Troubling Arguments from the Government in Smith v. Obama
> The district court said it felt bound to dismiss her claims because of a 1979 Supreme Court case, <i>Smith v. Maryland</i>. That case involved the collection of the phone numbers dialed by a criminal suspect over the course of three days. It’s one of the cornerstones of the so-called “third party doctrine,” the idea that people have no expectation of privacy in information they entrust to others—and <i>it’s outdated to say the least.</i><p>Post "the Fappening" and the realization that there are essentially no enforceable protections for information you store in the cloud, I'd say <i>Smith v. Maryland</i> makes as much sense as it ever did. After all, back in 1979, call records were stored in a dusty database somewhere, used only for billing purposes. Today, the corresponding data stored by Facebook, Google, etc, are mined, processed, and correlated across time and space for advertising and marketing purposes. If <i>Smith</i> stands for the proposition that the government has at least as much right to access your data for law enforcement purposes as AT&T does for billing purposes, then replacing "AT&T" with "Google" and "Facebook" and "billing" with "advertising" doesn't undermine the rationale of the case one bit.<p>Obviously you can argue that it was wrongly decided in the first instance, but that's a different argument.