I don't think that argument supports the better analogy of breaking into a computer or filing cabinet owned by someone renting the space. Just because someone is renting space doesn't give you the right to do whatever you want to them. Cameras in bathrooms of a rented space would be another example.
But he wasn’t running a computer in a rented space, he was using storage space on google’s computers.
In an older comment I argued against analogies to rationalize this. I think honestly at face value it is possible to evaluate the goodness or badness of the decision.
> In an older comment I argued against analogies to rationalize this. I think honestly at face value it is possible to evaluate the goodness or badness of the decision.
I generally do agree that analogies became anti-useful in this thread relatively quickly.
However, I am not sure that avoiding analogies is actually possible for the courts. I mean, they can try, but at some point analogies are unavailable because most of the case law -- and, hell, the fourth amendment itself -- is written in terms of the non-digital world. Judges are forced to reason by analogy, because legal arguments will be advanced in terms of precedent that is inherently physical.
So there is value in hashing out the analogies, even if at some point they become tenuous, primarily because demonstrating the breaking points of the analogies is step zero in deviating from case law.
Yes, that is why I presented an alternative to the analogy of "import hundreds of pounds of poached ivory and store it in a shipping yard or move it to a long term storage unit".
Like having the right to avoid being videoed in the bathroom, we have the right to avoid unreasonable search of our files by authorities, whether stored locally or on the cloud
