08/06/2019
Its not just Google and Yelp who follow your every move. Police and government agencies have been capturing cell phone data and searching it. Now, the US Supreme Court and the State of Washington Court of Appeals have found that people have a right to privacy in their cell phone meta data. That means that government agencies can no longer access our data without getting a search warrant from a judge first.
Each time your cell phone connects to a cell site, it
generates a time-stamped record known as cell-site location information (CSLI) . Wireless carriers collect and store CSLI for their own business purposes. In addition, wireless carriers sell aggregated location records to data brokers. While carriers have long retained CSLI for the start and end of incoming calls, in recent years, phone companies have also collected location information from the transmission of text messages and routine data
connections. Accordingly, modern cell phones generate increasingly vast amounts of increasingly precise CSLI.
With great insight and thoughtfulness, The Court has concluded that accessing CSLI data from wireless carriers invades an individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of his physical movements. And, as a result, before compelling a wireless carrier to hand over a subscribers CSLI, the Government’s obligation is a familiar one—get a warrant.
Carpenter v. United States, — U.S._, 138 5. Ct.
2206, 2211-12,, 201 L. Ed. 2d 507 (2018).
http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/?fa=opinions.disp&filename=771752MAJ
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