Patrick McGreevy reports:
Tech firms including Facebook, Google, Mozilla and Twitter are supporting new legislation to protect Californians against warrantless government searches of their smartphones and laptops for private emails, text messages and GPS data.
State Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) is proposing the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act to require that law enforcement officers obtain a warrant before accessing a person’s digital information, including emails and other data stored off the smartphone on remote servers or cloud services.
Read more on the Los Angeles Times.
The ACLU of Northern California has endorsed the bill, and provides a list of the firms backing it. The bill will be formally introduced tomorrow. As of now, I’m not seeing a copy of the bill text anywhere.