The Atlantic Cod, Gadus morhua, once held a prime ecological and economic presence in the North Atlantic Ocean, and European colonizers capitalized on this resource by establishing a cod fishery in Newfoundland as far back as 1517. In 1992, Newfoundland’s fishery nearly eliminated its cod stocks, and the Gulf of Maine’s stocks were dying three times as fast as managers predicted. The fishery became one of the world’s most concrete examples of the tragedy of the commons, where harvesters exhaust an open-access resource. Guiding the New England Fisheries Management Council (NEFMC) cod fishery rebuilding effort is a tremendous amount of fisheries modeling aimed at estimating a requisite fishery’s stock size, using landings, discards, and survey data. The Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) sources and verifies data partly through the Northeast Fisheries Observer Program (NEFOP). Among the observers’ duties is physically boarding industry vessels to record data. The observers’ physical bias, however, could produce inaccurate data, leading the NEFMC to make inaccurate decisions and hinder the northeastern U.S. cod fishery’s recovery. Inaccurate data would thus hinder managers’ ability to rebuild this historically profitable fishery and the lack of cod would continue to deprive the Northeast’s ecosystem of a key predator. In response to the concern over bias, the NEFMC is currently considering several alternatives to the traditional human observer program in Amendment 23 to the Northeast Multispecies Fisheries Management Plan. One such alternative is electronic monitoring (EM). EM is a system of cameras that captures video of fishing activities onboard vessels, a crucial tool to produce high-quality and low-cost fisheries data to better inform management decisions. However, Northeast fishers have several concerns about EM. EM is a seemingly simple solution to human observers but produces highly detailed video and image data instead of pure numbers, which could identify private individuals, business, or their trade secrets. EM thus presents uncertainty in fishers’ private information, leading to apprehension of EM systems. The opportunity to design a program that is amenable to fishers could speed up implementing EM and its benefits to the northeast’s ecological and economic marine communities. Amending the Magnuson Stevens Act, promulgating strong privacy regulations and internal rules, and ensuring privacy guarantees in third-party contracts would best protect fishers’ privacy, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should consider in light of their broad authority to collect EM data. Strong fisheries management requires strong cooperation and mutual respect; guaranteeing strong privacy rights for EM data furthers everyone’s interests. The goal of this Note is to provide a framework to promote the recovery of New England’s marine environment through coastal stakeholder and federal management cooperation.