If someone let's you borrow their desk, you place it in your home. Does that person have the right to enter your home and use that desk whenever that person sees fit?
Oh, I forgot that I left my [really important item] in
that desk I let you borrow, and your backdoor was unlocked.
Just thought I'd come in and grab it.
What if the person sends their best friend over to retrieve said important item?
Could this person ask a police officer to retrieve it (say the person is handicapped)?
So we're borrowing these "cloud desks". Does that mean the stuff I've placed in the desk is also up for grabs?
Under your analogy, not only can they retrieve the item from the desk, but they also get to know all sorts of things about how I personally used the desk.
I'm sorry, but I don't like it when you leave the
drawers of my cloud desk open like that. So, I
took a picture of it so I can keep track of its use.
Now, would you agree to a borrow of a desk
if you are expected to not only maintain its quality of state, but
also it is that you are expected to record your every interaction with it?
They're recording it for you — fair enough, but is the loaner permitted to share those photos with other people? When does it end?
So the loaner isn't a government. But extrapolating from this: The Fourth Amendment gives us a clear answer to this question. Sure, it's not private, but that is beside the point. How I use the desk, technically, is not private, but something stops the loaner from telling the entire neighborhood about how I used the desk. That something is unwritten, often described in terms of "the rules of decorum" or simply: it's not worth it.
Thank Goodness Our Founding Fathers Decided to Write Something Down that Explicitly Answers this Question — When does it end? — in an Explicit Context that Can Be Governed.
Heck, by this Decision, our government can share our metadata with FOREIGN ENEMIES at their whimsy based on international agreements that statistically legislate over terror. This Decision just makes us a metastatistic, ultimately collatoral damage of a digital war.
They're exacerbating this institutionalized equivocation exactly so that they can cultivate our consumerist behavior and behavior as content producers for their own financial gain. They're exploiting exactly the fact that the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the digital age. They're doing this on purpose:
ooops sry i didn't know what an internat wuz im just too old i guess
They're not doing their due diligence to correctly interpret, adapt, and apply these laws. And the Judicial Branch is folding to monied interest indirectly.