David A. Couillard of the Minnesota Law Review, explores the potential applicability of the Fourth Amendment to data stored in off-site servers: spreadsheets in Google Docs, accounting data hosted on FreshBooks, and pretty much everything synced through DropBox, just to name two…

So far the courts,  mostly absent on-point statutes, almost always reason by analogy when presented with novel situations, and have not yet come to a conclusion about how to treat such data.

Drawing on analogies and  combined guidance from statutes like ECPA, the courts have pretty much settled on their treatment of email:

The to/from addresses on e-mails have also been considered transactional data, akin to an addressed envelope. However, the contents of an e-mail have been properly classified as content data. A service provider, even if it has the capability of accessing the contents of an e-mail, is not a party to the information.

However, the status of data stored in the cloud, that is, on the servers of a third-party provider, is much less clear.

Read Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing, for full detail.

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Applying the US Fourth Amendment to data in the cloud

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