Legally that is a correct statement.
If you want that changed, it will require legislation.
We'd have a better chance if anyone with power were talking about court reform to make the Supreme Court justices e.g. drawn by lot for each session from the district courts, but approximately nobody is. It'd be damn good and long overdue reform, but oh well.
And the thing is, we've already had a fairly conservative court for decades. I'm pretty likely to die, even if of old age, never having seen an actually-liberal court in the US my entire life. Like, WTF. Frankly, no wonder so much of our situation is fucked up, backwards, and authoritarianism-friendly. And (sigh) any serious attempts to fix that are basically on hold for many decades more, assuming rule of law survives that long anyway.
[EDIT] My point, in short, is that "we still have [thing], we just have to wait for a liberal court that'll support it" is functionally indistinguishable from not having [thing].
As others have said, in the United States this is, legally, completely correct: there is no right to privacy in American law. Lots of people think the Fourth Amendment is a general right to privacy, and they are wrong: the Fourth Amendment is specifically about government search and seizure, and courts have been largely consistent about saying it does not extend beyond that to e.g. relationships with private parties.
If you want a right to privacy, you will need to advocate for laws to be changed; the ones as they exist now do not give it to you.
As it stands today, a court case (A) affirming the right to use contraception is not equivalent to a court case (B) stating that a phone-company/ISP/site may not sell their records of your activity.
You conflate the absence of a statutory or regulatory regime governing private data transactions with the broader constitutional right to privacy. While it’s true that the Fourth Amendment limits only state action, U.S. constitutional law, via cases like Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas, and clearly recognizes a substantive right to privacy, grounded in the Due Process Clause and other constitutional penumbras. This is not a semantic variant; it is a distinct and judicially enforceable right.
Moreover, beyond constitutional law, the common law explicitly protects privacy through torts such as intrusion upon seclusion, public disclosure of private facts, false light, and appropriation of likeness. These apply to private actors and are recognized in nearly every U.S. jurisdiction.
Thus, while the Constitution may not prohibit a website from selling your data, it does affirm a right to privacy in other, fundamental contexts. To deny that entirely is legally incorrect.
Common law requires a high threshold of offensiveness and are adjudicated on a case-by-case in individual jurisdictions. They offer only remedies and not a proactive right to control your data.
The original point, that there is no general right in the US to have your interactions with a company remain private, still stands. That's not a denial of all privacy rights but a recognition that US law fails to provide comprehensive privacy protection.
“As others have said, in the United States this is, legally, completely correct: there is no right to privacy in American law.”
That is an incorrect statement. The common law torts I cited can apply in the context of a business transaction, so your statement is also incorrect.
If you’re strawman is that in the US there’s no right to privacy because there’s no blanket prohibition on talking about other people, and what they’ve been up to, then run with it.
I completely disagree. Yes, the Prosser privacy torts exist: intrusion upon seclusion, public disclosure, false light, and appropriation. But they are highly fact-specific, hard to win, rarely litigated, not recognized in all jurisdictions, and completely reactive -- you get harmed first, maybe sue later!
They are utterly inadequate to protect people in the modern data economy. A website selling your purchase history? Not actionable. A company logging your AI chats? Not intrusion. These torts are not a privacy regime - they are scraps. Also when we're talking about basic privacy rights, we just as concerned with mundane material not just "highly offensive" material that the torts would apply to.
If don’t want the grocery store telling people you buy Coke, don’t shop there.
As for Safeway selling your data: you're admitting that it's on the individual to opt out, negotiate, or avoid the transaction which just highlights the absence of a rights-based framework. The burden is entirely on the consumer to protect themselves, and companies can exploit that asymmetry unless narrowly constrained by statute (and even then, often with exceptions and opt-outs).
What you're describing isn't a right to privacy -- it's a lack of one, mitigated only by scattered laws and personal vigilance. That is precisely the problem.
While these grand theories of traditional implicit constitutional law are nice, they're pretty meaningless in a system where five individuals can (and are willing to) vote to invalidate decades of tradition on a whim.
I too want real laws.
A company like OpenAI that offers a SaaS is no such friend, and in such power dynamics (individual VS company) it's probably in your best interest to have everything public if necessary.
Why tangle the data of people with very different preferences than yours up in that?
First time?