SALT LAKE CITY — Utah is the first in the nation to have an electronic data privacy law.

On Wednesday night, Governor Gary Herbert signed House Bill 57, sponsored by Rep. Craig Hall, R-West Valley City. It requires police to get a warrant if they want to look at your emails, instant messages, direct messages and other forms of electronic communication, including shared files.

FOX 13 first reported on Rep. Hall’s legislation last year. He argued that a subpoena was insufficient and you shouldn’t lose Fourth Amendment protections because your data goes through a third-party like Facebook, Google or Dropbox.

“We need to make sure that our digital and our electronic information is protected. Just because it goes through wires, just because it goes in the cloud doesn’t mean we lose an expectation of privacy,” he told FOX 13 at the time.

Connor Boyack of the libertarian-leaning think tank, Libertas Institute, advocated for the bill and praised the governor’s decision to sign it into law.

“The U.S. Supreme Court recently required that our cell phone location data be protected by a warrant, which is a small step in the right direction. Utah’s new law takes that principle and puts it on steroids, applying it to all of our electronic data,” he said in a statement. “This first-in-the-nation law makes clear that if the government wants our data—whether it’s on our phone or on a company’s server somewhere else—they have to get a warrant. It’s a good policy that we’ll be encouraging other states to soon adopt.”

The bill was among 92 bills Gov. Herbert signed into law on Wednesday night. To date, he has signed 464 bills from the 2019 legislative session. Here are other bills signed: