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The Supreme Court’s Carpenter ruling can shape privacy protections for new technologies.

The Supreme Court’s Carpenter ruling can shape privacy protections for new technologies.

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The authoritarian snoops of the last century would have drooled over the surveillance uses of the smartphones that most of us now carry. Smartphones have, in fact, become one of the primo law enforcement tools other than the Internet.

The case is not the first instance on the government asking tech companies for details on Trump dissidents. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) briefly tried to get Twitter to reveal information to identify an account holder whose messages on the social media platform had been critical of Trump.

Apple Computer is the current champion of privacy against U.S. government attempts to expand its spying on us. The company, a frequent NSA and FBI collaborator in the past, finds itself in the strange position of confronting a federal court order to dislodge its iPhone security system, an action Apple insists will cripple encryption as a privacy-protection measure.

Increasingly technology companies are aggressively gathering information on their unsuspecting customers even when they are not using a company’s app or software. The ride-hailing company Uber, for example, has changed its privacy policy to track its users through a “unique identifier,” even after they have arrived at their Uber destination. Yet these same tech execs are taking byzantine steps to keep their personal information out of the public domain.

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