Filed on 1/3/2011, the Supreme Court of California held that a warrantless search of a cellphone is valid as being incident to a lawful arrest. While the case did not discuss the type of phone, I began thinking about the type of data stored on my cellphone. In a broad respect, I imagined an officer searching a smartphone (iPhone or Android-based phone). What website passwords are stored? Could a law enforcement officer read emails which had been previously unread by the suspect simply because the had authority to search the phone? What about applications which may have used GPS-technology to track where the suspect had been? Facebook? Foursquare? Dropbox?Apparently, Judge Werdegar has similar concerns. His dissenting opinion, on page 24, expresses great concern over the applicability to such smartphones. I would not be surprised if a case addresses these issues in the not-too-distant future.
