Followed by the states in 1791, the
Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted in 1792, holding: In
Katz v. United States (1967), the
United States Supreme Court established its
reasonable expectation of privacy test, which drastically expanded the scope of what was protected by the Fourth Amendment to include "what [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public." In response to
Katz v. United States (1967) and
Berger v. New York (1967), the
United States Congress enacted the
Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, of which Title III is known as the "Wiretap Act." Title III was Congress' attempt to extend Fourth Amendment-like protections to telephonic and other wired forms of communication. In 1976 (
United States v. Miller) and 1979 (
Smith v. Maryland), the Court affirmed that "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties." In 1986, the United States Congress updated the
Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 by enacting the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act which included an updated "Wiretap Act" and also extended Fourth Amendment-like protections to
electronic communications in Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, known as the
Stored Communications Act. A 2012
Maryland District Court court case (
United States v. Graham) held that historical cell site location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. In the same year,
Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing a concurrence in a case (
United States v. Jones) involving the police placing a
GPS tracker on a suspect without a warrant, noted that More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. and that [cell-site location information] provides officers with “an all-encompassing record of the holder's whereabouts” and “provides an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not only [an individual's] particular movements, but through them [their] familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” In 2019, Utah passed the Electronic Information or Data Privacy Act which requires a warrant for accessing Utah residents' private information stored with third parties. In June 2020, the
Fifth Circuit found in
United States v. Gratkowski that transaction data with exchanges of
virtual currency such as
Bitcoin, are akin to bank records and not subject to Fourth Amendment protections. == See also ==