Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
Page Number: 101

Cite as:  585 U. S. ____ (2018) 

3 

GORSUCH, J., dissenting 

balancing contest of the kind the Court now suggests, it’s 
still hard to see how that would help the petitioner in this 
case.  Why  is  someone’s  location  when  using  a  phone  so 
much  more  sensitive  than  who  he  was  talking  to  (Smith)
or what financial transactions he engaged in (Miller)?  I do 
not know and the Court does not say. 

The problem isn’t with the Sixth Circuit’s application of 
Smith and Miller but with the cases themselves.  Can the 
government demand a copy of all your e-mails from Google
or Microsoft without implicating your Fourth Amendment 
rights?  Can it secure your DNA from 23andMe without a
warrant  or  probable  cause?    Smith  and  Miller  say  yes  it 
can—at  least  without  running  afoul  of  Katz.  But  that 
result  strikes  most  lawyers  and  judges  today—me  in- 
cluded—as pretty unlikely.  In the years since its adoption, 
countless  scholars,  too,  have  come  to  conclude  that  the 
“third-party  doctrine  is  not  only  wrong,  but  horribly 
wrong.”  Kerr, The Case for the Third-Party Doctrine, 107 
Mich.  L. Rev.  561,  563,  n. 5,  564  (2009)  (collecting  criti-
cisms but defending the doctrine (footnotes omitted)).  The 
reasons  are  obvious.  “As  an  empirical  statement  about 
subjective  expectations  of  privacy,”  the  doctrine  is  “quite 
dubious.”  Baude & Stern, The Positive Law Model of the 
Fourth Amendment, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 1821, 1872 (2016).
People  often  do  reasonably  expect  that  information  they 
entrust  to  third  parties,  especially  information  subject  to 
confidentiality  agreements,  will  be  kept  private.    Mean-
while, if the third party doctrine is supposed to represent 
a  normative  assessment  of  when  a  person  should  expect 
privacy,  the  notion  that  the  answer  might  be  “never” 
seems a pretty unattractive societal prescription.  Ibid. 

What,  then,  is  the  explanation  for  our  third  party  doc-
trine?  The truth is, the Court has never offered a persua-
sive  justification.  The  Court  has  said  that  by  conveying 
information  to  a  third  party  you  “ ‘assum[e]  the  risk’ ”  it
will be revealed to the police and therefore lack a reason-