For our analog parents, a diary or a personal letter could rarely be touched by authorities, not even by law enforcement searching for evidence of a crime. Objects such as these had protection over and above the constitutional privacy safeguards. For our digital children, however, the equivalent diaries and letters aren\u2019t even considered worthy of basic constitutional privacy.<\/p>\n
In most jurisdictions, there is a constitutional right to privacy. Law enforcement in such countries can\u2019t just walk in and read somebody\u2019s mail, wiretap their phonecalls, or track their IP addresses. They need a prior court order to do so, which in turn is based on a concrete suspicion of a serious crime: the general case is that you have a right to privacy, and violations of this rule are the exception, not the norm.<\/p>\n
However, there\u2019s usually a layer of protection over and above this: even if and when<\/em> law enforcement gets permission from a judge to violate somebody\u2019s privacy in the form of a search warrant of their home, there are certain things that may not be touched unless specific and additional<\/em> permissions are granted by the same type of judge. This class of items includes the most private of the personal: private letters, diaries, and so on.<\/p>\n Of course, this is only true in the analog world of our parents. Even though the letter of the law is the same, this protection doesn\u2019t apply at all to the digital world of our children, to their diaries and letters.<\/strong><\/p>\n