ARTICLE SUMMARY
The Supreme Court’s opinion in Carpenter v. United States is revolutionary. The Supreme Court recognizes that Fourth Amendment privacy rights were intended to preserve a society free of constant surveillance.
POLICY RELEVANCE
For the first time, police will often need to obtain a warrant to access commercial databases.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- In Carpenter v. United States, decided in 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that a customer’s cell phone location data is protected by the Fourth Amendment; for the first time, the Court held that police need a warrant to require a business to reveal information about its customers.
- Carpenter uses three factors to determine whether privacy rights apply when police seek information from a database about individuals:
- The deeply revealing nature of the information.
- The depth and breadth of the information, and the number of people covered.
- Whether collection is inescapable and automatic.
- The deeply revealing nature of the information.
- This revolutionary case means that the police probably need a warrant to access data from fitness trackers and connected cars, web browsing habits, or telephone and banking records.
- Warrants might be needed to access medical records or genetic information.
- Carpenter also should apply to surveillance by drones or license plate readers.
- Warrants might be needed to access medical records or genetic information.
- Under the “third party doctrine,” information a person voluntarily discloses to a third party is not protected by a reasonable expectation of privacy; Carpenter turns this idea inside out.
- Formerly, cases were unclear as to whether the “reasonable expectation” inquiry was descriptive (what do ordinary Americans expect?) or normative (what kind of society does the Constitution seek to promote?); after Carpenter, the inquiry will be normative.
- Carpenter ties the “reasonable expectations” inquiry to constitutional history; the case suggests that the Constitution requires the police to be more inefficient than technology allows, as the Framers of the Constitution sought to place obstacles in the way of permeating police surveillance.
- Several Justices support a rule of “technological equivalence,” that is, if police use a new technology to gather information equivalent to traditionally protected information, use of the new technology also requires constitutional protection.
- Police must have a warrant for thermal imaging to “see” inside the home.
- Police might need a warrant to read email, which resembles private letters.
- Police must have a warrant for thermal imaging to “see” inside the home.
- Some Justices embrace “tech exceptionalism,” the idea that recent advances in information technology are fundamentally different from what has come before.
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About Paul Ohm
Paul Ohm is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center. He specializes in information privacy, computer crime law, intellectual property, and criminal procedure. He teaches courses in all of these topics and more and he serves as a faculty director for the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown. Through his scholarship and outreach, Professor Ohm is leading efforts to build new interdisciplinary bridges between law and computer science.
