Regarding phones, those also have specific laws attempting to protect wireless (cellular) communications from eavesdropping (with the exception of legal wiretaps, which cellular providers are required to be able to support).
Likewise for pagers, those have specific laws making it illegal to intercept the communications sent to pagers.
For normal phones, a specific law had to be passed to require warrants for interception of communication (the "Wiretap Statute" from 1968, later extended by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986).
So the point to all of this is that those privacy "rights" that you talk about are not 4th Amendment rights at all, they are protections granted by specific legal action on the part of Congress. Had that legal action not been taken then you'd be right back in this same "interesting 4th Amendment question" that we're talking about for this.
The bottom line is that if you're willing to give info to a 3rd party unencrypted you need to assume the government can be given access to the same information unless there are specific laws forbidding it.
The statute fixed that privacy issue and then put requirements on when wiretaps could be used by the government. Before this law and the Supreme Court decision the government was very... lax regarding warrants for wiretaps.
On the other hand, it's not a privacy violation for the DHL guy to voluntarily turn over material to the government and the government to use that as evidence against you. Think of the stereotypical "guy at the photo lab" who notices that someone dropped off child porn to be developed, you (sadly) used to see that in the news yearly, and no one thought anything of that being turned over to the government.
In some cases third-party services have privacy protections added by law. E.g. the cellular communications interception thing, it used to be very easy indeed to intercept a cell phone call just by sticking up an antenna. In 1994 the law was changed to make it illegal to intercept those calls in most scenarios, and require search warrants even for that "public transmission" of communications (but the law also required cell phone companies to make it possible to wiretap, the "CALEA" provisions).
Given how strictly regulated banks are I would be very surprised if there are not similar laws providing some semblance of legal protection to the contents of safe deposit boxes, but I'm not sure and don't have time to Google it.
Also: the government could always ask your friend at the other end about what you said, not just Facebook.
The intention of the founders re: the 4th amendment was not to protect communications between people, it was to protect people from personal searches. Read the text: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Persons, houses, papers, and effects? What do all those things have in common? They are personal to you. You'd feel violated if someone else entered your house or rifled through your effects. That same reasoning doesn't apply to something like a Facebook message that any of a number of people at Facebook could read. Maybe you assume that they wouldn't do that, but they certainly can.
Maybe we need a law to keep the government from getting Facebook messages without a warrant. But that's a separate thing from the Constitutional issue. Personally, I don't even think we need such a law. If you're okay with Facebook or Google looking at your communications, you should be okay with the government doing so.
If you could help me follow the idea further: In my mind, a communication is mine until I send it, at which point it is my property in the trust of another, until delivered to whom I'm communicating with, at which point it becomes their property.
I know legal reasoning doesn't always follow what I may consider to be common sense- can you shine any light on what I'm missing?
(Prefer not to focus on the DHL/UPS etc side of things, because I understand their right to snoop is a part of their TOS.)
Think of this hypothetical. Say Google reads your g-mail and tells people you ordered green shirts. Do you have a lawsuit against Google for disclosing your private information? I doubt it. If the information is sensitive for a different reason (e.g. it's about your herpes diagnosis), you might have a suit, but then you'd also have a suit against a friend to whom you told that information in confidence. I.e. it's a suit based on the nature of the sensitive information, not the disclosure by itself.
The idea of this "information trustee" doesn't really exist in the law. Google is treated no differently than a guy on the street you tell to relay a message to your friend. And as for the 4th amendment, as I said, wiretapping aside it's more of a "personal search" protection than a "communication protection." This is a good summary of the relevant precedent: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~chase/cps49s/carnivore-history.html
| Legally, once you hand your communication over
| to Google, it's their property.
If I store files on Dropbox, I am arguably paying for them to store the files for me, not giving them to Dropbox to do with what they like. It should not be treated any differently than a rented storage space in the physical world (regardless of implementation details like de-duplication).
It's like right now you have the idea, but haven't written the code.
But as it stands things are even more lopsided towards Google. Go check their terms of service, I'd bet they have a half dozen different ways of indemnifying themselves from liability in the event they don't deliver that email.
| If you're okay with Facebook or Google looking at
| your communications, you should be okay with the
| government doing so.
