-- YuwenHuang - 04 Mar 2013 Recently, Google revealed the transparency report which shows information about requests from government s or courts around the world to hand over user data. Users may wonder why Google can hand over my information to governments or courts. Take look at Google’s privacy policy which describes their authorization from you to hand over your date to the third party. I guess users may argue that I never agree with that privacy policy. In fact, before you sign up for a Google service, such as Gmail, you need to check the box that I agree to the Google terms of service and privacy policy; otherwise you will not be allowed to use Google service. I bet over 99% users signed up and checked the box without reading these agreements and I believe some may just check the box even without understanding what the box is for. Practically, as long as you sign up to use Google service, you are seen to authorize Google the power enumerated in the agreement. According to Google’s privacy policy, Google will share personal information with companies, organizations or individuals outside of Google if they have a good-faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to: 1) meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request. 2)enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations. detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues. 3)protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of Google, our users or the public as required or permitted by law. If Google thinks it’s necessary to share your information to the government for the above reasons, they can share it without your consent. Users may argue that Google is wrong about the existence of any above conditions and request Google to be liable for their loss. However, it’s not easy to inculpate Google, because they can claim they have good faith. Of course, user may contend that it’s invalid to make users agree to give up their privacy without notifying or emphasizing the effect of agreeing upon on Google’s privacy policy in advance, therefore your agreement is invalid. However, even though it’s void to force users to sign up the above agreement, the law authorizes Google to hand over user’s information to the government. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”) which was passed in 1986 confers power to law enforcement to access many kinds of stored communications without a warrant. That is to say, no matter you agree or not, all the information you put on the Google service would be possible under government‘s surveillance on day. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause" is stipulated in Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. According to the fourth amendment, can we argue that the ECPA is violating the request of Constitution? It depends on whether the act enforced by the government is search or not. In Supreme Court’s decision in Katz v. United States, the majority ruled that the Fourth Amendment protects persons and not places from unreasonable intrusion. Even if the defendant used the telephone booth in the public, he did not want his conversation to be heard by third party. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects persons and not areas from unreasonable searches and seizures and the government's activities in electronically listening to and recording defendant's words spoken into telephone receiver in public telephone booth violated the privacy upon which defendant justifiably relied while using the telephone booth and thus constituted a ‘search and seizure. This eavesdropping without a warrant would lead to evidence exclusion in court. It seems that Supreme Court has expand the Fourth Amendment protection to “Person” not only place to adapt to the technology age. However, don’t miss the point that the Court also stressed that “(w)hat a person knowingly exposes to the public . . . is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. Therefore, in Miller v. United States, the court held that no legitimate “expectation of privacy” could be found in the contents that the depositor voluntarily conveyed to the banks. In addition, Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to government authorities; even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed. Furthermore, in Smith v Maryland, the Court held that it is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company recording this information for various legitimate business purposes. And even if users did harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not one that society is prepared to recognize as “reasonable.” Because when users “exposed” that information to company’s equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information to the police. In terms of the prospective of the above cases, we can infer that the fourth amendment protects only one kind of person who harbors expectation of privacy which is recognized as “reasonable” by the Supreme Court. In accordance with the Court’s logic, users who convey information to Google through their service may not have expectation of privacy since they put their content on Google’s server voluntarily and they know or should know that Google maintain or store their information on their server, thus assume the risk that Google would reveal to the government these date even if users assumes Google would keep these date secretly. In sum, I think I can say that ECPA is not violating the fourth Amended since no search involved. I think I can predict that the fourth amendment construed by the Supreme court is no longer a harbor to prevent from unreasonable search because we ourselves as an internet service users has relinquish our privacy and hand over to Google, Facebook or whatever.