Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
Page Number: 35.0

8 

CARPENTER v. UNITED STATES 

KENNEDY, J., dissenting 

reasonable  expectation  of  privacy  in  information  they 
“voluntarily  conveyed  to  the  [companies]  and  exposed  to 
their employees in the ordinary course of business.”   Mil-
ler,  supra,  at  442;  see  Smith,  442  U. S.,  at  744.    Rather, 
the  defendants  “assumed  the  risk  that  the  information 
would be divulged to police.”  Id., at 745. 

Miller and Smith have been criticized as being based on
too  narrow  a  view  of  reasonable  expectations  of  privacy.
See,  e.g.,  Ashdown,  The  Fourth  Amendment  and  the  “Le-
gitimate  Expectation  of  Privacy,”  34  Vand.  L. Rev.  1289, 
13131316 (1981).  Those criticisms, however, are unwar-
ranted.  The  principle  established  in  Miller  and  Smith  is 
correct  for  two  reasons,  the  first  relating  to  a  defendant’s
attenuated interest in property owned by another, and the 
second  relating  to  the  safeguards  inherent  in  the  use  of 
compulsory process.

First,  Miller  and  Smith  placed  necessary  limits  on  the
ability  of  individuals  to  assert  Fourth  Amendment  inter-
ests  in  property  to  which  they  lack  a  “requisite  connec-
tion.”  Minnesota  v.  Carter,  525  U. S.  83,  99  (1998) 
(KENNEDY,  J.,  concurring).    Fourth  Amendment  rights, 
after  all,  are  personal.    The  Amendment  protects  “[t]he 
right of the people to be secure in their . . . persons, houses,
papers, and effects”—not the persons, houses, papers, and 
effects of others.  (Emphasis added.)

The  concept  of  reasonable  expectations  of  privacy,  first 
announced in Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967), 
sought  to  look  beyond  the  “arcane  distinctions  developed
in  property  and  tort  law”  in  evaluating  whether  a  person
has  a  sufficient  connection  to  the  thing  or  place  searched
to  assert  Fourth  Amendment  interests  in  it.    Rakas  v. 
Illinois, 439 U. S. 128, 143 (1978).  Yet “property concepts” 
are,  nonetheless,  fundamental  “in  determining  the  pres-
ence  or  absence  of  the privacy  interests  protected  by  that 
Amendment.”  Id., at 143144, n. 12.  This is so for at least 
two  reasons.  First,  as  a  matter  of  settled  expectations