MCN/USA TODAY NETWORK
May 14, 2021
Your car is spying on you. Most late model vehicles have the
ability to log speed, when and where a vehicle’s lights are turned on, which
doors are opened and closed at specific locations as well as gear shifts,
odometer readings, ignition cycles - and that is only the tip of the iceberg.
As the U.S. Supreme Court has extended protections to the
privacy of your smartphone, your car has unexpectedly become a safe haven for
law enforcement to access your personal information without a warrant.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United
States, that the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and
seizures, protects cell phone location information. In an opinion by Chief
Justice John Roberts, the court recognized that location information -
collected by cell providers creates a “detailed chronicle of a person’s
physical presence compiled every day, every moment over years.”
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, perhaps the
most significant part of the ruling is its explicit recognition that
individuals can maintain an expectation of privacy in information that they
provide to third parties. As a result of what has become a landmark decision
the police must now get a warrant before obtaining cell phone data.
However, when a smartphone is plugged into a vehicle’s USB
port to make a call or listen to music all that precious personal data is
downloaded into the vehicle.
The Intercept recently reported on a 2015 podcast of “The
Forensic Lunch,” wherein Ben LeMere the founder of Berla, a company that
manufactures vehicle forensic kits, talked about the accidental data transfer
unbeknownst to the vehicle owner or operator.
“Your phone died, you’re gonna get in the car, plug it in,
and there’s going to be this nice convenient USB port for you,” LeMere said.
“When you plug it into this USB port, it’s going to charge your phone,
absolutely. And as soon as it powers up, it’s going to start sucking all your
data down into the car.”
The Fourth Amendment may afford individuals some protection
from invasive searches of a personal vehicle. However, that may not protect you
while on vacation or traveling for business.
In the same podcast, as reported by The Intercept, LeMere
discussed pulling data from a rental car, “We had a Ford Explorer ... we pulled
the system out, and we recovered 70 phones that had been connected to it. All
of their call logs, their contacts and their SMS history, as well as their
music preferences, songs that were on their device, and some of their Facebook
and Twitter things as well.”
The individuals who rented that vehicle unwittingly left
their personal information in the vehicle. As a result, law enforcement can
access a lot of personal information - embarrassing, and maybe even
incriminating, information without a warrant.
Plugging into your vehicle is the same as throwing your
personal information in the garbage and putting it out on the curb. In 1988,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a California case that the Fourth Amendment
does not require that police obtain a warrant before searching trash containers
placed on the curb.
No person has a reasonable expectation of privacy in items
left in a public place. “What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in
his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection,” said
the justices. That goes for personal information dumped into a vehicle’s data
system.
The courts have yet to catch up with this new form of
invasive surveillance technology. In the meantime, the willy-nilly exposure of
personal data may come at a cost.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett,
Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by
McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him
on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.
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