Even though Justice Gorsuch voted against Carpenter for the purposes of the case, he was for Carpenter and was for a more radical decision that would completely tear down the precedents in United States v Miller, and Smith v Maryland. Gorsuch wanted the court to decide based on an originalist/textualist basis for "property rights" under the 4th Amendment and not under "privacy rights" as the majority decided; and to completely throw out the third party precedents of the past. Gorsuch's written dissent was actually a concurrence for the decision.
http://reason.com/blog/2018/06/22/neil- ... ayor-in-qu
The Supreme Court developed the third-party doctrine in United States v. Miller, a 1976 case dealing with bank records, and Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 case involving "pen registers" that record the phone numbers called from a particular location. As the Court explained the principle in Miller, "the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit the obtaining of information revealed to a third party and conveyed by him to Government authorities, even if the information is revealed on the assumption that it will be used only for a limited purpose and the confidence placed in the third party will not be betrayed." Gorsuch recognizes the sweeping implications of that principle in an age when sensitive information is routinely stored on remote servers:
What's left of the Fourth Amendment? Today we use the Internet to do most everything. Smartphones make it easy to keep a calendar, correspond with friends, make calls, conduct banking, and even watch the game. Countless Internet companies maintain records about us and, increasingly, for us. Even our most private documents—those that, in other eras, we would have locked safely in a desk drawer or destroyed—now reside on third party servers. Smith and Miller teach that the police can review all of this material, on the theory that no one reasonably expects any of it will be kept private. But no one believes that, if they ever did....
Can the government demand a copy of all your e-mails from Google or Microsoft without implicating your Fourth Amendment rights? Can it secure your DNA from 23andMe without a warrant or probable cause? Smith and Miller say yes it can...But that result strikes most lawyers and judges today—me included—as pretty unlikely.
Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the majority opinion in Carpenter, expressed similar concerns in United States v. Jones, the 2012 decision that said monitoring a suspect's movements by attaching a GPS tracker to his car counts as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. In that case, Sotomayor observed that the third-party doctrine is "ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
Gorsuch notes that "the Court has never offered a persuasive justification" for the third-party doctrine. A person's willingness to share information with someone else for a particular purpose does not imply that he is willing to share it with the world, and his awareness of the risk that it will nevertheless be divulged to others does not give those people permission to peruse it.
We can hope that SCOTUS moves towards Justice Gorsuch's viewpoint on property rights and the 4th Amendment.
Note: The others in the minority who voted against Carpenter (Alito, Thomas and Kennedy), also voted based on property rights of the historical cellphone location information. It's just that they decided that the information held by the cellphone companies was owned entirely by the companies--information accumulated by all the companies because of their 'terms of service' agreements. To me, the information is your historical location information and merely held by the company, so I disagree with Alito, Thomas and Kennedy on who owns my life information--I do.
You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...and those are pretty good odds.
Brett Maverick, gambler on TV (also used by Progressive leaders everywhere)