'Government Purchases of Private Data' by Matthew Tokson in Wake Forest Law Review (Forthcoming) comments
In recent years, numerous government entities from the Department of Homeland Security to local police departments have begun to purchase location and other data from specialized brokers in order to track individuals’ activities over time. Much of this data is constitutionally protected. Yet, while some government actors have concluded that the Fourth Amendment regulates these purchases, most have determined that purchasing data is a valid way of bypassing the Constitution’s restrictions.
This Article addresses the increasingly prominent issue of government purchases of private data, and examines broader issues of privacy protection in an era of commercial markets in personal information. The Article questions the widespread assumption that the Fourth Amendment can never apply to commercial purchases. Police officers can generally purchase an item available to the public without constitutional restriction. But a closer examination of data markets demonstrates that sensitive cellphone data is not publicly available or exposed. Rather, the vendors who sell such data do so either exclusively to law enforcement agencies or in large, anonymized chunks to other marketing companies. Because sensitive cellphone data remains functionally private, a government purchase of such data violates the Fourth Amendment.
The Article then challenges the idea that consumers waive their rights in their cellphone data when they use apps or other services. The explanations customers see when an app asks for permission to access their data are often insufficient or misleading, and they typically say nothing about personal data being sold to other parties. Further, penalizing users for disclosing their data to service providers creates harmful incentives and is incompatible with meaningful Fourth Amendment protection in the digital age.
The Article sits at the intersection of consumer privacy and Fourth Amendment law, as poorly regulated markets in personal data and flawed concepts of consumer consent now threaten to erode fundamental constitutional rights. The Article draws broader lessons about the inadequacy of consumer privacy law in the United States. It examines the potential for private surveillance to become government surveillance, via technical and legal interoperability. And it assesses a variety of possible solutions through which legal actors can prevent commercial markets in private data from undermining Fourth Amendment rights.
