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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

"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."

The US Government does _not_ have the legal authority to arbitrarily collect or seize data without a warrant specifying exactly where and what they're looking for.

>So much so that they have codified the few that it doesn't apply to.

There are a few exceptions on whom you can get warrants for, but we're not complaining about warrants with probable cause.

The complaint is that our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" are being violated without probable cause and without "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized".

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The Fourth Amendment seems to be pretty merky when it comes to data about you belonging to and stored with other entities.

The "3rd party doctrine" is a bullshit interpretation and it needs to die. When I go through the trouble of coming up with a long complicated password and setup two factor authentication it's pretty obvious that I have "an expectation of privacy". Maybe what the tech companies need to do is have a checkmark on sign up that says "I expect my data to be private".

It sounds like a joke, but would this work?

He clicked the check box... there's nothing we can do here images entire backup anyway

My take: The third party doctrine is a natural consequence of the use of "their" in the 4th amendment. People have a fourth amendment right to "their" persons, houses, papers, and effects. Bits on Google's hard drives aren't "theirs" they're Google's. You have no property right in those bits. If Google loses them, you can't sue them for negligence. If they change their TOS and monetize those bits, you have no recourse.[1]

It wouldn't even be a hard issue of the Supreme Court hadn't injected this "expectation of privacy" concept that appears nowhere in the text of the amendment.

[1] From Google's TOS: "When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."

Google's TOS negates your point. Google requires such a license to because those works belong to you. The license (which does not transfer ownership) gives Google the right to do all the things listed.

Of course, a lot information is actually generated by Google and even though it's about you (search history, etc) and doesn't belong to you.

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