If what the judge says is true, and we are all just putting all of our information out for anyone to read, then law enforcement should have no more need to request information from social media companies anymore. After all, my status updates, photos, etc. are easily viewable by anyone, including law enforcement.

Replace the country names up above with mobile phone companies and that story actually starts to sound like the current state of their industry.

It's not just phone companies either. I used to work tech support at Dish Network and telling the customer that they could get a discount on the service call they were about to schedule by asking for a $5/month warranty they could cancel AT ANY TIME (aka, as soon as the service call was over) was a fireable offense. CSRs know all kinds of nifty ways of beating the system, but most companies will fire the CSR for even casually mentioning any of them.