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Yes. There have been some state court rulings on this (and other privacy rules like getting people's search history). But the US constitution is not well equipped for 3rd parties having massive troves of potentially incriminating information on people, and having essentially no incentive to keep it private from law enforcement. Some, like Apple, have resisted and implemented their own standards that require LE to issue subpoenas or warrants to get certain types of information, but generally this is not standard practice. And it seems that it should probably be. There have been various privacy bills that have circulated over the years, but none has gotten traction. This Law Review article is what really explained most of the issues to me.
In almost every crime there are people adjacent to the criminal who have massive troves of potentially incriminating information on people; yet, we let them testify as witnesses and provide incriminating documents and objects as evidence in court. You are grossly misinterpreting the 4th amendment.
No I'm not. I'm saying exactly what the 4th Amendment is, what the 3rd party doctrine is, and how it is not going to (nor was it intended to) apply to situations like DNA banks and internet data.
The difference between the situation in the past, and the situation in the present day is used to be very costly for the police to get potentially incriminating information on everyone for every crime. So they'd have to narrow down potential suspects before they could invest their time into getting documents and testimony from everyone in town.
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I mean, the Constitution is just not well-equipped to handle the concept of DNA. We now know that your DNA is an incredibly important and detailed piece of information about you, and even shedding those cells at a high rate, and a bunch of of other people are walking around with most of that information in every cell of their body.
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