The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California and most of the Western U.S., just delivered good news for digital privacy: abandoning a phone doesn’t abandon your Fourth Amendment rights in the phone’s contents. In United States v. Hunt, the court made clear that no longer having control of a device is not the same thing as surrendering the privacy of the information it contains. As a result, courts must separately analyze whether someone intended to abandon a physical phone and whether they intended to abandon the data stored within it. Given how much personal information our phones contain, it will be unlikely for courts to find that someone truly intended to give up their privacy rights in that data.
  • reddig33@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Interesting. If throw my tax returns in the garbage, and take the garbage can to the curb — there’s no expectation of privacy. The law says anyone can dig through the trash once it’s at the curb.

    • spinning_disk_engineer@lemmy.ca
      1·
      22 hours ago

      I think the difference is, your phone is encrypted. In order to access any of the data, an attacker has to brute force your password (unless you left it powered on and it hasn’t run out of battery yet), which means a clear security boundary that had to be broken.

      Of course, banning circumvention is clearly bad in lots of other contexts (DMCA), but I think that a phone dropped in an emergency is a pretty good case. There’s maybe even an argument than an unencrypted drive should be protected in that context, though I’m not sure it’s my position.