Murder Case Decision Involving Social Posts Could Weaken Federal Privacy Law
Several groups said in amicus briefs they support Snap and Meta in arguing to the California Supreme Court that the social media platforms shouldn't be required to turn over posts and other communications made on the apps as evidence in a California murder case. Doing so would significantly decrease the power of the 1986 Stored Communications Act (SCA), they argued in briefs obtained by Privacy Daily.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Through the SCA, users have a reasonable expectation that providers like Snap and Meta won't disclose their content to third parties, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a Feb. 26 blog about the case. “If the lower court's ruling is affirmed, Meta, Snap, and other providers would be permitted to voluntarily disclose the content of their users' communications to any other corporation, the government, or any individual for any reason.”
The case (S286267), Snap v. The Superior Court of San Diego County, centers on SCA, which restricts providers from disclosing the content of communications to private parties or governments. The Snap ruling could set a precedent for how SCA operates when a social media company is subpoenaed for communications in criminal cases.
The Court of Appeal, 4th Appellate Division ruled in July 2024 that the disclosure limitations in the SCA “do not apply to the material at issue here” because the companies retain user content for business purposes. The case is now before the California Supreme Court.
EFF said the lower court got the decision wrong. “The Stored Communications Act (SCA) protects the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of people who use certain online communications and storage services,” said EFF in its brief with the Center for Democracy and Technology and Mozilla. “In a break with nearly 40 years of precedent, the lower court found that the SCA largely does not protect the users of services offered by Meta, Snap, and many similar companies because those companies choose to access the content of user communications for their own business purposes, including for online behavioral advertising … but rather than solve the very real problem of corporate surveillance, the lower court’s opinion will perversely strip away some of the few statutory privacy protections that U.S. users have on the internet.”
LGBT Tech, along with Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom, Hacking the Workforce, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance, the Trevor Project, and Advocates for Trans Equality also urged the court to overturn the lower court’s decision. “Strong privacy protections, such as those afforded by the SCA, are crucial for safeguarding the well-being and safety of LGBTQ+ individuals in the digital age,” said LGBT Tech in its brief. “The SCA plays a vital role in protecting the privacy of online communications and ensuring that individuals can express themselves freely and connect with others without fear of unreasonable intrusion, while allowing access to communications in certain justifiably narrow circumstances.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it supports online service providers not choosing between the act’s protection and commonplace content-moderation practices. “The Court of Appeal’s adoption of the ‘business model theory’ eliminates privacy protections long afforded by the Stored Communications Act (SCA) to online service providers and their billions of users,” it said. “That theory -- if it can fairly be described as one -- requires that an online service provider forfeit its users’ SCA protections if it can access its users’ communications for some still-unspecified set of purposes beyond strictly transmitting or storing them.”
Snap and Meta also received support from privacy and security law scholars, including Daniel Solove of George Washington University Law School, Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law and Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University School of Law. Other support included the American Civil Liberties Union; Pinterest, Reddit and X Corp. in a joint brief; and Google and Microsoft in another joint brief.
Not all the briefs in the case sided with the social media companies, however. A coalition of 23 law professors submitted a brief asking the California Supreme Court to affirm the lower court’s decision. “The SCA is ambiguously silent as to its effect on subpoenas requested by criminal defendants,” the brief said. “In effect, Petitioners are asking this Court to do what the California legislature has said it may not: create a novel block on lawful judicial process based on a federal law that is totally silent on access to information by criminal defendants."