No. 14-5123
Huff, et al. v. Spaw
Page 13
district court held that she lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in her face-to-face
conversation with her husband in their hotel room on the basis of this awareness. Huff, 995 F.
Supp. 2d at 734. We disagree with this conclusion because speaking to a person who may carry
a device capable of intercepting one’s statements does not constitute a waiver of the expectation
of privacy in those statements.
In addition to placing pocket-dial calls, a cellphone can also be used directly and
purposefully to intercept face-to-face conversations, for example, by surreptitiously recording or
transmitting them. See, e.g., IPHONE USER GUIDE 133 (2014) (instructing the owner on the use of
the recording function). If Bertha waived her reasonable expectation of privacy from pocketdials by speaking to a person who she knew to carry a pocket-dial-capable device, she would
also waive her reasonable expectation of privacy from recordings and transmissions by speaking
with anyone carrying a recording-capable or transmission-capable device, i.e., any modern
cellphone.
The district court’s holding would logically result in the loss of a reasonable
expectation of privacy in face-to-face conversations where one party is aware that a participant in
the conversation may have a modern cellphone. As nearly every participant in a conversation is
a potential cellphone carrier,8 such a conclusion would dramatically undermine the protection
that Title III grants to oral communication. It would also mean that, had Spaw and James Huff
conspired for James to deliberately turn on his phone and transmit his conversation with Bertha
Huff for Spaw to hear and share with others, neither James nor Spaw would have violated Title
III because no “oral communication” was intercepted.
But the law does not support this
conclusion.
First, we consider whether Bertha Huff exhibited an expectation of privacy in the
statements she made in her hotel room. Having a conversation in one’s home generally exhibits
an expectation of privacy, Katz, 389 U.S. at 361 (Harlan J., concurring), and hotel rooms are
treated as homes for privacy purposes, Minnesota v. Olsen, 495 U.S. 91, 98 (1990). Therefore,
Bertha Huff exhibited an expectation of privacy in statements she made to her husband in the
hotel room, unless she exposed those statements to an outsider as her husband did. For most of
8
As of 2014, approximately 90% of U.S. adults own a cellphone, and 58% of U.S. adults own a
smartphone. Pew Research Center Survey, available at http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/mobile/cell-phoneand-smartphone-ownership-demographics/ (last visited on June 30, 2015).
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