PLW: Pa. Supreme Court Tackles Internet Privacy in 'Kurtz'

Matthew T. Mangino
The Legal Intelligencer
January 15, 2026

In summer 2016, a woman in Northumberland County went to bed after her husband, a corrections officer, left to work the midnight shift at Coal Township State Correctional Institution.

After he left an intruder entered the home. The intruder bound and gagged the woman, removed her from her home, and raped her in a nearby trailer. The Pennsylvania state police (PSP) investigated the crime.

Although foreign DNA was found on the victim’s body, the PSP could not match the DNA to any known person. Investigators surmised, through their preliminary investigation, that the perpetrator was familiar with the victim. The PSP obtained a “reverse keyword search warrant” requiring Google to provide any search of the victim’s name or address by anyone in the world for a week prior to the attack.

The warrant was not directed at a specific person’s activity, but instead any activity that was directed toward information about the victim. After about a year, Google found that two searches for the victim’s address occurred only hours before the attack.

The information provided by Google included the person’s IP address. As aresult, the PSP focused on John Edward Kurtz who was a corrections officer at the same facility as the victim’s husband. After grabbing a cigarette butt discarded by Kurtz and retrieving his DNA, the PSP found it matched the DNA retrieved from the victim.

Kurtz was arrested and subsequently filed a motion to suppress the Google warrant. Kurtz argued that the PSP failed to establish probable cause individualized to him, as constitutionally required to support the issuance of a search warrant.

However, before Kurtz could challenge the validity of the search warrant, he first had to demonstrate a reasonable expectation of privacy in the area searched. What is a reasonable expectation of privacy triggering the protection of the Fourth Amendment?

In Katz v. United States, 389 US 347 (1967), the U.S. Supreme Court found that a bookie using a telephone booth to place bets was protected by the Fourth Amendment and if police wanted to listen to his end of the conversation outside a telephone booth, they needed to get a search warrant.
The majority opinion was not as newsworthy as the concurring opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan. As the Pennsylvania Supreme Court noted, Harlan’s often quoted concurrence bears repeating,“Justice Harlan explained that, for a person to demonstrate an expectation of privacy,‘there is a twofold requirement. ’First, that person must‘ have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, ... the expectation must be one that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.’”

After Kurtz’s suppression motion was denied,he was convicted at trial of multiple rapes. The Superior Court affirmed his conviction and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ultimately granted Kurtz’s allowance of appeal at Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 98, 99, and 100 MAP 2023.

Initially, the Supreme Court determined, “In this case, we must decide whether a person who conducts general, unprotected internet searches has an expectation of privacy in the records generated by those searches.”

The court continued, “The internet is now commingled with most, if not all, of our personal and professional activities that does not mean that a person automatically has a constitutionally reasonable expectation of privacy in its general usage.”

The court suggested that an individual’s use of the internet in her own home—a place often viewed by the U.S. Constitution as an individual’s most sacred and protected refuge, is not automatically protected. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court acknowledged, “At the heart of the Fourth Amendment‘ stands the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.’”

The majority opinion in Kurtz, written by Justice David Wecht and issued on Dec. 16, 2025, took care to examine a number of well-known U.S. Supreme Court decisions establishing, and later restraining the “third-party doctrine.” The doctrine stands for the premise that if an individual makes personal matters accessible to a third party, that person cannot then invoke the protections of the Fourth Amendment.

The U.S. Supreme Court began to narrow the third-party doctrine in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), in which the court held that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and using satellite technology to track the operator’s movements in that vehicle constituted a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and requires a search warrant..

The Kurtz opinion then focused on Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. __(2018). Police had retrieved cellphone numbers from a member of a burglary ring. Investigators then obtained the cellphone site location information (CSLI) without a search warrant. The U.S. Supreme Court held a person does not make a voluntary choice to place CSLI generated by cellphone use into the hands of third parties. Rather, such transmission happens automatically.
Based on the analysis of the third-party doctrine and its subsequent treatment, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reasoned that the resolution of Kurtz’s claim hung“upon whether such actions are governed by Carpenter’s “narrow” rejection of the third-party doctrine, or fall instead under the traditional third-party doctrine.”

Wecht wrote, “the pedestal upon which the Fourth Amendment places the home crumbles when “a person knowingly exposes [private material] to the public. ”While “a man’s home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy,” that privacy does not extend to those “objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the plain view of outsiders.”

The court continued, “The point is that the data trail created by using the internet is not involuntary in the same way that the trail created by carrying a cellphone is.” An individual should not be surprised that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in Google searches, “It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data.”

The court ruled in Kurtz that an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to internet searches, in this case the simple, and prolific decision to “Google it.”

The court did not make access to internet searches unlimited. The court made clear that internet users who take efforts “to secure some degree of privacy” may be afforded greater constitutional privacy protections. The court pointed to use of virtual private networks, internet browsers that do not collect or share data, and websites that are password-protected as examples of internet use that may permit users to “retain a constitutionally recognizable expectation of privacy.”

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly and George and the former district attorney of Lawrence County, Pennsylvania.He is the author of "The Executioner’s Toll." You can follow him on Bluesky @matthewmangino.bsky.social or contact him at mmangino@lgkg.com.

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