Court Opinion

ID: 9791278
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 02:08:25.65442+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:37:35.196418
License: Public Domain

BRYNER, Chief Judge,
concurring.
I join in the court’s decision but want to emphasize the narrow scope of our holding. We hold only that the reach of the Alaska Constitution’s privacy clause stops short of information relating to an individual’s residence address when that information is held by a public utility in connection with customer service records that are themselves open for public disclosure and not subject to protection by the right of privacy-
In Chryst’s case, M.E.A. elected to treat the residence addresses of its members as confidential. On the other hand, the utility apparently made available to the public records of the services it provided to its members. It seems that the trial court relied heavily on M.E.A.’s disclosure policies to conclude that Chryst’s constitutional right to privacy prohibited the disclosure of his address but not the records detailing his electrical consumption at that address. The trial court’s reliance on the internal policies adopted by M.E.A., however, is questionable. While M.E.A.’s disclosure policies would certainly be relevant to the issue of Chryst’s subjective expectations and might affect Chryst’s contractual rights vis-a-vis M.E.A., they cannot determine the scope of the constitutional right to privacy.
Chryst, however, has not, at this stage of his case, challenged the superior court’s *543decision that M.E.A. had a right to disclose information relating to the services that it provided him. Consequently, we must assume that aspect of the superior court’s ruling to be valid for purposes of deciding the issue presented here: the permissibility of disclosing Chryst’s address. Given that Chryst’s address was not associated with any other confidential utility records, we have concluded that the privacy clause did not preclude its disclosure.
In my view, it is particularly significant that the two closest cases cited by Chryst appear to support our conclusion. In both People v. Chapman, 36 Cal.3d 98, 201 Cal. Rptr. 628, 679 P.2d 62 (1984), and State v. Butterworth, 48 Wash.App. 152, 737 P.2d 1297 (1987), a telephone utility’s disclosure of a customer’s address was held to violate the customer’s right to privacy. Both cases, however, involved situations in which the customer’s address was associated with an unlisted telephone number. In both cases, the unlisted number was the core information found to be protected by the right to privacy, and the customer’s address was deemed protected as a consequence of its relationship to the protected information. Neither case purports to hold that a person’s address is in and of itself private information whose disclosure is constitutionally protected, and Chryst cites no cases reaching such a conclusion.
Indeed, in Chapman, the California Supreme Court went to considerable lengths to emphasize the significance of the relationship between the customer’s address and the privacy of the unlisted number that served as the source for that information. Chapman, 679 P.2d at 68-69. The court analogized the situation to that of the attorney-client privilege, which normally does not protect against disclosure of a client’s identity, but which does apply in particular circumstances when disclosure would have the effect of revealing client confidences. Id. at 69.
Because Chapman and Butterworth are distinguishable from Chryst’s case, it is unnecessary to decide whether we would be inclined to follow them in a case in which a customer’s address was revealed by a utility that held the information in connection with other confidential records.' My chief concern in writing this separate concurrence is to assure that our decision is not misunderstood as rejecting Chapman and Butterworth or as suggesting that we would decline to follow those eases in other contexts. The court’s opinion should be read as addressing only the narrow factual circumstances involved in this case.