Adjunct Professor Deanna Paul wrote an op-ed about the challenges of maintaining online privacy and an upcoming Supreme Court case that deals with the Fourth Amendment in the digital age.
Most people know that very little they do on the web is private. The terabytes of data held online contain personal information accessible not only to friends, relatives and would-be employers, but to private businesses, which frequently collect user information in order to deliver better services to customers.
Can the government see it too?
In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Maryland that Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches do not cover such “third party” access to online data. In what has since been developed as the “Third Party Doctrine,” the court ruled that an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy for information voluntarily given to a third party—be it a person, bank, or phone carrier—information that is also then similarly available to government agencies.
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“Given how much [of]our data goes through third parties, if you take a strong reading of the Doctrine, it essentially wipes out Fourth Amendment protections for most modern communications,” Michael Price, Senior Counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me.
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There are few things we do online that aren’t connected, in some way, to a third party. As smartphone technology continues to advance, more and more aspects of our lives will be recorded and stored on third-party servers. Lower courts across the country are only just beginning to consider how the Internet of Things will affect our expectations of privacy.
