This won’t go forward, and here’s why: filing fees. I am a law clerk to a judge in another district, and we used to get a ton of cases where Cablevision would sue individuals for using illegal cable boxes. Essentially, the police would raid an illegal cable box manufacturer. Cablevision would subpoena all the sales info from the manufacturer, and then use the credit card payment info to track down and sue anyone who bought a cable box (who wasn’t smart enough to use a prepaid credit card). There would be hundreds of defendants all brought under a single case, many of whom defaulted or settled for a couple grand. Given the amount of court resources used, and the fact that the liability of each defendant was unrelated (the evidence proving the actions of one defendant have nothing to do with any others), the court ordered that the cases were unrelated and had to be filed separately, meaning one defendant per case. The effect of this ruling was that Cablevision had to pay the $350 filing fee for each defendant. Given the collection rate, it wasn’t worth it, and the suits stopped. I imagine the same thing will happen here. There is no way the plaintiff is paying $7M in filing fees. As I haven’t read the complaint, so I don’t know for certain, but I am willing to bet these suits were brought as one (or a few). I doubt the judge or judges handling this case will just sit and let this proceed as one action. They’ll want their filing fees, all $7M worth.

I am all for privacy, but some of you need to take off the tin foil caps. As a law clerk to a federal magistrate judge, I deal with these things all the time. Allow me to clarify some confusion. When it comes to electronic communications, there are two major tools available to law enforcement: intercepts (like a wiretap) and pen registers/trap and trace devices (pen for short). Intercepts are when you listen to the substantive communication, like the dialog of a phone call. Intercepts constitute a "search" under the 4th Amendment, and therefore require a warrant. Due to public pressure, Congress has heightened the Constitutional warrant requirements for electronic communications, requiring even more from law enforcement. Telephone wiretaps are the most common type of intercept, but they are still relatively rare as they cost approximately $60,000 per month to maintain. Pens record the information provided to the third-party company that is routing the communication, for example the phone number. The Supreme Court ruled that this information is not protected by the 4th Amendment. The Court held that the phone company is free to disclose the information, and you therefore have no expectation of privacy. Agree or not, that is the law. Without 4th Amendment protection, there is no warrant requirement and no need for probable cause. As with wiretaps, however, Congress decided to provided some level of privacy protection even though the Constitution didn't require it. Federal law requires that the information sought will likely be relevant to an ongoing investigation--a rather low standard. It may seem shocking that all this information can be taken by law enforcement, but this is the way it has always been. In any case, even a civil case between two individuals, "private" information like bank records, call records, all sorts of things can be subpoenaed. Electronic information is no different. As far as obtaining user GPS data 8 million times, a pen that seeks GPS data will apply to a particular phone number, but it will not be limited to one sample. If police are tracking the movements of say a drug dealer, attempting to identify his supplier, the GPS data will be polled repeatedly to track his movement. For example, once per half hour for a month would be about 1,440 requests. When this fact is factored into the size of the US population, 8 million seems like much less of a big deal. In the end, the information being obtained without a warrant is all information you freely gave to a third party. Of course that brings up questions with companies like Google, who are third-parties potentially storing all of your personal documents. Whether that information can be obtained without a warrant has not been definitively answered. Ultimately, the question will come down to whether one has an "expectation of privacy," and that decision will be made by the courts.