【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】

Ignorance is bliss.

This is not an area of law I stay up to date on, but that did not used to be the case. Is that a rather new development?

Last I knew most courts were holding that since customers are sharing this information with third parties (sharing with their phone companies, Apple and Google, Facebook, etc.), giving everything away anyway, most individuals have waived any claim to an expectation of privacy. The right to privacy is founded upon reasonable expectations. I did hear about some pushback on that, more recently, but not from the Court of Appeals from DC, which has jurisdiction over appeals taken from federal agencies, prior to the Supreme Court. I’d be grateful to be shown otherwise. About time, if true.

Search and seizure, the Fourth Amendment, only applies to State actors. The only exception is when a private entity is acting as an agent of the government, such as in the case of private prisons.

Congress needs to pass consumer protection laws aimed at privacy in the digital age. They haven’t updated this sort of thing I believe since 1996. It used to be legal for adult video stores to disclose the tapes people rented, but Congress passed a privacy law forbidding it when some journalists disclosed some of their rentals. The scandal had some cool name. I forgot what.