Police must have reasonable suspicion that crime is afoot. In less-coercive settings, such “consent searches” must be strictly limited. In highly coercive settings, like traffic stops, police must be banned from conducting “consent searches” of our phones and similar devices. These misleadingly named “consent searches” invade our digital privacy, disparately burden people of color, undermine judicial supervision of police searches, and rest on a legal fiction. Police use this ploy, thousands of times every year, to evade the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that police obtain a warrant, based on a judge’s independent finding of probable cause of crime, before searching someone’s phone. If you’re like most people, you grudgingly comply. But they’ve got a badge and a gun, and you just want to go home. After you provide your license and registration, the officer catches you off guard by asking: “Since you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t mind unlocking your phone for me, do you?” Of course, you don’t want the officer to copy or rummage through all the private information on your phone. ![]() ![]() Police pull you over, allegedly for a traffic violation. Imagine this scenario: You’re driving home.
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