Will Alexa Take the Witness Stand?

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: Cover story

Our electronic gadgets are collecting data about us that police are using to solve crimes. When does that violate our constitutional right to privacy?

It was her Fitbit that gave him away.

In December 2015, Connie Dabate was shot dead in her Connecticut home. When police questioned her husband, Richard, he said that a masked intruder had broken in and attacked her. But the Fitbit she wore on her waistband told a different story. The data it had collected showed that she'd walked 1,217 feet around the house in the hour after Richard said she'd been killed. That information called his story into question and led prosecutors to charge him with murder in April.

Richard Dabate is still awaiting trial, but the case and others like it are raising questions about the nature of privacy in the digital age. Americans are increasingly relying on high-tech gadgets to improve their quality of life: internet-connected security systems, fitness trackers like the Fitbit, smartphones, and personal assistants like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Echo, which is also known as Alexa.

But police are beginning to see these devices as something else entirely: evidence gatherers and silent witnesses that continually collect and store data about us whether or not we realize it.

"It is definitely something we are going to see more of in the future," says police detective Christopher Jones of East Lampeter Township, Pennsylvania. "As people continue to provide more and more personal information through technology, they have to understand we are obligated to find the best evidence, and this technology has become a part of that."

At what point, however, does good police work infringe on Americans' right to privacy in an age when we live our lives tethered to our digital assistants?

"We let these devices into our homes and we're not really aware of what the implications are," says Katharina Kopp of the Center for Digital Democracy. "More and more areas of our lives that had once been considered private are now contested spaces."

The Framers' Motivation

The right to privacy is based on the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures" (see "The Fourth Amendment," p. 7). But the courts are still figuring out how to apply that 18th-century phrase to our 21st-century society.

When the Framers wrote the Fourth Amendment in 1789, they had in mind the British soldiers who before the Revolution could enter colonists' homes to search and seize...