The College Fix

If you’re a college student and you lived with your parents for the summer, you’re probably intimately familiar with the concept of privacy. Whether your mother joined Facebook to troll through your photos, or she dropped off some laundry in your room and uncovered your stash of (shall we say) Girl Scout cookies, you have a sense of both the unfettered freedom of dorm life, and the somewhat more complicated judicial process of home.

For example, upon finding compromising photos, what course of action is she allowed to take? Must she appeal to your father before grounding you? Or are they by simple right of point and shoot, your’s to post and distribute as you like? The answer to this question is usually complicated by a list of factors, the least of which includes the mood of the mother in question.

Although our justice system employs a slightly more consistent and potentially more organized process, many of the same questions get raised and what constitutes a search is continually evolving to address new technological and social frontiers. It’s the Courts’ challenge to reconcile Constitutional language with the modern world in all of its tweeted glory. As we willingly (nay, gleefully) post tidbits, snippets and the occasional complete sentence to Facebook, we shed privacy in favor of notoriety perceived or otherwise. Facebook has just added a locator application that allows users and their “friends” to post information about their locations online. After 24 hours, I changed my privacy settings. Too far is too far.

In that vein, The DC Circuit Court of Appeals has just changed everyone’s privacy settings. On August 6, the Court held that the long-term use of a Global Positioning System device to track the location of a car on public road qualifies as a search under the terms of the Fourth Amendment.

Not flashy, but significant.

Read the full column at the UMass Daily Collegian.

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