That's exactly the logic used to justify civil asset forfeiture. There was a link on here two months ago showing that the assets seized were more than all burglaries in 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10591250 .
Essentially stringent privacy laws often have adverse effect where activities that might be of public benefit Research on Rare diseases/Teacher Accountability/Class action lawsuits are curtailed.
>> You are clearly not familiar with how IRS functions. IRS can and often times does automatically freeze bank accounts if they suspect tax evasion.[1]
The reality is that when it comes to user data the analogy is even weaker, since most user data is transactional in nature. Hence both parties can assert their rights. This is particularly of importance in medical data. Where there are no laws that assure patients of his ownership of his own data.[2]
In reality when it comes to information/data the ownership argument is on a shaky legal grounds. And in some cases data ownership might be counterproductive.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509500 [2] http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v25/25HarvJLTech69....
Among the potential problems with such a solution is that it gives the government the imperative to adjudicate the "ultimate owner" of data. It will not always be obvious, and when it's not, it can surely be decided in such a way that tramples, rather than bolsters, individual rights over data.
Imagine if the government said "hey, that money in your bank account, we can just automatically take our taxes from it, because we're not really taking it from you, we're just taking it from the bank." Probably not the most accurate analogy, but I think you see where I'm going with this.
Since the ruling that invalidated Safe Harbor, Microsoft has been pushing for laws and agreements between nations that say law enforcement shouldn't be coming to Microsoft (as a cloud service provider) with a warrant for data requests, but to their corporate customers. So for instance, if FastMail uses the Azure cloud service, they're saying that if the government wants access to a user's data, they shouldn't be going to Microsoft but to FastMail with the warrant.
It's a small improvement, but Microsoft and all of the other companies should be pushing so this works for all of their customers, not just the corporate ones. It's exactly the same principle, but Microsoft just takes the easier way out here, because that still gets them off the hook, and it's really what they care most about. The corporations (even if they are "people") shouldn't be having more rights than actual people.