Hacker News Reader

Comment by meepmorp | Hacker News Reader

Would you expect, then, that a list of phone numbers someone called or sent text messages to would be the kind of information that are not considered private? A list of addresses to which someone sent email? A list of URLs visited or books checked out of the library?

View on HN

There are certain protections that apply to libraries as public institutions. I wouldn't expect any of the others to be private. The rationale for why the postal "metadata" is not private is simple: no one can reasonably expect anything they write on the outside of an envelope and then drop in a box for potentially dozens of people to handle to be private. That same reasoning can be applied to phone numbers, text messages, e-mail addresses, and URL's. If I'm disclosing to Google what URL's I'm visiting by typing them into Chrome, I can't complain if the government can access them too.

There is this idea among hackers that you should be able to trust Google, etc, to keep information private from the government. But that's not what privacy means in the context of the 4th amendment.

The 4th amendment starts with: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..."

It's clearly referring to things that are truly private: things you keep in your house or on your person, not things you voluntarily share with potentially hundreds of people at AT&T, Google, Apple, Akamai, etc.

> If I'm disclosing to Google what URL's I'm visiting by typing them into Chrome, I can't complain if the government can access them too.

How many people realize they're (with the default configuration) disclosing to Google what they type into the address bar?

Reminds me of a Cory Doctorow short story that takes place in the near future. In it, US Customs can't view your Google search history, but they can view the ads served to you as a result of your searches.

http://craphound.com/scroogled.html

Absurd. If I have a contractual relationship with another party to keep information shared with them private, law enforcement should not be able to force disclosure without a court order.

By your rationale, there is no warrant necessary to search the secured offices of a corporation that employs an outside cleaning staff.

> There is this idea among hackers that you should be able to trust Google, etc, to keep information private from the government. But that's not what privacy means in the context of the 4th amendment.

Do you think it's appropriate to evaluate the meaning of "privacy" through what a 200-year-old document says? Or do you think we might need to take the Internet into account too? Does privacy have anything to do with what laws say?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com