Earlier this year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that users generally lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in unprotected Google search records, underscoring how aggressively some courts are still applying third-party doctrine principles to digital data. Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 348 A.3d 133 (Pa. 2025). Our previous blog post on Kurtz is available here.

Courts are often faced with the dilemma of applying centuries, or even decades, old law to constantly evolving technological advancements.  See, e.g., Transcript of Oral Argument, United States v. Microsoft, No. 17-2 (U.S. Feb. 27, 2018) (attempting to ascertain the relationship between the Stored Communications Act, a 1986 law, and modern cloud computing…