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University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law

Faculty Scholarship

Science and Technology Law

Mosaic theory

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Full-Text Articles in Law

When Enough Is Enough: Location Tracking, Mosaic Theory, And Machine Learning, Steven M. Bellovin, Renée M. Hutchins, Tony Jebara, Sebastian Zimmeck Jan 2014

When Enough Is Enough: Location Tracking, Mosaic Theory, And Machine Learning, Steven M. Bellovin, Renée M. Hutchins, Tony Jebara, Sebastian Zimmeck

Faculty Scholarship

Since 1967, when it decided Katz v. United States, the Supreme Court has tied the right to be free of unwanted government scrutiny to the concept of reasonable xpectations of privacy.[1] An evaluation of reasonable expectations depends, among other factors, upon an assessment of the intrusiveness of government action. When making such assessment historically the Court has considered police conduct with clear temporal, geographic, or substantive limits. However, in an era where new technologies permit the storage and compilation of vast amounts of personal data, things are becoming more complicated. A school of thought known as “mosaic theory” …


A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron Jan 2013

A Shattered Looking Glass: The Pitfalls And Potential Of The Mosaic Theory Of Fourth Amendment Privacy, David C. Gray, Danielle Keats Citron

Faculty Scholarship

On January 23, 2012, the Supreme Court issued a landmark non-decision in United States v. Jones. In that case, officers used a GPS-enabled device to track a suspect’s public movements for four weeks, amassing a considerable amount of data in the process. Although ultimately resolved on narrow grounds, five Justices joined concurring opinions in Jones expressing sympathy for some version of the “mosaic theory” of Fourth Amendment privacy. This theory holds that we maintain reasonable expectations of privacy in certain quantities of information even if we do not have such expectations in the constituent parts. This Article examines and …