Chatrie v. United States · ¶56

The third-party doctrine traces to two cases involving information provided by customers to a bank and telephone company, and then turned over to law enforcement officials. In United States v. Miller, 425 U. S. 435 (1976), this Court held that a bank depositor had no reasonable expectation of privacy in canceled checks and deposit slips in his bank’s possession, because the records were “voluntarily conveyed to the bank[] and exposed to [its] employees in the ordinary course of business.” Id., at 442. The depositor, the Court explained, had “take[n] the risk, in revealing his affairs to another,” that the third party would in turn provide that information to the government. Id., at 443. A few years later, the Court in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U. S. 735 (1979), applied that principle to hold that a (landline) telephone subscriber lacked a legitimate expectation of privacy in the phone…

slip opinion
Source edition
Passage preview. Read in context for the complete text, notes and references.