Phone Users Have No Protected Privacy In Contents of Texts They Send to Others

The Fourth Amendment does not protect individuals’ privacy in text messages that are stored by the phone service providers of the people with whom they have texted, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals held Jan. 28 (State v. Marcum, Okla. Crim. App., No. S-12-976).

Courts across the country disagree about the reasonableness of privacy expectations in digital media, but “no published case from any other court has addressed precisely this issue,” the Oklahoma court said in an opinion by Vice Presiding Judge Clancy Smith. It decided the case by analogizing the searches of text messages in this case ...