[1] Followed by the states in 1791, the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted in 1792, holding: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In 1976 (United States v. Miller) and 1979 (Smith v. Maryland), the Court affirmed that "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.
In the same year, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing a concurrence in a case (United States v. Jones) involving the police placing a GPS tracker on a suspect without a warrant, noted that More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.
This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
[6][7][8][9] In June 2020, the Fifth Circuit found in United States v. Gratkowski that transaction data with exchanges of virtual currency such as Bitcoin, are akin to bank records and not subject to Fourth Amendment protections.