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The End Of Miller’S Time: How Sensitivity Can Categorize Third-Party Data After Carpenter, Michael Gentithes

Georgia Law Review

For over 40 years, the Supreme Court has permitted
government investigators to warrantlessly collect
information that citizens disclose to third-party service
providers. That third-party doctrine is under significant
strain in the modern, networked world. Yet scholarly
responses typically fall into unhelpfully extreme camps,
either championing an absolute version of the doctrine
or calling for its abolition. In Carpenter v. United
States, the Court suggested a middle road, holding that
some categories of data—such as digital location
information collected from cell phones—do not neatly
fall into the third-party doctrine’s dichotomy between
unprotected, disclosed information and protected,
undisclosed information. But the majority …