This posted was drafted by EFF legal intern Alexandra HalbeckThe Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California and most of the Western U.S., just delivered good news for digital privacy: abandoning a phone doesn’t abandon your Fourth Amendment rights in the phone’s contents. Given how much personal information our phones contain, it will be unlikely for courts to find that someone truly intended to give up their privacy rights in that data. As the Supreme Court recognized in Riley v. California, our phones hold “the privacies of life,” and accessing those digital contents generally requires a warrant. Nearly three years later—during an unrelated drug investigation—federal agents obtained a warrant and searched the phone’s contents. This decision ensures that constitutional protections don’t evaporate just because someone abandons their device, and that warrants still matter in the digital age.