for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and its expansion, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). Together, these laws give Californians rights that Texans simply do not have:
The right to know what personal data a company collects about them.
The right to request deletion of that data.
The right to opt out of data sharing or sales.
The right to limit use of sensitive personal information, such as health or location data.
California also created the California Privacy Protection Agency, which enforces compliance — a level of oversight absent in Texas.
Misunderstanding Privacy in Everyday Life
When Texans invoke a “right to privacy,” they often mean one of three things:
That the government cannot monitor them without cause.
That employers cannot intrude into their private lives.
That companies cannot collect or sell their personal information.
Each of those is true only in limited circumstances.
The Fourth Amendment restricts unreasonable government searches, but surveillance programs, metadata collection, and border checks still occur without warrants. Employers in Texas can monitor workplace communications, GPS tracking, and computer activity if they own the equipment or have disclosed their policy. And private companies can collect and sell personal data freely unless they fall under specific privacy statutes.
In short, privacy in Texas depends heavily on context — who is watching, why, and what kind of data is involved.
Why It Matters
Privacy used to mean solitude: the ability to close your door and be left alone. Today, it means control — over who can see your data, track your movements, or listen to your conversations.
In that sense, Texas’s legal framework has not kept up with modern realities. The state emphasizes personal freedom and light regulation but leaves individuals with limited tools to defend their own privacy.
Californians, by contrast, enjoy a constitutional right to privacy, comprehensive consumer data protections, and stronger consent requirements for recordings and surveillance.
The result is a stark difference in practical rights. In Texas, your personal data can be collected, your voice can be recorded, and your activities can be monitored — all legally. In California, those same actions could amount to violations of constitutional and statutory privacy law.