From the High Performance Computing nerds at HPC Wire, May 7:
Your data is yours, right? It seems like a simple question, but thanks to a little-known loophole in federal law, US regulators are can access your private data without a warrant as long as it’s being stored by a third party. The so-called “third-party doctrine” could be reconsidered in a case currently before the Supreme Court.
The case, Harper Vs. O’Donnell, pits Coinbase customer James Harper against the head of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas O’Donnell. The case stretches back to 2016, when the IRS conducted a dragnet by demanding Coinbase hand over transaction records for more than 14,000 customers of the cryptocurrency trading platform.
Harper received a letter from the IRS warning that he had under reported his crypto income, a charge that Harper denied. But more importantly, Harper learned that the IRS had access to his transaction logs, his wallet addresses, and public keys–all without obtaining a court warrant. Harper’s lawyers argued that his constitutional protections–namely, the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures–had been violated by the IRS.
Lower courts repeatedly deined Harper’s claim, citing the third-party doctrine, which stems from a pair of Supreme Court cases in the 1970s. The Supreme Court ruled that “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Harpe’s records are owned by Coinbase, and thus fall within the third-party exception to the Fourth Amendment....
....MUCH MORE
On personal computers Microsoft really wants you to store stuff on their OneDrive cloud storage service. Every time I see a file set to go to OneDrive I think of that Supreme Court line: “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” and I ask if maybe I can store it locally; on one of our servers or PCs instead.
