That's correct. Under the current law, cloud-based storage is an implicit acceptance of giving up various privacy protections, under the principle of third-party disclosure.
The principle summary is that if you share private information with a third party (disclosure), you are voluntarily making that information non-private, if not public. That opens the door for the government to request the information under ECPA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. For more on that, check EPIC, which is a lead plaintiff in suing the government over the mass surveillance without a warrant programs, broadly collected under the PRISM moniker in public discussion: http://epic.org/privacy/ecpa/
Wikipedia adds: "For instance, email that is stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered by the law to be abandoned, and all that is required to obtain the content of the emails by a law enforcement agency, is a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation, with absolutely no judicial review required whatsoever.
When the law was initially passed, emails were stored on a third party's server for only a short period of time, just long enough to facilitate transfer of email to the consumer's email client, which was generally located on their personal or work computer. Now, with online email services prevalent such as Gmail and Hotmail, users are more likely to store emails online indefinitely, rather than to only keep them for less than 180 days. If the same emails were stored on the user's personal computer, it would require the police to obtain a warrant first for seizure of their contents, regardless of their age. When they are stored on an internet server however, no warrant is needed, starting 180 days after receipt of the message, under the law. In 2013 members of the US Congress proposed to reform this procedure." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priva...
Written in a time when POP was king and emails were pulled from the (expensive) server to be read and stored locally, it assumes that anything on what we now call the cloud is abandoned after six months, again giving up various privacy protections.
Google—Gmail—and Dropbox both operate within this legal regime, as cloud-storage companies. As the parent states, citing that argument lends credence in a court that gives deference to the federal government that created and relies on the argument to request data.
The principle summary is that if you share private information with a third party (disclosure), you are voluntarily making that information non-private, if not public. That opens the door for the government to request the information under ECPA, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. For more on that, check EPIC, which is a lead plaintiff in suing the government over the mass surveillance without a warrant programs, broadly collected under the PRISM moniker in public discussion: http://epic.org/privacy/ecpa/
Wikipedia adds: "For instance, email that is stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered by the law to be abandoned, and all that is required to obtain the content of the emails by a law enforcement agency, is a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation, with absolutely no judicial review required whatsoever.
When the law was initially passed, emails were stored on a third party's server for only a short period of time, just long enough to facilitate transfer of email to the consumer's email client, which was generally located on their personal or work computer. Now, with online email services prevalent such as Gmail and Hotmail, users are more likely to store emails online indefinitely, rather than to only keep them for less than 180 days. If the same emails were stored on the user's personal computer, it would require the police to obtain a warrant first for seizure of their contents, regardless of their age. When they are stored on an internet server however, no warrant is needed, starting 180 days after receipt of the message, under the law. In 2013 members of the US Congress proposed to reform this procedure." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Communications_Priva...
Written in a time when POP was king and emails were pulled from the (expensive) server to be read and stored locally, it assumes that anything on what we now call the cloud is abandoned after six months, again giving up various privacy protections.
Google—Gmail—and Dropbox both operate within this legal regime, as cloud-storage companies. As the parent states, citing that argument lends credence in a court that gives deference to the federal government that created and relies on the argument to request data.