Would you find it different if it was for all the video cameras in the city for several hours? Because it's the overbroad scope of the warrant that's particularly being taken issue with.

Warrants aren't "from the department", but because of constitutional privacy protections require a judicial warrant that has to go through the courts. This is a fundamental problem, if you think this something that the law enforcement agency should be able to do themselves, then you do not believe that a warrant is needed. If there's a there's a reasonable expectation of a citizen to privacy as is a constitutional right, then need a judge or one of the warrant exceptions which will have to be justified later before use.

Here's another sticking point, private data isn't the same as secured. Private in this context is a category of things that have a rule preventing them from being requested by law enforcement and used in court.

The data is held by the telephone company what makes it private is that the government can't ask for that data on a citizen without a warrant. And if they did, they wouldn't be able to use it as evidence to prosecute someone.

The provider isn't blocked from keeping location data, the police are blocked from asking for it without cause justified to a judge who have criteria to evaluate the validity of the request.

The current power to search without warrant is held by the executive branch. Requiring a warrant would give power to the courts...

And the last two cases, Jones and Carpenter, that have reached the Supreme Court resulted in more restrictions.

Of course using WordPress or even GeoCities doesn't mean the content is instantly bad, just easy to deploy. But that's the same for sites that include being AI assisted a technical blog post by a bilingual person using an LLM to fix improper idioms use. Knowing that 48% was just one framework which enables the publishing of web content of which a significant percentage is low effort or even human slop contextualizes the meaning of per site statistics.

There's many wonderful WordPress sites, there were some great GeoCities sites. But that a significant portion of the internet has always been web content that needs to be approached skeptically.

Um, that's not my argument. It's that when looking at "per site" statistics the internet has always been a lot of low effort content. For every specialist or niche creator website there's been a site for an abandoned hot dog stand in Toledo, an astrology for pets microblog, abandoned instance of Mastodon for squirrel breeders, or fanfic journal with tenuous grasp on how normal human relationships function.

Elevating good content has always been hard and the era of search engines obscured how much of the web is not interesting to most people. The lowered bar for entry to AI slop being is undoubtedly a problem, but it's not the 1/3 of site statistics that's worrying, because at one point 48% were WordPress of which most were low effort. What's more concerning is the difficulty to detect slop because that's the underlying threat to the internet, search algorithms partially solved finding the diamonds in the rough. But we're quickly going to need to find the diamonds in a pile of shiny plastic.

uBlock Origin itself could do it. Just need someone to make a list that we can subscribe to that blocks all of the slop sites.

Yeah, there's a lot of AI slop and it's problem. But I am not going to pretend that most web content has ever been artisanal and well curated. Well maybe back in the day when my GeoCities page for my dog was part of the most well regarded Webring. At least then Tom was still my friend.

Just as bad when more than a 1/3 of the web was WordPress or whatever the CMS du jour is.

It's an attention grabbing headline until you think about how many small business websites there are trying to keep the effort trimmed down, like the local barber, dog groomer, or mohel.

I actually think refills on drinks is a pretty apt analogy though. They thought that most people wouldn't fill up multiple times, that the soda would be cheap enough to not worry about, and if they gave away some free soda they'd get some loyal customers.

Only after some people are staying to drink only the "cheap soda" and the soda is expensive, do they need to make rules kicking people out early and paying per refill.

I think we're talking past each other. The "unlawful search" that's being argued in this case is private location data. But not getting your property destroyed by a search is a further non-digital protection of that same provision.

IMEI searches was the last ruling, Carpenter, that got restrictions because of a reasonable expectation of privacy to location data from cell phones.

Flock is a bring your own identity system and credentials for police departments have been found in dark web data. Police access can access it from their home computers.

Being used for an arrest is the case for harm to be protected against though... Again the open questions are when do need a warrant, with a warrant what can and what cat they search for. Without that required warrant, it's up to legislatures to ratchet down use because there's not constitutional protection. If the data doesn't have an expectation to privacy, then there's no harm in having or using it.

Great, that was the entire point. They are powerful tools that are convenient for the police and reduce costs. But that convenience should be locked behind safeguards like warrants because privacy is important. They shouldn't be able to go fishing in private data without a narrowly scoped warrant even if it hooks some bad guys.

Because it sure sounded like you thought that they shouldn't need a warrant, because if they can get and use the data without the warrant, then there's no point a warrant...

The difference with this article is that it comes after the arguments, has a fair amount of information on the questions that different justices asked, and the general feeling for the outcome.

Unless that can be bypassed with parallel construction.

Yes, the Third Party Doctrine is unevenly applied. And this ruling is important because it's a question straight into expectation of privacy of data held by third parties and it may affect those other things too. With how the court has changed and the recent unpopularity of stare decisis, the landscape may drastically change. The last decision with Carpenter when the question was on cell tower data. The coalition for enforcing restrictions was John G. Roberts Jr and the liberal justices, since then Amy Coney Barrett has replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But looks like it was quite the day in court:

There's limit to what privacy should be sacrificed for investigative convenience. The Supreme Court has ruled that long-term tracking someone is something that should be considered private, even if slapping a GPS on a car saves gas on following them for a month that's something that requires a warrant and accountability to a independent judiciary.

That who audits and with what consequences? If there's just an entry in the log with a "green pick-up truck with a rusty bumper" and a random unassociated case id, who would ever know that an unlawful search happened? We know that plenty of people have been caught stalking their exes or filling the reason field with protected activities like "protest". Or even further if that reason field is truthful, considering that the Feds apologized to an IL PD for not forging that field, when signing in with their creds for a disallowed purpose, with no consequences.

The brackets are just a discrete human calculatable implementation of your S-curve idea. Smoothing it out and making it continuous doesn't change what gets counted under the curve.