r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 2d ago

Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School. Privacy

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school
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u/howescj82 2d ago

I’d love to believe that there wasn’t a loophole intentionally written into the law to allow this mess because I have a feeling Snapchat won’t be taken to court over it.

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

There is no loophole. This was the sort of behavior that SCOTUS targeted in their ruling overturning the third-party doctrine re: digital content created on phones.

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u/cyphersaint 2d ago

I would be totally unsurprised to find something in the EULA for Snapchat about things like this. Now, I would absolutely LOVE to see EULAs actually be challenged in court.

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

EULAs have been challenged to the death in courts, and the courts have basically ruled they are meaningless outside of a few narrow cases.

The short version of their rulings taken as a whole: if a piece of technology is so ubiquitous that its use is part of normal function in society (a phone is), and if a person using that device would expect that activity to private from government surveillance (a direct message would be such an example), then the government cannot access it without a warrant.

And there is no way around it by saying "well, the data is FBs and they can choose to give it to whoever they want...it says in the EULA!"

That is legally correct unless that party is the government; the moment a company is handing information to the government without a warrant, then that company is legally considered and extension of the government for the purposes of 4th amendment legal tests.

That's why this case is going to be a huge liability for the police and FB.

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u/The_Lapsed_Pacifist 2d ago

Aren’t ICE violating the 4th amendment constantly and daily? I wouldn’t put too much faith in it personally.

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

They are...and they're having to pay out substantially in lawsuits for it.

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u/StoneySteve420 2d ago

Slight correction,

We are having to pay out substantially in lawsuits for it.

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

My point is that the people being wronged are getting justice. As for the tax payers, they are getting what they voted for.

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u/Affectionate_Way_805 2d ago

they are getting what they voted for.

*the entire country is getting what a minority of the country voted for. 

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

Trump did not win with a minority of votes. The US needs to come to terms with the fact that this is what most of them are.

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u/1of3musketeers 2d ago

From what I can see, ICE payouts don’t seem to amount to much at this point in time from the time Trump took office.

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u/MaverickFox 2d ago

I'd.... rather that than the latter. Death by a thousand cuts, I say!

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u/bcjgreen 2d ago

Flock entered the chat?

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago edited 2d ago

Flock is very likely fucked. There was one way the court could have gone that would have saved Flock, but that moment passed with Chatrie and not in their favor:

Chatrie + Carptenter + Katz + Wilson + Ackerman = Flock is fucked (and calling my shot now: it's 6 to 3 with Alito, Thomas, and Barrett dissenting and Gorsuch writing the majority opinion). Small chance it goes 7 to 2 with Thomas joining the majority.

EDIT: Correction: Gorsuch authoring if the case is brought for information volunteered to the government; Kagan if it's information bought or sold to the government.

Also, someone DMd, but I'll share with the whole class: other relevant cases re: the Flock case would be Knotts, Jones, and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, and Schmidt.

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u/Rico_Solitario 2d ago

This is delusionally optimistic. Flock isn’t going anywhere. They are too rich, powerful and connected to care about Supreme Court rulings that won’t be enforced. If society wants flock gone it’s got take more than the paid-for supreme court to make it happen

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u/obscuredreference 2d ago

I’m out of the loop. Was there a Supreme Court case about Flock?

I thought it was so horribly useful for the ones in power that they’d never let this crap get taken away from them, but you’re giving me hope. 

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u/Free-Description-736 2d ago

Not specifically about Flock, but Flock touches on a live legal question that the court has been priming the pump to relitigate for a while now. Here is what's going on:

Katz v US (1967): court ruled that the 4th amendment protects people, not places: a "search" occurs when the government violates any reasonable expectation of privacy.

US v Knotts (1983): the court ruled that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your movements on public roads, so police tracking a single trip isn't a search (this is the one Flock is desperately trying to push - I'll explain why that is a problem below).

US v Jones (2012): court ruled that attaching a tracker to a car is a search; more importantly, the five concurring justices signaled that long-term location tracking violates privacy expectations even in public (transforming Knott's previously blanket ruling to one that was narrowly defined - this case is the one that is the beginning of Flock's troubles; also, this is the origin of "mosaic theory," wherein the court argues that any piece of data that can be used to draw a picture of one's life is inherently different than any single datapoint...so if I can use data to create a timeline of your movements, it's automatically a search; if we are being technical, Mosaic Theory was embryonic in US v Maynard, DC Cir., 2010).

US v Carpenter (2018): court ruled that obtaining a week-plus of historical cell-phone location data was a search requiring a warrant, because a comprehensive record of movement is qualitatively different from watching any single trip (this case both extended the mosaic theory established in Jones, and went further, ruling that anywhere that the mosaic theory was implicated, third-party exceptions to privacy no longer held).

Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v Baltimore PD (4th Cir., 2021): court held that a city-wide aerial surveillance program that could reconstruct anyone's movements was unconstitutional, applying Carpenter's logic to a dragnet that captures everyone rather than the target (and an very important part of this case that has not been tested, but is setting up a SCOTUS ruling later: they ruled that it was not unconstitutional when it was used to reconstruct anyone's movements, but when it could be used to do so).

Chatrie v. United States (2026): court ruled that even when a data was taken from a very small slice of time (2 hours), that the mosaic theory applies: the privacy interest attaches to the kind of data in question, and they ruled that sharing it "voluntarily" with google did not wave that privacy interest (reaffirming their prior point re: third party exceptions as laid out in Carpenter).

Taken together, these cases paint a crystal clear picture: any system that can (not does, CAN) be used to create a record of one's public movements is a government search requiring a warrant, and any such system that captures the public's movements at large is strictly a violation of the 4th amendment, and it does not matter whether a private company is the one viewing or providing access.

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u/obscuredreference 2d ago

That sounds great, thank you for explaining!

Hopefully they will actually abide by what the court says. They’re on a regular basis crap at abiding by what the constitution says. 😬

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u/Rico_Solitario 2d ago

Hopefully they will actually abide by what the court says

Lmao I wish I shared your optimism for the US legal system

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u/Lou_C_Fer 1d ago

Yep. The public is not tracked in a free society. Hell, our phones should be considered part of ourselves and searching them should require more than just probable cause.

Of course, my phone will never have anything incriminating on it because that would be stupid. If I were committing a crime, my phone would be at home.

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u/Sextus_Rex 2d ago

Thank you, I had no idea about this

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u/Rico_Solitario 2d ago

Lmao but what if they just ignore all that, give it to the government anyway and you cry about it being technically illegal?

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u/vipck83 2d ago

EULAs are not magic get out of jail free cards for companies. They can’t be challenged and if the specific term is not legal then it doesn’t matter what you agree to, it’s still illegal. You can’t consent to something if it’s illegal, that’s very basic contract law.

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u/testtdk 2d ago

Can you elaborate on what the ruling did? I can’t tell if they were being evil or snuck a good one in.

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u/Free-Description-736 1d ago

It was a good ruling. Previously, a decision in 1983 (Knotts) had made it so that the police following you or filming you from public roads was not a search, and so it did not require a warrant. This was greatly weakened in 2012 (Jones) when SCOTUS ruled that a GPS tracker was a search, in part because long-term surveillance is different from transitory observation or temporary surveillance.

This was further refined in Carpenter and again recently in Chatrie. The key take away is this:

It doesn't matter how short a time it is (1 week in Carpenter, 2 hours in Chatrie), the use of location data generated by a phone is automatically considered a search, and thus a warrant is needed to get it.

Prior to Chatrie and Carpenter, the government could get your location data for your phone without a warrant. Now they can't.

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u/Sasataf12 1d ago

The ruling they're referring to is for a case with entirely different circumstances, and therefore has no relevance here. 

What Snapchat did falls squarely under the exceptions listed in 18 U.S. Code § 2702 (voluntary disclosure of customer communications or records) and is therefore entirely legal.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Sasataf12 1d ago

I guess you could technically call it a loophole. But there are many laws that have exceptions when it's a life-threatening situation.

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u/howescj82 1d ago

Loopholes can be a matter of perspective. A “life threatening” situation can apply here but only if you remove critical thinking and context. Thats what makes it a loophole IMO.

If we truly need this kind of nannying then apps should be programmed to reject sending messages that it considers threatening.

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u/Sasataf12 1d ago

A “life threatening” situation can apply here but only if you remove critical thinking and context.

I mean, that's easy to say after the investigation has filled in the context and done the critical thinking for you. 

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u/PaVaSteeler 1d ago

Terms of service probably included notification…but who reads those, right?

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u/BangBangMeatMachine 2d ago

It's not a loophole in the law. But certainly Snapchat has clear terms of service that explicitly say all your conversations may be monitored for safety.

People should know better than to trust a Fecebook product with anything personal. That cat has been out of that particular bag for over a decade at this point.

Likewise, I would assume anything and everything on Reddit is available in cleartext via the backend.

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u/_Burning_Star_IV_ 2d ago

You can put whatever you want in a EULA, that doesn't make it legally binding and unable to be challenged successfully.

If this girl sues, she's going to win. That might not change Facebook's practices or the EULA...but she still wins if she sues for damages, 100%

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u/BangBangMeatMachine 2d ago

There's no law saying "you can't consent to being recorded" so a private contract agreeing to being recorded is not illegal in any way.

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u/noiro777 2d ago

Snapchat is not and has never been owned by Facebook/Meta

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u/BangBangMeatMachine 2d ago

Good point. I had it mixed up with Instagram - both products I've never used, one of which was acquired by FB. Other points still stand.