It is a well-established legal principle that individuals do not have a reasonable expectation of
privacy in information held by or disclosed to third parties.[1] Because internet and telecommunications
data is almost entirely held by electronic service providers, virtually any reasonable-expectation
analysis applied to information technology implicates the third-party doctrine.[2] Every time you access
a website, make a phone call, send a text message, use a debit card, tweet, poke someone on Facebook,
or find the nearest taco shop, you are sending and receiving data to a wide variety of third-parties.
[3] To illustrate, imagine a law student sitting in a coffee shop using the Chrome web browser to use
Yelp to look for taco shops. In performing this action, our theoretical law student may have sent data
to Yelp, Google, Facebook, Scorecardresearch.com, and a host of other websites.
Further, the data would have first have to be sent over the wireless network of the coffee shop,
then through the coffee shop’s ISP, then through any other ISPs necessary to reach these third parties’
servers. Further, Yelp may store its servers on a third party web-hosting service. If this law student
had performed this search on a smart phone, GPS data may have been transmitted to all of these parties.
[4] Because such data has been willingly shared with a variety of third parties,
the Third-Party doctrine logically applies to remove the warrant requirement for this data.