[Brian_K_White]

Is there any such thing as this surveillence applying to the inside of the renters bed room, bath room, filing cabinet with medical or financial documents, or political for that matter?

I don't think there is, and I don't think you can reduce reality to being as simple as "owner has more right over property than renter" renter absolutely has at least a few rights in at least a few defined contextx over owner because owner "consented" to accept money in trade for use of property.

[aiforecastthway]

> Is there any such thing as this surveillence applying to the inside of the renters bed room, bath room, filing cabinet with medical or financial documents, or political for that matter?

Yes. Entering property for regular maintenance. Any time a landlord or his agent enters a piece of property, there is implicit surveillance. Some places are more formal about this than others, but anyone who has rented, owned rental property, or managed rental property knows that any time maintenance occurs there's an implicit examination of the premises also happening...

But here is a more pertinent example: the regular comings and goings of people or property can be and often are observed from outside of a property. These can contribute to probable cause for a search of those premises even without direct observation. (E.g., large numbers of disheveled children moving through an apartment, or an exterior camera shot of a known fugitive entering the property.)

Here the police could obtain a warrant on the basis of landlord's testimony without the landlord actually seeing the inside of the unit. This is somewhat similar to the case at hand, since what Google alerted the police to a hash match without actually looking at the image (ie, entering the bedroom).

> I don't think you can reduce reality to being as simple as "owner has more right over property than renter"

But I make no such reduction, and neither does the opinion. In fact, quite the opposite -- this is contributory why the court determines a warrant is required!

[simoncion]

> ...Google alerted the police to a hash match without actually looking at the image (ie, entering the bedroom).

Google cannot have calculated that hash without examining the data in the image. They, or systems under there control obviously looked at the image.

It should not legally matter whether the eyes are meat or machine... if anything, machine inspection should be MORE strictly regulated, because of how much easier and cheaper it tends to make surveillance (mass or otherwise).

[aiforecastthway]

> It should not legally matter whether the eyes are meat or machine

But it does matter, and, perhaps ironically, it matters in a way that gives you STRONGER (not weaker) fourth amendment rights. That's the entire TL;DR of the fine article.

If the court accepted this sentence of yours in isolation, then the court would have determined that no warrant was necessary in any case.

> if anything, machine inspection should be MORE strictly regulated, because of how much easier and cheaper it tends to make surveillance (mass or otherwise).

I don't disagree. In particular: I believe that the "Reasonable Person", to the extent that we remain stuck with the fiction, should be understood as having stronger privacy expectations in their phone or cloud account than they do even in their own bedroom or bathroom.

With respect to Google's actions in this case, this is an issue for your legislator and not the courts. The fourth amendment does not bind Google's hands in any way, and judges are not lawmakers.

[AyyEye]

> Yes. Entering property for regular maintenance.

In every state that I've lived in they must give advance notice (except for emergencies). They can't just show up and do a surprise check.

[aiforecastthway]

Only in residential properties, typically. There are also states that have no such requirement even on residential rentals.

In any case, I think it's a bit of a red herring and that the "regular comings and goings" case is more analogous.

But also that, at this point in the thread, we have reached a point where analogy stops being helpful and the actual thing has to be analyzed.

[Brian_K_White]

The point of the analogy is that the contents of ones files should be considered analogous to the contents of ones mind.

Whatever reasons we had in the past for deciding that financial or health data, or conversations with attorneys, or bathrooms and bedrooms, are private, those reasons should apply to ones documents which includes ones files.

Or at least if not, we should figure out and be able to show exactly how and why not with some argument that actually holds water.

Only after that does it make any sense to either defend or object to this development.

[AyyEye]

Fair enough.

[ok_computer]

If I import hundreds of pounds of poached ivory and store it in a shipping yard or move it to a long term storage unit, the owner and operator of those properties are allowed to notify police of suspected illegal activities and unlock the storage locker if there is a warrant produced.

Maybe the warrant uses some abstraction of the contents of that storage locker like the shipping manifest or customs declaration. Maybe someone saw a shadow of an elephant tusk or rhino horn as I was closing the locker door.

[potato3732842]

Pretty much all rental storage, shipping container, 3rd party semi trailer pool, safe deposit box type services and business agreements stipulate that the user of the arbitrary box gets to deny the owner of the arbitrary box access so long as they're holding up their end of the deal. The point is that the user is wholly responsible for the security of the contents of the arbitrary box and the owner bears no liability for the contents. This is why (well run) rental storage places make you use your own lock and if you don't pay they add an additional lock rather than removing yours.

[ImPostingOnHN]

I don't think that argument supports the better analogy of breaking into a computer or filing cabinet owned by someone renting the space. Just because someone is renting space doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want to them. Cameras in bathrooms of a rented space would be another example.

[ok_computer]

But he wasn’t running a computer in a rented space, he was using storage space on google’s computers.

In an older comment I argued against analogies to rationalize this. I think honestly at face value it is possible to evaluate the goodness or badness of the decision.

[aiforecastthway]

> In an older comment I argued against analogies to rationalize this. I think honestly at face value it is possible to evaluate the goodness or badness of the decision.

I generally do agree that analogies became anti-useful in this thread relatively quickly.

However, I am not sure that avoiding analogies is actually possible for the courts. I mean, they can try, but at some point analogies are unavailable because most of the case law -- and, hell, the fourth amendment itself -- is written in terms of the non-digital world. Judges are forced to reason by analogy, because legal arguments will be advanced in terms of precedent that is inherently physical.

So there is value in hashing out the analogies, even if at some point they become tenuous, primarily because demonstrating the breaking points of the analogies is step zero in deviating from case law.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Yes, that is why I presented an alternative to the analogy of "import hundreds of pounds of poached ivory and store it in a shipping yard or move it to a long term storage unit".

Like having the right to avoid being videoed in the bathroom, we have the right to avoid unreasonable search of our files by authorities, whether stored locally or on the cloud

[freejazz]

Wait until you hear about third party doctrine.

I have this weird experience where people that get all their legal news from tech websites have really pointed views about fourth amendment jurisprudence and patent law.