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How is this not different from asking a phone company for the transcript of a private conversation? Or of asking a bank for account statements? It is the nature
by jkhdigital 5y ago
How is this not different from asking a phone company for the transcript of a private conversation? Or of asking a bank for account statements? It is the nature of any sufficiently complex economy that private entities will possess extremely intimate knowledge about their customers, knowledge which their customers "voluntarily" provided in the course of business. None of this has any bearing whatsoever on the constraints applied by the 4th amendment, unless we are trying to move toward the interpretation that literally any interaction with the outside world is subject to unlimited surveillance by the state.
- refurb 5y agoThe difference is none of those things are freely available for purchase? That’s the key here - these companies are already selling this information. The govt is just saying “cool, we’ll buy it too”.
- judge2020 5y agoThis comment above does a good job of explaining how phone calls are different: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29170649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29170649