> With metadata the rebuttal is that the Constitution refers to the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects..." There is a legitimate argument that AT&T's records about when you used their network is not your papers or effects. You didn't create the record, AT&T did. You don't usually even have access to the information, AT&T does. It's not something silly like "the phone doesn't have a 4th amendment right."

You caused the record to come into being by making or receiving the phone call. No human intervention was required on the carrier's part. Your action triggered an automated response by a machine. The records are about you, were generated by your actions, and exist pursuant to a service contract you hold. To say it is not "yours" is to cherry-pick a certain definition of "yours:" one based solely on who holds the property rights. But there are other reasonable definitions of "yours." Ordinary English usage illustrates this. I could talk about "your records at the phone company," and nobody would find my turn of phrase the slightest bit odd, even though you don't own those records. It should be noted that Constitutional interpretation generally looks to the ordinary meaning of words first. Indeed, in Katz, the Court held:

"The existence of a property right is but one element in determining whether expectations of privacy are legitimate."

By a narrow reading of "their persons, houses, papers, and effects," phone data might not be your papers or effects. However, one ought not read the 4th amendment narrowly. The Supreme Court said in Griswold:

"The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy...These cases bear witness that the right of privacy which presses for recognition here is a legitimate one."

The cases cited in Griswold and those which cite it lay out a doctrine of broadly interpreting privacy rights provided by the 4th and other Amendments. Words like "their" should not be construed narrowly to limit a person's privacy rights.

Instead, we have the doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy." That is, where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, 4th Amendment protections come into play. For a telephone call, one should reasonably expect the phone company to generate logs, if only for billing purposes and aggregated, anonymized data analysis. However, one would not reasonably expect the sum total of their personal call history to be available to the government.

> The rebuttal for gathering information from cameras is that the 4th amendment has never extended to what the government can observe about you in a public place.

This is not true. See, for example, US v Jones (the GPS tracking case). Jones strengthened the doctrine of "reasonable expectation of privacy," enshrining a new application in public places. I expect that we'll see a case about facial recognition, license plate tracking, or something similar where the government assembles a database of your movements in public. Alito's concurrence in Jones reads a prelude to these future cases:

"In the pre-computer age, the greatest protections of privacy were neither constitutional nor statutory, but practical. Traditional surveillance for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken. The surveillance at issue in this case—constant monitoring of the location of a vehicle for four weeks—would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance. 10 Only an investigation of unusual importance could have justified such an expenditure of law enforcement resources. Devices like the one used in the present case, however, make long-term monitoring relatively easy and cheap...But the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period."