My take:  The third party doctrine is a natural consequence of the use of &quot;their&quot; in the 4th amendment. People have a fourth amendment right to &quot;their&quot; persons, houses, papers, and effects. Bits on Google&#x27;s hard drives aren&#x27;t &quot;theirs&quot; they&#x27;re Google&#x27;s. You have no property right in those bits. If Google loses them, you can&#x27;t sue them for negligence. If they change their TOS and monetize those bits, you have no recourse.[1]<p>It wouldn&#x27;t even be a hard issue of the Supreme Court hadn&#x27;t injected this &quot;expectation of privacy&quot; concept that appears nowhere in the text of the amendment.<p>[1] From Google&#x27;s TOS:  &quot;When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.&quot;