This is an unfortunate thing about a whole lot of legal precedent in the US.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.
Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed. I can't find the argument I'm thinking of but it referenced how the police can sit outside your house and surveil you, but physically cannot do that to everyone all the time, and that is an inherent limit to their ability to conduct surveillance that gives you some freedoms and that limit should be respected. Making a machine that can do exactly that is not something cops are allowed to do.
The actual legal problem is that, the above does not apply to private companies. You have no fourth amendment rights from private companies. The constitution gives you no rights against companies.
So the company does exactly what the police aren't allowed to do, and then sell access to the police. For some reason, this literal circumvention of their restrictions has been explicitly allowed.
This is why Surveillance Capitalism is such a big deal. It is a direct circumvention of your explicit constitutional rights, and it just so happens to accomplish that because of the profit earned in the process. For a lot of assholes, this is the winingest of win-wins.
> Actually the courts of the US have stated that mass dragnet surveillance is not allowed.
There isn’t a sweeping precedent that says “mass surveillance is illegal.
The Supreme Court has signaled concern (Knotts’ “dragnet-type” reservation; echoed in Jones/Carpenter), but mostly we rely upon older third-party/plain-view doctrines and very fact-specific scope/retention questions.
So we have things like law enforcement successfully subpoenaing gmail metadata at large scale.
The law is perhaps changing, slowly -- we have geofencing heading to the Supremes, and active litigation about ALPR.
Also, “private company” isn’t an automatic workaround—if a vendor is acting as an agent of law enforcement, Fourth Amendment limits apply.
Courts made a pretty reasonable set of tradeoffs around the 4th amendment for search warrant vs. subpoena, police officers observing you, etc.
During the 19th century.
Unfortunately, modern data processing completely undermines a lot of the rationale about how reasonable and intrusive various things are. Before, cops couldn't follow and surveil everyone; blanket subpoenas to get millions of peoples' information weren't possible because the information wasn't concentrated in one entity's hands and compliance would have been impossible; etc.