These devices are listening to you! Technology infiltrates every aspect of our lives, even in the investigative world. Solving crimes has become futuristic as advances in technology have become more fundamental to daily life. But did you also know that retrievable data probably exists about you? Authorities have increasingly sought evidence from mobile phones, laptops, social media, even video games. Doesn’t this go against our Fourth Amendment?

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

– US Constitution

Paul Larkin, Senior Legal Research Fellow, Director of The Heritage Foundation’s project to counter abuse of the criminal law, particularly at the federal level. Larkin stated that,

“The use of those devices for law enforcement offers potential benefits and costs, and society ought to debate the pros and cons of the trade-off between efficiency and efficacy of law enforcement techniques and the privacy rights of citizens the government may wish to monitor.”   

If the government wants to prove someone is guilty by using evidence taken from a personal device, the person can demand that the courts review the legality of the government’s conduct. Then the judges will be forced to bless or decline the use of the evidence. These decisions define what the Fourth Amendment means.

James Goodnow, a tech attorney at Fennemore Craig, P.C. in Phoenix, explains that the Echo and Homework are best when they know everything about you. Remember that little pop up asking if you give an app permission to access to another part of your phone? When you click “YES,” you are allowing them access to access more information about you.

“Google especially will take everything that you feed to Google to allow Home to be as efficient and knowledgeable as possible. The Echo works the same way. For it to be good, you have to feed it a lot of data. And that data, whether you’re using the Home or the Echo, is sent to a cloud-based server somewhere for analysis. Is it stored there? No one knows, but some of it must be for the Echo and Home to maintain and learn your habits to be as useful as possible.” (Goodnow).

Attempting to gather information a smart speaker, like the Echo, may be a first for law enforcement. A prosecutor had sought recordings from the defendant’s Amazon Echo smart speaker as evidence in a murder case, a request Amazon had denied. Not until the defendant agreed to voluntarily turnover the information, did Amazon comply.

Amazon’s initial refusal to fork over the infection set up a legal battle pitting investigators’ quest for technology-based evidence against American privacy rights.

“Given the important First Amendment and privacy implications at stake, the warrant should be quashed unless the Court finds that the State has met its heightened burden for compelled production of such materials,” Amazon’s lawyers wrote in a February.

The privacy case is reminiscent of the unsuccessful attempt that FBI made last year to force Apple to unlock an iPhone that had been used by one of the assailants in the mass shooting in San Bernardino in December 2015. The FBI later hired professional hackers to unlock the phone.

While some people might argue that voice technologies such as Echo, Siri or Google Home, which assist users with queries and tasks, come with a different expectation of privacy than social media postings or Internet searches. Joel Reidenberg, the founding academic director for Fordham University’s Center on Law and Information Policy, said he feels such an attitude is naive.

In article his article, “Restoring Americans’ Privacy In Electronic Commerce,” Reidenbering states that, “in the United States, today substance abusers have a greater privacy than web users and privacy has become the critical issue for the development of electronic commerce.” 

The right to privacy is a deeply rooted into the United State’s democratic principles. It is so important that it had to be mentioned in the US Constitution, as the liberty of personal freedom, and protected by the Fourth Amendment, as a form of self-protection.