Privacy Guides

I am conflicted on how I feel about that. Obviously information dragonets are bad because they're specifically designed to produce false positives. In this case, however, they produced a definite positive that wouldn't have been achieved otherwise.

Edit:

The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule provides that “evidence
obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment should not be suppressed in
circumstances where the evidence was obtained by officers acting in objectively
reasonable reliance on a warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate, even
if that warrant was later determined to be invalid.” Gutierrez, 222 P.3d at 941; see
also Leftwich, 869 P.2d at 1272 (holding that Colorado’s good-faith exception,
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codified in section 16-3-308, C.R.S. (2023), is “substantially similar” to the Supreme
Court’s rule). The exception exists because there is little chance suppression will
deter police misconduct in cases where the police didn’t know their conduct was
illegal in the first place. Leon, 468 U.S. at 918–19. In such cases, “the social costs of
suppression would outweigh any possible deterrent effect.

But the good-faith analysis in Gutierrez is distinguishable. True, we held
there that the good-faith exception did not apply, but we had already recognized
that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their financial records
when Gutierrez was decided. Id. at 933 (citing numerous cases and statutes
establishing that an individual’s financial records are protected under Colorado
law). So, the police were on notice that a nexus was required between a crime and
Gutierrez’s individual tax records. See id.

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¶70 By contrast, until today, no court had established that individuals have a
constitutionally protected privacy interest in their Google search history. Cf.
Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 294 A.3d 509, 522 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2023) (holding that, under
the third-party doctrine, the defendant did not have a reasonable expectation of
privacy in his search history). In the absence of precedent explicitly establishing
that an individual’s Google search history is constitutionally protected, DPD had
no reason to know that it might have needed to demonstrate a connection between
the alleged crime and Seymour’s individual Google account.

In essence, the court is saying that this is the one and only time this will be allowed in Colorado.

https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA12.pdf