Via Ashkan Soltani: “The Yale Law Journal Online (YLJO) just published an article that Ashkan Soltani co-authored with Kevin Bankston (first workshopped at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference last year) entitled Tiny Constables and the Cost of Surveillance: Making Cents Out of United States v. Jones. In it, we discuss the drastic reduction in the cost of tracking an individual’s location and show how technology has greatly reduced the barriers to performing surveillance. We estimate the hourly cost of location tracking techniques used in landmark Supreme Court cases Jones, Karo, and Knotts and use the opinions issued in those cases to propose an objective metric: if the cost of the surveillance using the new technique is an order of magnitude (ten times) less than the cost of the surveillance without using the new technique, then the new technique violates a reasonable expectation of privacy. For example, the graph above shows that tracking a suspect using a GPS device is 28 times cheaper than assigning officers to follow him. The paper was inspired by an exchange between Catherine Crump and Representative Gowdy at a congressional hearing two years ago on the ”Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act.” The congressman asked how tracking technology, specifically GPS tracking, is any different from following someone around on the street and whether it merits additional legal protections. We relied on Harry Surden‘s eloquent argument that privacy protections are often made possible due to structural transaction costs and Orin Kerr who argues that the Supreme Court should use an equilibrium-adjustment theory to maintain a steady level of protection in the face of new technologies.”