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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

The question is, if you hold a garage sale and someone buys your stuff and the governments then buys that stuff from whomever you sold it to, is it a Fourth Amendment violation?

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.

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>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.

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.

So a one off garage sale run doesn’t seem “unreasonable” —they came upon it… accidentally or gumshoed it… but once it becomes systematic and pervasive I definitely believe it is in contradiction with the fourth amendment to the constitution of the US

If the government is using the data to bypass a restriction then that same government is unlikely to create a law to change that.

Seems like a problem that will never be fixed, on purpose.

You would think so, but Congress has occasionally done things like this, like pass the Wiretap Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, both of which impose restrictions on government access to information beyond what the Courts at the time required under the Fourth Amendment.

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.

It appears like the Neocons, previously associated with a war-philic faction of the Republican party has surreptitiously, through the Clintonite "third way" faction of the Democrat party, made vast inroads into the current Democrat party, in measure because of the Neocon opposition to non-interventionism which is associated with parts of the Republican right and also parts of the Democrat left. Off bedfellows but has become rather "mainstream" in both parties.

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