Over the last 10+ years, Montana has, with little fanfare or national attention, steadily pushed to protect its residents’ privacy interests through sensible laws that recognize the unique threats posed by new technologies. Now Montana has passed one of the nation’s most protective consumer genetic privacy laws—the Genetic Information Privacy Act. Could this law and the state’s bipartisan approach become a model for the rest of the country?
2013 is a good starting point for this story. That year, Montana passed a law requiring police to get a warrant before they could obtain location information generated by electronic devices. At the time, there were no state or federal laws that explicitly protected this data. And the police were already getting and using location data in thousands of criminal cases across the country every year.
Montana’s straightforward law went into effect two and a half years before California’s landmark privacy law, CalECPA, codified similar protections for location data—and five years before the Supreme Court, in Carpenter v. United States, explicitly recognized the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for access to cell site location information.
Montana may have only a little more than a million residents, but since 2013, it has passed a significant number of other important privacy laws. These run the gamut from prohibiting government face surveillance and limiting face recognition, to providing Montana consumers with explicit privacy rights in their online data and preventing energy utilities from selling or sharing individual advanced meter energy data without consumer consent. In 2021, Montana expressly restricted familial searches of government-
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