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Comment by sharemywin | Hacker News Reader

shouldn't that apply to companies too?

No, the Fourth Amendment only applies to the government. You'd need to pass a new law prohibiting companies from doing the same.

> the Fourth Amendment only applies to the government.

Source? The way I read it there doesn't seem to be any such restriction.

IIRC there weren't corporations in the modern sense when the bill of rights was written.

Burdeau v. McDowell

The Constitution is binding only on the government; it is a document that lays out what the United States federal government, and, in a few cases, what the states of the United States can and cannot do.

The Bill of Rights is a set of 10 amendments that restrict what the federal government can do with respect to citizens. The 14th amendment extends those restrictions from the federal government to include state governments as well. (Since local governments are considered extensions of the state government's jurisdiction, it's included as well).

> IIRC there weren't corporations in the modern sense when the bill of rights was written.

The Virginia Company is a corporation in the modern sense that is literally the origin of the United States. Actually, if anything, corporations have gotten less powerful since the Bill of Rights; we don't have any companies running countries any more.

> IIRC there weren't corporations in the modern sense when the bill of rights was written.

The Dutch East India Company was a publicly-traded multinational corporation as early as the early 1600s.

So what happens when a company is acting on behalf of/as an extension of the government? And exactly how close can that relationship get?

If I'm a cell phone company and decide to just give the government access to all data I have pass through my systems, is that allowed? What if the government gives me some benefit in return for it?

> When police apprehended some members of the ring, the smaller fish implicated the leader of the ring, Timothy Carpenter. Police got a court order to get access to 127 days of cellphone tracking records for Carpenter and other members of the gang.

> Lo and behold, Carpenter's general location information matched the robbery locations, and that information was used to help convict him. Carpenter appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, contending that the Constitution required that police first obtain a warrant before getting this location information from a service provider.

This paragraph makes it seem like the govt must get a warrant before it can ask the service provider for that information.

But what happens if I give without being asked? If I provide an API for them to pull any data they want, is it that they need a warrant to make a data pull? If I drop off a book with the data, they need a warrant before opening the book?

Read the case: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf

> So what happens when a company is acting on behalf of/as an extension of the government? And exactly how close can that relationship get?

FYI, the legal term you're looking for is "state actor". In case that helps with googling.

The police were getting it from the companies, without a search warrant, so one step at a time.

Supreme Court rulings are narrow in general, and this opinion took pains to make it narrower than normal.

Companies need to know where you are so they can route your call, bill the appropriate party the correct amount, and credit the appropriate tower operator.

Interactions and the special implicit relationship with the government are involuntary.

Unfortunately, the constitution was written by folks who at the time likely could not have imagined the kind of corporate power and technology that exists today.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/madisons-p...

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