Don’t expect data on P2P networks to be private, judge rules

Jaikumar Vijayan reports:

There can be no expectation of privacy in data exposed to the Internet over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network, a federal judge in Vermont ruled in a case involving three individuals charged with possession of child pornography.

The three men had argued that police illegally gathered information from their computers using an automated P2P search tool and then used that information to obtain probable cause warrants for searching their computers. Each of the defendants was later charged with possession of child pornography based on evidence seized from their computers.