This week I joined an esteemed group of legal scholars including Steven Bellovin, Laura Donohue, Susan Freiwald, Eric Goldman, Paul Ohm, and Daniel Solove in submitting an amicus brief to the California Supreme Court urging them to reverse an appeals-court decision that would be disastrous for user privacy if upheld.
Our brief explains why the decision below would gut the longstanding and well-settled privacy protections afforded by the Stored Communications Act, which keeps tech companies from disclosing the stored files we entrust to them except in a few specified circumstances. Under the lower court's ruling, which runs counter to four decades of SCA jurisprudence, if a provider accesses users' stored files for any other reason besides backup storage, then they're no longer covered by the SCA, period. But access for other reasons (e.g. scanning the cloud for viruses) is the norm for many services with massive user bases. The appeals court's reasoning would let those services disclose your private files and conversations to your spouse in an acrimonious divorce proceeding, sell them to data brokers and advertisers, or hand them over to foreign governments on request.
My hat is off to the two terrific students in SLS's Juelsgaard IP & Innovation Clinic who authored the brief, Selina Li and Braden Crimmins. Under the wise supervision of Phil Malone and Nina Srejovic, they drafted and revised a great brief on a tight timeframe through multiple rounds of feedback from all us finicky amici. I'm proud of the final result. And now... we wait.