Quick Refresher: The Fourth Amendment guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. (please note: Search and arrest should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court.)
So – how is Fourth Amendment related to Cloud computing (or any technological advances, in general)? In his recent article, David A. Couillardan, argues that an extension of the Fourth Amendment standard into the cloud might be able to adequately address future unanticipated issues that arise as new technologies collide with the government’s attempt to search and seize data.
The linchpin in extending Fourth Amendment protection to the cloud rests with the reasonableness of society’s expectations governing privacy in the cloud. But societal expectations change over time, especially as technology and our uses of that technology change.
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This change in Internet usage seems to indicate that society might be prepared to recognize a reasonable expectation of privacy in the cloud, at least in some circumstances. Even if the Internet remains a public medium in some respects, taking a private object into public doesn’t necessarily destroy a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy in that object. But reasonable efforts to conceal that object must be present.
