> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated[.]
While digital records can easily be considered “papers” the function of the possessive adjective “their” in English hasn’t changed since 1791. A person can complain about an unreasonable search of their digital papers. They can’t complain about the digital search of someone else’s digital papers, like Google’s IP logs.
Section 215 used to allow the FBI to apply to the FISA court for “an order requiring the production of any tangible things”—a subpoena duces tecum. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/subpoena_duces_tecum
That legal instrument has been in use since the 1600s, and was imported into American law. Until the 20th century, nobody thought it was an unreasonable search under the 4th amendment for the government to subpoena documents where the person complaining about the subpoena had no property interest in the materials: https://commons.stmarytx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=105...
Of course under a “living constitution” style reasoning you can do whatever you want. (After all many people think there is a right to “privacy” in the constitution, when it never uses that word, but think there is no right to own firearms, which is right there in black and beige!) We are probably well on our way to that with the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Carpenter which found the fourth amendment protected cell phone location information. But if you care about what the Constitution actually says, it’s difficult to understand why a defendant can complain about a fourth amendment violation for a subpoena demanding that Google turn over Google’s IP logs.
Google searches are tricky for sure. I'm asking Google to look something up for me. What I looked up is their record.
But for example, video rentals are specifically protected as are library checkout records. Even though I've asked those places to do something for me, they can't reveal that.
So yeah, it's tricky, but at the end of the day it should probably count as my personal property.
If you take the view GDPR takes, most data about the person is their data.
>> and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm not a lawyer, but, from what I understand, probable cause refers to whether the law was violated by the party subject to the warrant. If Google has not violated the law, then what is probable cause referring to?