Tech companies, law profs agree: The Fourth Amendment should protect data

Enlarge / Outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. (credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images News)

A group of prominent tech companies and lawyers has come together in new friend-of-the-court filings submitted to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. The group is arguing in favor of stronger legal protections for data generated by apps and digital devices in an important privacy case pending before the court.

The companies, which include Apple, Google, and Microsoft among many others, argue that the current state of the law, which distinguishes between "content" (which requires a warrant) and "non-content" (which does not) "make[s] little sense in the context of digital technologies."

The amicus filing by dozens of law professors also concludes that the third-party doctrine "cannot support future application of the Fourth Amendment." The legal theory posits that individuals relinquish their privacy interest in data (like a call record or location data) to a third-party-so the government can access it with a court order rather than a warrant.

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