It's unreasonable to expect every citizen to understand when and where their data is being taken.
It's unreasonable to expect people to understand what actions lead to what data points.
It's unreasonable to assess data for unrelated traits that don't match every person perfectly.
It's unreasonable to trust a company selling data to not at some point include illegal data. Certainly not without a verified chain of custody.
It is unreasonable for the government to bypass the constitution by using limited interpretation of language.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, 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.
In a digital world, one's "Person" and "effects" have become inseparable from the phones/platforms we communicate with. Participation in many cases is not a choice if one is to function in society.
The requirement that warrants are issued only upon establishment of probable cause also highlights the issue here. It seems highly dubious that a company holding your data and selling that data is somehow an acceptable end-around the warrant requirement.
Is this all technically legal? Seems like it might be. Is this what the authors of the 4th amendment had in mind? Seems extremely unlikely.
I can't read the 4th amendment and this article and not come to a conflict. It seems obvious to me that it is unreasonable to expect a person (with the average IQ being 94-98) to understand what data on their phone is public or private.
It's obvious because we have millions of teenagers believing they have privacy on their phones to a point where they break incredibly consequential laws to store sexualized imagery there.
What the average citizen believes is private is where the goal posts should be.
So a potential solution is to poll America asking the following question:
Donald Trump and Joe Biden would both like to download all the data on your phone to share with the world via press conference. Do you accept? If 50% of people so no, it is unreasonable.
Disclaimer: I worked on Geolocation products with the top 3 aggregators and have extensive experience with Palantir.
Both geolocation and sexual proclivities are often considered private.
2 years ago I had access to enough data to stalk any person I chose, anywhere in North America. If they connected to a network of websites (GM/Stellantis/Nissan corp and all their dealer pages, plus most of MBUSA) I could see a profile of them and where they went.
I knew their work schedule, where they worked, where they did lunch, when they were in a meeting and when they were taking the day to go to Canada's Wobderland. This was done with permission of the friend and encouraged by my boss.
The end result was dealerships having a ~90% accurate intent to purchase. Which was used to increase sale prices. We were measuring the success with our partners at a Lexus dealer in Toronto.
* Some brands(of vehicles) have been changed to similar brands to protect myself.
Your example is knowing the location of somebody. That's it. You example isn't about knowing who they're calling, what they're saying, their Wordle high score, their pictures, theirs emails, etc.
I don't doubt you had highly detailed geolocation. Just make that your poll though since that's what you have an example of.
you are not inconvenienced when the NSA buys data in the same way that you're inconvenienced when you have to feed/house a soldier.
While it's extremely unlike the authors of the 4th amendment had the internet & etc in mind this concept of selling things to the government surely was known to them and so the current implementation would be OK from their perspective.
A lot of the first 10 amendments are about protecting your physical property from the Government. 2nd - Guns, 3rd - House, 4th - Property, 8th - Money. The digital bits that Google and etc created (ex. metadata) are clearly neither in your procession nor your property. There is no amendment that protects letters you wrote but gave to somebody else nor recordings made by somebody else of your interaction with them.
People have digital homes just as they have physical homes, and they have digital letters (mail, messages or chat) traveling to and from those digital homes. It is not unreasonable to expect all of that to be private against broad government surveillance.
You're decided to add a condition of "held by the post office" to the letter example. This is not at all what I wrote. Once the letter is delivered (as it was in my example) that recipient may give it to the Government without a warrant. The government may just not forcibly take it without a warrant.
Again, NSA isn't going into your digital home. They're going into Verizon's digital home and Verizon has invited them in there. Sure Verizon has information there that you gave them but just like if it had written Verizon physical letters it's not _your_ home its _Verizon's_ home.
It's fine to think of this like a loophole but gathering information and selling it really isn't some novelty that didn't exist in the 1700s.
1. Landlord writes into rental agreements that they could have someone inspect the property every year.
2. Sold access to people's apartments to police officers every year.
Your friend also cannot just bust into your house and search through your things. Now the government because it has enormous powers behind it and people willing to do the wrong thing on its behalf is specifically limited in what it’s allowed to do.
Because that's what's really happening here. Once you sell your data to Facebook, Twitter, etc, it's no longer "in your house." If you granted third parties license to collect and sell your data under terms of service, then that data no longer belongs to you, and you agreed to that..
To me the bigger problem isn't the government buying data on the open market, it's that data is a market to begin with.
That's the general thrust of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and is called the "third-party doctrine". But the Carpenter decision in 2018 is a big exception to that, and it's likely that more are to come.
Seems like a problem that will never be fixed, on purpose.
One concerning development is how much the Democratic Party, which used to be a major proponent of restrictions on government searches, has cozied up to the defense and intelligence establishments since 2016 because of a shared interest in stopping populist right-wing movements that also happen to be anti-interventionist. They're also less keen on digital rights these days because they want to censor right-wingers online.