"Amendment IV: 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."
Maybe it should be illegal?
Then Congress has to pass a law to make it illegal.
There’s obviously something very wrong here, but it’s a dead end to say no one can sell the government info about people. Need a different approach in the vein of outlawing crazy TOSs, keeping user ownership of their data even if used to make a service operate, right to be forgotten, etc.
Telcos are exempt for exactly the reason you mention: phones are really important to daily life and they collect tons of sensitive data as a side effect of normal use.
IMO this is one of the more viable routes to getting this behavior changed: expand Third Party Doctrine exemptions to a lot more services, but to do that we’d have to confront just how much data we’re choosing to share, and whether we’re actually choosing to share it.
Without data protection laws that data isn't your private data, that data is the company's data. And you are free to do whatever you want with your data, and since the company owns this data the company can sell it to the government, it doesn't matter if you consider it to be your private data the company still owns it. Europe has GDPR which clarifies this, the data is yours even if it is stored on company servers, I'm not aware of USA having anything similar except for health data.
So to me it sounds like you'd want USA to create something akin to GDPR.
Or maybe it's not, and we need new legislation specifically targeting this. That's where the Supreme Court comes in: their raison d'être is to resolve ambiguities in existing law.
Got any precedents for this? All examples given in this thread was about the government forcing companies to hand over data, not companies just plain selling it to the government. These companies are already selling this data to other companies, like credit score companies gets a lot of data from banks, so to them selling it to the government as well is just another buyer. Does the fourth amendment really apply to cases like this? My hunch is that it does not, and you wont find any such cases since it is so clear that it doesn't apply that it hasn't even reached a court.
The better solution would be to have laws legislated. However, unfortunately, there is so much gridlock because congress members are just chasing after Ws for their respective parties and minimizing Ls.
1. The data is not yours. It’s the company’s 2. The government is not “search or seizing” the data, they are purchasing it or a license to it. 3. The company is selling it voluntarily, the government is not compelling it.
The fourth does not apply.
It requires searches and seizures to be reasonable.
It also creates requirements for the basis of any warrants that are issued.
It is a series of Supreme Court rulings that infers a general warrant requirement with some exceptions from that text.
A person cannot sell themselves into slavery. Yet we allow the US government to endorse indentured servitude for immigrant labor, because corporations want indentured servitude.
Nor can a US citizen sign away workplace safety rights, legally. Yet we allow US construction companies to rampantly hire off-the-books undocumented labor so that they can freely ignore workplace safety rights, since no one will exist to make claims against them.
It would have been perfectly reasonable for a court to broadly ban surveillance of individuals by telecom companies back in the 1990s, based on the same principles that those courts have willfully violated on behalf of corporations in the other examples above.
Therefore, arguing precedent and consistency is relatively pointless. My point was an exercise in "anything goes, so make the law fit the argument." That's what Chevron would do.
In other words: What's the desired outcome? That corporations cannot wantonly create mass surveillance any more than the government can. So make the law fit the desired reality: extend the 4th amendment to say that privacy is a basic human right and people cannot contractually sign it away any more than they can contractually sign away themselves into forced labor. A clever judge could outlaw H1 visas in the same ruling and get 2 birds with 1 stone.
That’s the key here - these companies are already selling this information. The govt is just saying “cool, we’ll buy it too”.