In TV shows and in movies, sometimes you see characters exercise their Fifth Amendment rights, which basically means that they won’t say or do anything that incriminates themselves. Now with technology being so advanced, has the law caught up with it? It turns out that it might have, thanks to a recent ruling in a federal trial court in Pennsylvania.
According to the ruling issued by US District Judge Mark Kearny, it would seem that your smartphone’s passwords are actually protected by the Fifth Amendment. This means is that if you rely on alphanumeric passwords to unlock your device to gain access to its contents, you will not be legally obligated to unlock it.
Interestingly enough this applies to both personal and work phones, even though the phones are property of the company you work for since the passwords themselves aren’t corporate record. This is thanks to a recent case involving two former Capital One data analysts who were accused of insider trading and were asked to turn over their smartphone’s passwords.
However it seems that not everyone agrees with the ruling. As pointed out by the report in the Washington Post, the courts had only asked for their passwords, as opposed to asking for their passwords in order to obtain information in their phones that could incriminate them, but we suppose that is a debate for another time. In the meantime thanks to this ruling, it has set a precedent for future potential cases, but what do you guys think?