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> It's difficult to reconcile the Third Party doctrine with Riley. Under the third party doctrine, storing a document in the cloud is like leaving a box of pape
by jsmeaton 12y ago
> It's difficult to reconcile the Third Party doctrine with Riley. Under the third party doctrine, storing a document in the cloud is like leaving a box of papers in your friend's garage--not protected under the 4th amendment. But under Riley, storing a document in the cloud is like storing it locally on your phone--protected under the 4th amendment.
What about storing documents in a safety deposit box of a bank? Where does that fall legally? I would imagine that storing documents on a box rented from a cloud provider should fall under the same law.
- rayiner 12y agoYou do have a 4th amendment interest in the contents of safety deposit boxes, storage units, and rented apartments. So the question becomes: is the cloud more like your friend's garage, or a safety deposit box in a bank? I think the relevant distinction is that when it comes to a safety deposit box, or a storage unit, or an apartment, the landlord no longer has unrestricted access to the unit, and indeed it can be illegal for him to access the unit without your permission. Thus the expectation of privacy is higher than with your friend's garage, which he can continue to access whenever he wants without restriction. So it might well be that there is a stronger privacy interest in something like AWS, where Amazon doesn't look into your instances, than in other cloud services that look at the data you store in them. That said, as I said, Riley makes me think that the Supreme Court is just going to give blanket 4th amendment protection to cloud services, regardless of the fact that some are, in actual fact, much more private than others.
- jsmeaton 12y agoThanks, appreciate the information. I was thinking more along the lines of an EC2 instance rather than a shared service like Gmail.