Not particularly. It's an isolated data point; an outlier. I haven't read the court opinion, but the EFF's take isn't exactly spirit raising. They ruled it u

Not particularly. It's an isolated data point; an outlier. I haven't read the court opinion, but the EFF's take isn't exactly spirit raising. They ruled it unconstitutional because the retention period was long enough that you could easily build a detailed ledger of where everyone has been. That seems to implicitly allow surveillance networks, so long as they don't keep the data for very long, or if it's more than trivial to track an individual. More broadly, there still seem to be no penalties (either for doing something that should be obviously illegal, or for lying to the court in earlier statements). We've locked a door, but we haven't closed the windows. > Don't you wonder if the future is actually one where, to borrow a quote from a famous legal decision, "the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places"? That quote doesn't particularly help your case. Katz won that argument under the logic that physical intrusion was unnecessary. Yet here we are, over 50 years later, doing very similar things in slightly different ways. In a just world, this aerial surveillance program never would have gotten off the ground. Like I said before, we closed the door but nobody shut the windows. Until there are some actual penalties, vendors are going to keep crawling in through the window and opening the door with slightly different variations of technology that haven't been explicitly banned yet. It also doesn't fill me with hope that we draw the line at some 1984-esque individual tracking system. "Oh, sure, you can track everyone. As long as there's a modicum of effort to tie the records to an individual, you can track whatever you want." "Modicum of effort" usually means you pay a vendor for software to do it, and then don't tell anyone about it so they don't realize how easy it is to do. If people find out, they tell you not to do it again and life goes on. There's no motivation to avoid things that might be a 4th Amendment violation.