In January the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police violated the U.S. Constitution when, without first obtaining a search warrant, they placed a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car and tracked his movements for a month. Although the ruling was unanimous, the justices split into two groups in reaching the same conclusion. The majority believed that the GPS placement constituted an “unreasonable search” of the suspect’s property under the Fourth Amendment. Noting that surveillance can be conducted in today’s society without resort to trespass of property, however, the concurring minority of justices reasoned that the police action was unconstitutional because it violated the suspect’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Agreeing with the majority, Justice Sotomayor nonetheless wrote a separate concurring opinion in which she noted that because citizens daily disclose private information to third parties through the various technologies (cell phones, web searches, on line purchases) “in the course of carrying out mundane tasks,” the Court likely soon will have to decide whether information voluntarily disclosed to certain members of the public, for certain limited purposes, is entitled to constitutional protection. That is, can a citizen have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” with regard to information voluntarily disclosed to third parties? Twitter users especially might want to stay tuned. // Michael Racette