Butt Dial' At Your Own Risk: US Court Says You Have No Expectation Of Privacy
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This week’s Huff v. Spaw case starts out innocuously enough.
This case requires us to consider whether a person who listens to and subsequently electronically records a conversation from an inadvertent “pocket-dial” call FN1 violates the Wiretap Act.
The court’s substitution of the polite term “pocket dial” for what is generally known as “butt dial” and then footnoting it is rather humorous.
FN1 The term “pocket-dial” refers to the accidental placement of a phone call when a person’s cellphone “bump[s] against other objects in a purse, briefcase, or pocket.”
But the only funny thing about this case is seeing the court maintain decorum by avoiding use of the term “butt dial.” The case itself is decidedly not funny.
Pocket dialing your phone–known colloquially as “butt dialing”–isn’t funny when you have no expectation of privacy if the phone connects and transmits, unbeknownst to you. Photo credit Jim.henderson [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.
The facts of the case are long and can be found in detail
here. But the bottom line scenario is this: You are out of the U.S. on a trip. You have a cellphone in your pocket that is not connected to a call but is also not turned off. The phone accidentally “pocket dials” and connects with someone in the U.S. while you are having face-to-face conversations with a business colleague and later, with your spouse. The person whose number you accidentally butt-dialed hears and records what they hear being said through the phone that is, unbeknownst to you, connected and acting as a transmitter/speaker. Your conversation did not reveal criminal attacks (to which a different law and standards apply).
Under these circumstances, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in any communications you unknowingly make through that cell phone in your pocket that you thought was disconnected.
Under the court’s reasoning, your reasonable expectation of privacy is defeated if the objects, activities, or statements that you expose to the ‘plain view’ of outsiders are not “protected” because you had no intention to keep them to yourself.
It is a stretch of reason to conclude that under the scenario posited you did not have an intention to keep the conversations to yourself. But that’s what the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held this week.
It does not help your plight if you make an accidental call from outside the United States. The court also held that the relevant location for jurisdiction under the Wiretap Act is not where the conversations took place, but where the party used a device to acquire the contents of those conversations. Thus, U.S. law applied, it held.
Your best defense against unwanted use of information by others that you may inadvertently divulge through a call you did not intend to make from a phone you have in your pocket (or that can be accidentally turned on from elsewhere, such as a desk drawer) is, as the Court in the Huff case recommended, use a means to block the phone from unintended dialing.
Butt Dialed, is a free Android app that promises just that, and even has an “I apologize” feature to use if you do accidentally make a call. I intend to try Butt Dialed today. I’ll update later and let you know.
Follow Comments
This week’s Huff v. Spaw case starts out innocuously enough.
This case requires us to consider whether a person who listens to and subsequently electronically records a conversation from an inadvertent “pocket-dial” call FN1 violates the Wiretap Act.
The court’s substitution of the polite term “pocket dial” for what is generally known as “butt dial” and then footnoting it is rather humorous.
FN1 The term “pocket-dial” refers to the accidental placement of a phone call when a person’s cellphone “bump[s] against other objects in a purse, briefcase, or pocket.”
But the only funny thing about this case is seeing the court maintain decorum by avoiding use of the term “butt dial.” The case itself is decidedly not funny.
Pocket dialing your phone–known colloquially as “butt dialing”–isn’t funny when you have no expectation of privacy if the phone connects and transmits, unbeknownst to you. Photo credit Jim.henderson [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Under these circumstances, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in any communications you unknowingly make through that cell phone in your pocket that you thought was disconnected.
Under the court’s reasoning, your reasonable expectation of privacy is defeated if the objects, activities, or statements that you expose to the ‘plain view’ of outsiders are not “protected” because you had no intention to keep them to yourself.
It is a stretch of reason to conclude that under the scenario posited you did not have an intention to keep the conversations to yourself. But that’s what the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held this week.
It does not help your plight if you make an accidental call from outside the United States. The court also held that the relevant location for jurisdiction under the Wiretap Act is not where the conversations took place, but where the party used a device to acquire the contents of those conversations. Thus, U.S. law applied, it held.
Your best defense against unwanted use of information by others that you may inadvertently divulge through a call you did not intend to make from a phone you have in your pocket (or that can be accidentally turned on from elsewhere, such as a desk drawer) is, as the Court in the Huff case recommended, use a means to block the phone from unintended dialing.
Butt Dialed, is a free Android app that promises just that, and even has an “I apologize” feature to use if you do accidentally make a call. I intend to try Butt Dialed today. I’ll update later and let you know.