- Government employees wield much more power than Facebook employees.
- If it was common knowledge that all Google/Facebook employees had unfettered access to all communications going through their systems, then people would treat the system differently. As it stands, employees should only be looking at specific communications to deal with work functions (investigate complaints from users, look at a message that caused a back-end system to blow up, etc).
But you're not hiding anything. You're transmitting it in clear text through Google/Facebook's services. You're not worried about the right to hide your information, you're worried about the right to hide it against the government specifically. That's the key distinction. I do have things to hide--I don't share those thing with either Google or the government, and those are the things I want protected. If I choose to share something with Google, I'm okay with the government having access to it too.
> Government employees wield much more power than Facebook employees.
In my mind, the government has a lot more power to screw me over, but private industry has a lot more incentive. I'm much more worried about credit ratings agencies, insurance companies, potential employers, etc, having access to my information than I am about the NSA looking at my information.
> As it stands, employees should only be looking at specific communications to deal with work functions
That's the same for government employees. Maybe the difference between us is that you implicitly trust the employees of Facebook not to do stuff like this, and don't trust government employees, while I feel the opposite way.
| But you're not hiding anything. You're
| transmitting it in clear text through
| Google/Facebook's services. You're not worried
| about the right to hide your information, you're
| worried about the right to hide it against the
| government specifically.
| If I choose to share something with Google, I'm
| okay with the government having access to it too.
| Maybe the difference between us is that you
| implicitly trust the employees of Facebook not
| to do stuff like this, and don't trust government
| employees, while I feel the opposite way.
When was the last time that an FBI agent was fired for overstepping their authority? On the other hand, I feel more trust that Facebook/Google would fire an employee that overstepped their authority.
[1] And they are always testing the bounds of how they can apply the law. See the case of trying to charge the mother that drove her daughter's classmate to suicide, where they tried to charge her with 'hacking' because she violated the Terms of Service of MySpace.
How do you figure that?
> To be fair, there are bad actors in all places, but the FBI/US Attorney General has more incentive to pull people into court, and send them to jail than Facebook employees do.
The difference is that only a small fraction of people do things that causes the federal government to become interested in putting them in jail. Most people do things that arise the interest of private industry. See, e.g., the credit ratings agency mafia. Those companies would have a field day if they had access to Facebook's information. See also, all the hiring managers that would have to have access to peoples' social networking information in order to blacklist them for jobs. Or insurance companies looking for any reason to drop people from healthcare plans, etc.
How much you worry about something is generally proportional to the product of how likely that something is to happen and how bad that thing would be if it did happen. It's exceedingly unlikely that you'll be at the receiving end of a federal prosecution, even if that would be a really bad thing. But having trouble with your credit, having trouble getting a job, being dropped from your health insurance--all of these things are much more likely, and they can be pretty bad in and of themselves. Yeah, sure, the government can bankrupt me defending a prosecution, but then again so can my HMO dropping me from my health plan if I get sick.
As I said, I imagine this is a matter of outlook. I don't see myself as a revolutionary who might get railroaded by the government for fighting for a just cause. I do see myself as a guy with a wife and a kid looking to buy a house some day, worrying about health care costs for my aging parents, etc. Given that, the ways private industry can screw me over are a lot more real to me.
I'm pretty sure that "reasonable expectation
of privacy" is found no where in the
Constitution.
Employment agreements are also subject to contract law concepts such as consideration[1], which would come into play when someone stops and asks "what's in it for me?" A single job as described at the beginning of the relationship through the employment agreement is probably not going to be seen as valuable enough for someone to have legitimately signed away his future productivity.
I'm not sure what you mean by "you can't sign your rights away". IP is of course transferable.
Not without a signature on a document itemizing the IP being transferred.
Same goes for FB, Google and other providers. They have the ability to read your mail and occasionally do just like the phone company.
Bonus example: voice mail. It's just like email since its a message sitting on the service providers computer. Can the Feds just listen to those messages?
It's when we are being data mined by the government there's a problem. I think we all don't mind being data mined for advertising (within reason) but when we are being watched to be 'kept in line' that's where there's a problem. At that point it's more like 'Minority Report' where you are being scrutinized before you even do anything.