{"id":304613,"date":"2010-02-10T11:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-10T16:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100204\/0206588045.shtml"},"modified":"2010-02-10T11:20:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-10T16:20:00","slug":"leaving-your-wifi-open-decreases-your-fourth-amendment-rights-to-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/304613","title":{"rendered":"Leaving Your WiFi Open Decreases Your Fourth Amendment Rights To Privacy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’ve had numerous discussions on this site about both the legality<\/a> and ethics<\/a> of open WiFi networks. And yet, the issue still comes up now and again — but who knew it was a Constitutional issue? Thomas O’Toole shares the news of a ruling in Oregon, that suggests a user who left his WiFi open gave up certain 4th Amendment rights to privacy<\/a>. Though, actually, the details of the case suggest it’s not so much the open WiFi that’s the issue, but the fact that the guy also<\/i> left illegal material in shared Limewire and iTunes folders. It was just that police were able to confirm that by connecting to his open WiFi. But the court does make a specific statement on the WiFi issue, noting:<\/p>\n


\n“as a result of the ease and frequency with which people use each others’ wireless networks, I conclude that society recognizes a lower expectation of privacy in information broadcast via an unsecured wireless network router than in information transmitted through a hardwired network or password-protected network.”
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While O’Toole doesn’t think there’s anything earth shattering about this, I’m not sure I agree. I think, in this case, the guy probably gave up rights to privacy by putting the content in shared folders that were available widely — but I don’t think that just because you’re using an open WiFi network you’ve set yourself a “lower expectation of privacy.” I would suspect that most users have no idea that it’s less secure, and I wonder why the type of network used should really determine the level of 4th Amendment protections.<\/p>\n

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We’ve had numerous discussions on this site about both the legality and ethics of open WiFi networks. And yet, the issue still comes up now and again — but who knew it was a Constitutional issue? Thomas O’Toole shares the news of a ruling in Oregon, that suggests a user who left his WiFi open […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304613\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}